I’m sure that most internet marketers have heard of the lead nurturing process and can recognize its importance to pushing leads through the sales cycle. One of the most overlooked parts of this process, and, in my opinion, one of the most important is content mapping. Content mapping is when marketers tie different types of content to different stages of the buying process based on their audience’s needs during those various stages. The inherent value of content mapping is that when it is done properly it helps you to organize your content so that it answers your users’ questions appropriately no matter what stage of the buying process they are in. Content mapping should be a key component of your organization’s content strategy and if it isn’t, you may be missing out on an opportunity to nurture your leads effectively.

How can you get started with content mapping?

Step 1: Developing buyer personas
Without a clear view of who your key audience is, and what they’re looking for, it will be very difficult for you to effectively nurture them with content. One of the biggest advantages associated with content mapping is that it allows you to target your lead nurturing process by customizing it for different groups of users.  Different users will have a variety of needs and wants when they arrive at your website, and they’re looking to have those demands fulfilled. It’s important that you can meet each individual’s needs with content that matches what they’re looking for, regardless of what stage of the buying process they’re in. By defining your target user base into different groups (personas) based on their preferences and needs you can ensure that you’re getting them the content they want, when they want it.

Depending on your organization you could have anywhere from 2 to 200 personas but regardless of the number, these personas will help you to keep your lead nurturing campaigns targeted and relevant to your audience. Depending on your company, products and services personas can be developed based on role, title, demographic information, goals, pain points, etc. Regardless of what criteria you use to separate your user base into groups, you want to make sure that you end up with defined groups that share similar motivations and concerns and that for each of the people in these groups you have information like name, organization, role, location, role in the buying process etc. Having as much information as possible about your leads helps you develop the most targeted campaign possible.
Once you’ve created your personas and split your audience into the appropriate categories you can start to determine which type of content each persona is looking for based on their location within the buying cycle.

Step 2: Determining what your personas need at each stage of the buying process
Organizations can separate the stages of the buying process in different ways, but there are some commonly used stages which are recognized as a standard buying process:

When you were defining your prospects personas in the earlier step of this process you should have gained a pretty strong view of exactly what they’re looking for, how they research their information, their motivations, concerns and needs. Now that you have that information you can apply it to the different stages of the buying process as mentioned above so you can establish which types of content they are looking for at every step in the cycle. For each of the stages in the buying process you will have a different goal for what you want your users to do. These goals in conjunction with what you know about your users should help you to determine exactly what type, level, difficulty of content they’re looking for that will help them convert on your goals.

Need recognition and awareness – This is the first stage in the buying process and in it leads are just beginning to realize that they have a need for your products or services and are being to do some research into possible solutions. Content appropriate to this stage is fairly high-level and discusses their pain points in terms of reasons behind the problem (why there is a problem in the first place). This helps users associate themselves with your content by showing that you understand their problem. Good types of content for this stage may be thought leadership pieces, blog posts on industry news and trends, webinars etc.

Information search – Once the users recognize and become aware of their need they will start to do some further research into possible solutions for their problem. At this stage in the process they are looking for information that will educate them on the solutions available in the market. To best address your users at this stage, provide content that highlights their pain points and the solutions to them, but be careful about getting to feature-heavy. The users at this stage are still early in the buying process and throwing features at them too soon can be daunting and off-putting. Good content examples are this stage are case studies, success stories, best practices content and thought leadership materials.

Evaluation of alternatives – Don’t think that your users are going to make it easy for you. At this stage in the process they’ve discovered that they have a need, they’ve done some research to determine the solutions out there and now they’re getting to the nitty-gritty stage of evaluating different vendors and products. At this stage in the process users are looking for information that will help guide them towards the right decision. Good times of content at this stage are data and product sheets which focus on the features and benefits of your products and/or services.

Purchase – When it comes to time of purchase your users will most likely be looking for information that proves that your company is reliable, going beyond your product features to the trust associated with your brand itself. Good examples of content to have at this stage are customer testimonials or recommendations that speak highly of your company and brand.

Post-purchase evaluation – Remember, the sale isn’t the end of the buying process. Many organizations find that it’s easier to upsell to current customers than it is to generate sales from new leads. That being the case, it’s important to stay in touch with your customers using content which describes best practices, new features and trends.

Step 3: Creating a content strategy that complements your mapping
Now that you’ve determined what you need, it’s time make sure you have the content to meet those requirements. Using the personas you’ve created it’s important that you define how much of each ype of content you need, how regularly it will be produced, who’s going to create it and how you’re going to share it.

Image by Sherlock 77 on Flickr.

In the past, before the internet and websites were such important selling tools the only way that information was available to prospects was by contacting sales. Now more and more information is available and buyers tend to avoid “marketing speak” and instead take to platforms like social media to get word of mouth recommendations about brands and products. Prospects are less likely to register for early stage content or sales interactions and are more likely to contact companies later in the buying cycle after doing their own research through online channels. Because of this, the process of effective lead nurturing has been forced to evolve and absorb social media into its process to help build relationships with prospects before they even become leads.

Social media can be a great platform for nurturing prospects but it’s important to remember that it isn’t the same process as nurturing leads that come in through your website. With social media, you’re often nurturing prospects before they have registered or given you their information and you’re doing it in real-time, rather than through activity-triggered or timed responses.

So how does social media help you effectively nurture prospects?

1. Social media offers a wealth of prospect data. Traditionally lead nurturing begins once a prospect gives you their information (by registering for a demo, or filling in a form on your website etc).  This is a very different situation than with social media. Social media profiles often contain a plethora of prospect information including name, company, title, geographical location, employment history, likes and preferences as well as their history of social media interactions with your competitors and opinions about brands and products. Listening to your prospects via social media can help to give you insight into the best ways to interact with them and can help you segment your social media campaigns long before your prospects even become leads, allowing you to create buyer personas with minimal investment.
2. Establishing online personality can help to build trust. Social media allows your employees’ and company’s personality to shine through in a way that regular lead nurturing doesn’t. By showing that your company is made of real people, with real personalities it can help you develop relationships more easily and help to build trust in your brand. 
3. Connect with your prospects in real-time. Social media is one of the best tools for interacting with your prospects in real-time. With social media there is no time lag between when a prospect contacts you and you are able to respond. If you’re monitoring your social media accounts properly, you can interact with a prospect within seconds of them connecting with you, and let’s face it, most of the time, when a prospect contacts you they are feeling a sense of urgency. They want your attention NOW and forcing them to turn themselves into a lead before you can begin nurturing them can waste valuable time. 
4. Creating a social media brand presence keeps you “front of mind.” If you’re using social media right, you’re updating it frequently, you’re being authentic and transparent, your initiating conversations and listening to your prospects then you’re probably doing a good job of staying at the front of your prospects’ minds. With traditional lead nurturing campaigns, your touches or interactions are often based on activity-triggered or timed responses, with social media you’re able to consistently remind your prospects of your brand’s presence in an ongoing nurturing process 

This is a guest post written by Randa Codron, a Marketing and Communications Specialist for WaterTrax, one of Marqui's SaaS partner companies.

Lead generation and filling the sales pipeline is always a hot button issue for marketers.  There is a constant battle between generating leads and producing “sales ready leads.”  Drip marketing or what some may call lead nurturing takes website visitors from leads to “sales ready leads.”  Statistics that show that between 3 and 30 repetitions are required for any message to “take hold” in the human consciousness. 
 
So how do you develop an effective drip marketing campaign?  The 4 P’s:

• Planning
• Persistence / Patience
• Pizzazz
• Powerful tracking systems

Planning:  As with all good marketing, planning a drip campaign requires a thorough understanding of your target market and how to best reach it.  Make sure your campaign is focused and niche enough to engage your audience.

Persistence:  Drip marketing works because it is made up of consistent, well timed messages. If you develop a full-year plan, stick to it. Put systems in place up front that are simple to execute, so you don’t have to stop running your business to focus on that next step in the campaign.  Drip marketing should be an automated process occurring in the background of your business, which is why planning is imperative to success.

Pizzazz:  No one wants to see the same approach from the same company at the same time each month again and again.  Deliver real value in your communications and make sure your message is useful, unique and not merely promotional. Include news and best practices in your messages to keep them interesting. Your brand, however, should be consistent from drip to drip. Your audience should recognize immediately that a communication comes from your company.

Powerful tracking systems:  Tracking campaigns and providing measurable results is critical and relatively simple, with a variety of email campaign and lead nurturing tools, like Marqui. As your campaign grows and becomes more complex, you will be thankful you invested in a solution to manage and track your drip marketing efforts.

We just finished a webinar on the basics of lead nurturing and as an accompaniment to that presentation, we thought we'd post some of our tried and true tips for building successful lead nurturing campaigns.

1. Start simple. Before getting into complicated branching scenarios within your campaign, just implement a few basic multi-step campaigns that send 3 or 4 emails on a time delay.
2. Don’t wear out your welcome. It is important to remember when creating a campaign and determining time intervals that you want to be careful about sending too many messages. The quickest way to destroy a relationship with a lead, is for them to feel bombarded by your touches. 
3. Just like regular email campaigns, the offer is critical. We can't emphasize this point enough. If your offer isn't properly stated and relevant to your audience then your campaign is useless.
4. Regular segmentation is your friend. Build tailored lead nurturing campaigns for each of your key sub-segments to ensure that your campaigns remain targeted. 
5. Test thoroughly and carefully before deploying. This is especially critical if you’re using automated tools. The advantage (and sometimes disadvantage) of using automated tools is the idea that you can, "set it and forget it,". Sometimes this can lead to neglect in regular testing and that can be detrimental to the overall success of your campaign.
6. Work out the hand-off between sales and marketing. How does sales add leads to nurturing programs? How does sales ensure a prospect doesn’t get nurtured? For your Lead Nurturing process to run smoothly, it's important to ensure that  your sales and marketing teams have a clear plan for the different aspects of your strategy. 
7. Measure and tweak overtime to improve results. Analytics for your campaigns are an important way to test your conversion rates, and to improve your campaigns for the future.

We just finished our webinar "Lead Nurturing 101" and as usual, we like to give a recap for everyone who attended and those who were unable to join us today.

Today's webinar was presented by our VP of Marketing, Richard Sharp, and our VP of Product Management, Ryan Stocker.

The webinar covered the key fundamentals of lead nurturing including:

• The definition of lead nurturing
• Trends for buyer communication
• Is lead nurturing right for your audience?
• The anatomy of a lead nurturing campaign
• The business case for lead nurturing

A few of the main points we'd like you to take away from the presentation are:

1. Lead Nurturing is the process of building relationships with prospects overtime by sending relevant messages and creating meaningful conversations.
2. It takes on average 5 to 8 touches to convert a suspect into a prospect
3. Lead nurturing may not be right for your audience, but if it is, a good strategy can help you increase your wins without increasing your lead generation budget

If you'd like see the full webinar recording you can access it here.

A common problem we hear a lot about from our customers is: how can we get more qualified leads to our sales team?

If you've been wondering the same thing (but were too afraid to ask) don't worry, there are many people out there who are having the same issues, and,  because those people did ask, we're offering a webinar on the subject.

The webinar will be presented by our VP of Marketing, Richard Sharp, and our VP of Product Management, Ryan Stocker, and will cover several different aspects of lead nurturing:

• Defining lead nurturing
• Understanding if lead nurturing will work for your audience
• Tips for designing and executing nurturing campaigns
• Calculating the ROI for lead nurturing

Sound like something your interested in? You can register for the webinar here.

Hope to see you there!