Every website visitor to a B2B site is treated like a little gold nugget. Yes, some nuggets are more valuable than others and through lead nurturing you can learn about your prospect and take the right approach to keep your brand top-of-mind or guide them down the sales pipeline. But, plain old lead nurturing might not be enough anymore. If marketers fail to leverage real time marketing when nurturing website visitors and qualified leads, the sales team might miss out on closing additional incremental deals. Ultimately, real time lead nurturingmakes the sales process more efficient and successful and allows a company to take advantage of the prospect's state of mind in real time.
What is real time lead nurturing?
Lead Nurturing is the process of building relationships with qualified prospects regardless of their timing to buy, with the goal of earning their business when they're ready. Real time lead nurturing gives you the ability to take advantage of the prospect readiness to buy using real time data and automated, personalized messages. Lead nurturing requires:1. Knowing when and how a visitor becomes a lead 2. Knowing when to take action 3. Knowing what is the right action to take Real time lead nurturing is not that different from traditional lead nurturing. However, each element of lead nurturing now has a real time component that does make an impact for the success of the sales team.
Know when a visitor becomes a lead... in real time.
Due to the speed at which technology allows buyers to shop, real time is the reality and expectation. Prospects are not going to wait a long time at each stage of the purchase cycle for the seller to get back to them with answers. By leveraging technology, sellers have the ability to immediately react to the buyer at every stage of the buying process. For example, if I'm buying software, I would research a couple of companies and fill out forms to request more information from each. As the company, if you don't respond to me promptly after filling out a form, your competitor should--and probably will. Catching the attention of a buyer--especially within the first five minutes-- when they're focused on your product or service can be one of your biggest competitive advantages. Buyers have shorter attention spans and people want to satisfy their needs relatively quickly. When the buyer is engaging with you, marketers should recognize that moment and use lead nurturing to "drag" the prospect into the opportunity pipeline.
Know when to take action...in real time.
Not all visitors are created equal. How do you know when your lead is qualified? Don't know? You better know. A hot lead is a temporary status. How are you going to leverage that status? You know you need to do something, but what do you do? Score your lead, and take action. Sales and marketing teams need to work together to identify what criterion indicates a qualified lead. As you scale your marketing program, the sales team won't have the capacity to screen and follow up with every lead that marketing brings in. Lead scoring helps prioritize and segment leads, so there are no missed opportunities.
Taking the right action...in real time.
Lead nurturing is not always about just sending an email with a case study or article attached. Lead nurturing is definitely not a generic, automated response. Buyers want you to add value to their buying process. A sales person should not be calling up a lead if they can't add more value in five minutes then the lead could get by searching for more information. With the combination of visitor intelligence and calculated lead scores, marketing teams can develop sophisticated nurture workflows that are customized to each unique visitor. With the increasing number of channels to engage with website visitors and leads, there are more options to build that relationship with the means of communication the buyer prefers. Do I send a DM (Twitter's Direct Message) to a lead that downloaded a whitepaper from us via a link from a Tweet? When is sending out an SMS appropriate versus an email? For additional tips on using social media for lead nurturing, check out our blog post: How B2Bs Can Leverage Facebook Pages for Lead Nurturing.
Want to learn more about real time lead nurturing?
Adding the real time element to lead nurturing is becoming increasingly more important. The sophistication of custom lead nurturing is possible in real time with the help of automation software and thoughtful planning. With workflows based on lead scores and triggered by marketing automation software, sales and marketing teams can work seamlessly together to identify and evaluate every visitor that hits the website.
How do you approach real time lead nurturing? What are your examples of your best performing lead nurturing campaigns?