How do you give your buyers what they really want, and when they want it? How do you keep buyers ‘engaged,’, so that you're the one they think of when they want to buy something?
Before you start with lead nurturing, it’s important to understand exactly what it means and what its purpose is. That’s why, in this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the following terms: lead nurturing, lead generation, and lead scoring. The next step is to identify the target audience, the buyer personas, and the buyer journey.
From lead generation to lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is often confused with lead generation. However, each has its own purpose and its own place in your marketing and sales process.
At lead generation it's all about the generating new leads, whereas lead nurturing is about informing and qualifying leads. Tactics you can use for lead generation include: content marketing, optimizing your website for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), social media campaigns, sending newsletters, … .
Lead Nurturing literally means ‘Nurture’ your leads with information and guide them through their purchasing process or buyer journey (see below). This involves identifying who your leads are, determining which stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in, and guiding them to the next stage. The goal is that when they’re ready to make a purchase, they’ll ultimately choose your product or service—and thus become your customer.
Defining the target audience, buyer personas, and buyer journey
‘Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes’
You can't do lead generation and nurturing unless you first determine who your target audience is, who your buyer personas be and in which stage they are in within the purchasing process (buyer journey) may be located.
There are many definitions of buyer personas, which is why we provide the original definition by Tony Zambito, the person who coined the term: “Buyer personas are research-based, archetypal (modeled) representations of: who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make purchasing decisions.” You should try, as it were, to ‘put yourself in your buyer’s shoes’ and find out who they are, what they read, what interests them, what they do, where they look for information, and what kind of information they’re looking for.
Your target audience and buyer personas are at a specific stage in their purchasing process. This is called the buyer's journey mentioned. The diagram below shows the various steps of the buyer journey that Alistar uses:
Once you know who your target audience is, who your buyer personas are, and you have insight into the buyer’s journey, you can tailor your lead generation and nurturing activities accordingly. The ultimate goal is, above all, to Write and provide content tailored to each buyer persona and each stage of the buyer's journey. One key to success here is to start as early as the first phase (awareness) offer valuable content so that you can obtain your leads' information more quickly and, as a result, convert them more quickly into a Marketing-Qualified Lead.
Example of Alistar
One of Alistar's target audiences is the local governments (cities & municipalities, public social welfare centers). This target group includes the following personas: city/municipal clerk, financial manager, head of general affairs, and head of IT.
Suppose a A municipal or city clerk is looking for a mid-office solution to make his/her organization operate more efficiently, thereby keeping personnel costs under control (Awareness). The secretary begins his or her online search for a mid-office and types a keyword combination such as ‘CRM for cities and municipalities’ into Google (Consideration). This will take him or her to the Alistar website, and more specifically to the page with content about CRM for local governments. At that point, the secretary is still an anonymous visitor, because we don’t yet have enough information to contact him or her. That’s why we try to pique their interest with calls to action (‘Request more info’ or ‘Contact us’ buttons), customer case studies, free downloads, or blog posts.
The secretary is ultimately interested in our e-book. Our e-books are not publicly available on our website; they are only available once the visitor provides his or her contact information. As soon as this is done, the anonymous visitor becomes a known, Marketing-Qualified Lead and can launch a lead nurturing campaign.
