Your Online Marketing Strategy, Sales Lead Generation & Lead Nurturing

Your business growth strategy should include a well structured online marketing strategy for sales lead generation and lead nurturing to keep you top of mind with your clients and prospects. Research from Marketing Sherpa shows that 12.5% of leads are normally ready to buy now, 17.5% can be discarded or disqualified and a huge 70% are longer term opportunities worth nurturing.

This is where having an automated lead nurturing program as part of your Online Marketing Strategy can really make a difference to the return on your marketing efforts.

Most businesses seem challenged to keep in constant contact with their clients and prospects. The challenges with nurturing prospects and leads are many and may include:

• There is just not enough time in the day
• You may have many customer relationship products, excel spreadsheets and other data sources to manage and integrate
• Your process to send and schedule emails is manual and requires specific knowledge to be done correctly.
• You may struggle to develop good, interesting material.
• Pressure to improve results immediately pushes nurturing to one side
• Lead qualification and prioritisation is hard and for many is a long process without immediate results.

The longer term opportunities (70%) are in the interest stage of your products and services but as yet do not have the desire to buy. They are in "research" mode. This is typical in the business to business space and can range from 8 to 18 months in duration. For business to consumers this may still be anything up to 3 months or longer.

In contrast, the pressure on sales is to focus on hot prospects, now! They need to close deals for the month or the quarter and do not have the time to nurture possible deals that have a longer opportunity window. Many will probably not even start their buying process within the next 3 months.

A good lead nurturing strategy and system can plug this leaky hole in your marketing and sales pipeline. An automated system, with content well structured in paths can help qualify and score your leads automatically. At the same time, these leads can be automatically fed to your sales team as better qualified prospects.

The biggest mistake that is made is the belief that a monthly email is a lead nurturing program – it is far from it – although it is a good start, particularly if you have limited resources. The right strategy and system will use a combination of electronic, telephone and print to stay in contact with prospects.

The system can:

• Be smart enough to learn when each individual is most likely to open their email and send it at the right time
• Deliver content that they are interested in, from the sales person with whom they are dealing.
• Give you sales business intelligence so you know what your prospects are interested in.
• Seamlessly integrate your email with your website analytics so you can track your prospect's behaviour end to end.
• Integrate with your sales pipeline system - customer relationship management.
• Possibly even tell you about who the company is, before you know who the person is looking at your online marketing.

The bottom line is that if you have an online presence and you don't have a nurturing program in place, you are quite possibly missing out on the 70% that are opportunities for you. They are just not ready right now. You are allowing your competitors into the game, because you don’t keep in constant contact with relevant and valuable material.

To improve your sales lead generation, automate your online marketing strategy and your lead nurturing program. You can then take advantage growing your business without significant increases in marketing or business development resources.