Engaging lead nurturing content nudges prospects along the buyer’s journey. Providing relevant content helps convert leads into customers.

Lead nurturing is the process that aims to turn a prospective buyer into a customer. This is achieved by providing prospects with all the information they may need to make a confident and educated decision.

The practice of nurturing a lead reinforces the relationship between sellers and buyers at every step along the customer buying journey. Establishing deep connections with leads helps build trust, so when the prospect is ready to make a purchase, there is no question as to who they will make the purchase from.

The purpose of providing lead nurturing content is two-fold. For a start, it lets a prospect find out about your products and services, learn what your business offers, and how it fits with their goals.

On the other hand, content isn’t only about your business and the prices and specs of your products. The most effective content delivers an authentic message, including all information that is helpful and relevant to the prospect’s needs. This is how you build trust, maintain a connection, and increase brand awareness.

Lead nurturing content such as blog posts, social media posts, and email newsletters are just a few of the ways digital content marketers achieve this.

Establish Long-Term Customer Relationships

Lead nurturing efforts consist of more than simply promoting your products and services to prospects on repeat. Rather, leveraging crafted campaigns that accompany customers throughout the entire buying journey is most lucrative. This lead nurturing method differs depending on a company’s unique sales lifecycle. Different companies require different time periods for their sales development strategies to mature into the purchase phase.

No matter how long your sales lifecycle is, keeping prospects engaged with lead nurturing content is essential.

Leadsbridge reported that a customer receives an average of 7–10 marketing interactions from their first contact with a company up until they finally commit to making a purchase.

This means being on the lookout for any opportunities to address prospects’ questions or provide additional resources. Content such as blog posts, social media announcements, and email newsletters will help them stay informed over the long haul.

Buyer Personas

Creating buyer personas that reflect the profile of your audience remains the best way to understand how to speak to your target market.

Developing a persona for your market demographics entails profiling segments to identify their collective likes and dislikes. With buyer personas, you can also establish the factors that motivate them to buy—or not buy—a product. Moreover, personas have distinctive sales cycles that marketers need to consider when planning campaigns.

Once your buyer personas are defined, it’s much easier to produce highly-targeted lead nurturing content that speaks directly to each one. Different market segments purchase the same brand but for different reasons. Each segment also makes purchasing decisions based on diverse motivations. It’s worth considering these differences when making targeted content that caters to each market.

Get Personal

When it comes to developing lead nurturing content, personalization isn’t optional. It’s a necessary requirement to forge a deeper connection with individual leads.

Although your entire audience may seem like numbers based on your analytics report, each one will engage with your content in a personal way. But how do you make personalization possible if you have hundreds—even thousands—of leads? It can be surprisingly straightforward. Just ensure that each time you connect with a lead, you get their basic information: their name, location, occupation, employer, and so on. It might seem too simple a trick—but personalization really does work.

According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to apply personalization when they contact them. Another 76% show frustration when these companies fail to do so.

To be clear, personalization doesn’t just mean putting a lead’s name on the subject line of an email. Geotargeted content can also be an excellent way to personalize content without seeming to intrude. For example, emails or messages inviting you to attend a local event or blog content that uses keywords relevant to what a lead is looking for.

Let Content Mapping Guide You

No matter how long the sales lifecycle, crafting well-targeted, lead-nurturing content for each part of the customer journey is imperative.

In the early stages, potential customers might be more interested in what topics the company talks about or what they represent than the specific products or services they sell. This stage is often referred to as the awareness stage or top-of-funnel.

Then, once the potential customer begins connecting with and trusting the company, they may shift focus to how certain products or services that the company offers might suit their needs.

Create a Content Roadmap

Creating a content roadmap requires an understanding of the company’s buyer persona and the corresponding sales lifecycle.

Listing out frequently asked questions and typical problems customers face is a good starting point for brainstorming lead nurturing content ideas for each persona and buying stage.

Suggested Reading: How to Build a Content Roadmap for an Effective Lead Nurturing Strategy

Begin by plotting out the actual customer journey of each buyer persona through each critical phase: awareness, evaluation, and purchase. These steps help prepare the groundwork for creating lead-nurturing content that targets different customer personas at each stage of the journey.

Part of the plan should include determining which social media platforms are best suited for each buyer persona too.

Types of Lead Nurturing Content

Organizations must continue to keep their leads engaged to help move them along the customer buying journey. There are several types of lead nurturing content designed to ensure your company remains front of mind throughout the entire sales lifecycle, from awareness to consideration to the purchase stage.

Suggested Reading: 3 Types of Lead Nurturing Content & How a Strategic Approach Helps Increase Conversions

AWARENESS STAGE

Social Media Engagement

Maintaining a social media presence requires actively promoting your social platforms, regularly updating your content, and paying attention to user reactions.

A few best practices for creating an effective social media strategy to boost engagement with your prospects include the following:

Authenticity. Delivering authentic content has a significant advantage for your business. It’s also the reason people tend to latch on to some social accounts more than others.

As in all relationships, prospects want to be seen, heard, and listened to, which means supplying content that’s genuine about meeting those needs. Your social media account is the perfect vehicle for that!

Mobile-friendly. Over 50% of the global population views everything over their mobile phones, from the newest TV shows to live sports scores to the latest Hollywood gossip.

Nearly 60% of all web traffic comes through mobile phones, with desktops/laptops at 38.46%, and tablets at 2.23%.

If you’re not structuring your content to fit mobile phones, you’re likely losing out on opportunities. Also, remember that a one-size-fits-all design isn’t advised for content that you’ll be posting across a variety of social channels. It pays to take the time and effort to develop content that is tailored to fit each channel.

Include a Call-to-Action (CTA). The point of social media is to be social, engage with others, and share valuable content with your industry or network.

Adding thoughtful yet non-intrusive questions can help elicit a response from followers. Ask their opinion on a trending topic or ask them to share similar experiences.

Surveys and questionnaires are other great examples of ways to nurture your leads to help establish a clearer picture of what people are looking for.

CONSIDERATION STAGE

Blog Content

Blogs help companies in a number of ways, serving as a source of company-related information that prospects are looking for answers to their problems.

According to Hubspot’s 2022 State of Marketing Report, businesses with active blogs reported they are 13 times more likely to achieve positive ROI.

When considering a purchase, many buyers prefer searching for the information themselves. Having blog content readily available on your company blog establishes you as an expert authority in your specific industry. Curious leads have the opportunity to browse your content and discover helpful answers to their questions. Ultimately, this knowledge becomes associated with your company, which is extremely helpful when the inquiring prospect reaches the purchase stage.

Blogs are useful for establishing a link between your products or services and the connected topic. Assigning a related keyword phrase to specific blog content helps ensure the content is indexed in the search engines and reinforces topic ownership.

Providing a steady flow of lead nurturing content via blogs is a proven worthwhile investment when done consistently.

Suggested Reading: How to Write Lead Nurturing Content [5 Best Practices for Writing Lead Nurturing Content]

PURCHASE STAGE

Email Marketing Without the Spam

To say that most people dislike spam email is an understatement—they hate spam with a passion. It brings nothing of value and clogs mailboxes at the same time. Lead nurturing content helps provide a more accurate picture of your individual leads. This means that instead of wasting everyone’s time, it’s possible to implement a highly personalized, email-based campaign.

Thankfully, with accurate user behavioral data and research, it’s a lot easier to send well-targeted emails. In addition, market segmentation significantly increases the open and click rates of your email campaign. That’s because it specifically focuses only on those most likely to engage.

Email marketing, despite the bad rep it gets because of spam, remains one of the more successful and cost-effective digital marketing strategies.

Campaign Monitor reported that nearly 60% of marketers get their highest return on investment from email campaigns.

Partner with WriteForMe to Create Awesome Lead Nurturing Content

Content remains king in the world of digital marketing. Providing prospects with a steady source of information via social posts, blog articles, and email newsletters is only truly effective when it delivers engaging, lead nurturing content.

Connect with the experts at WriteForMe to learn more about creating a solid content marketing strategy, including developing a content roadmap and writing on-target, lead nurturing content.

Request your FREE content marketing playbook today!

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