Sunday, August 26, 2012

Lead Nurturing and the Sales Funnel

When it comes to running a successful business, it is all about making sure you have a solid sales funnel that brings in consistent customers who are loyal to your brand and spread the word of their experience to their own networks. However, before you can capture a bunch of strong leads to turn into customers, you need to first understand the metrics of lead nurturing.

Knowing how a person thinks before they become a fully fledged customer of your business might sound difficult, but it really doesn't have to be--especially with how many metrics and analytics are now available to diagnose why prospects are finding you. This data will enable you to create calls-to-action and marketing campaigns targeted at those visitors and create warm leads. All it takes is a little reporting savvy, the ability to act fast, and most importantly: quality aligned content that really shines.

Think Like Your Leads

A great way to see what type of content is working for you is by reverse engineering your own sales funnel and web traffic. Work through it so that you understand where the majority of your leads are currently coming in from--are they being predominately directed from your Facebook Fan Page? Your blog? Email campaigns? Do you have specific search terms that are generated a lot of high converting niche traffic? Whatever it may be, keeping reverse engineering your customers and traffic until you get to step one and know what is helping you generate leads. Analytics will especially help with this part.

Obviously, there are going to be a few different paths a majority of your customers will take. From here, you should have a couple that stand out from the rest which give you a good snapshot of what to do next.

Focus On The Majority
You've established major pathways that most of your leads take to become buying customers, now you have to focus your energy on making sure the process of going from interested visitor to lead to buyer is dialed in. Using your newly found data from reverse engineering your sales funnel, you can now provide even better content that your leads want and need.

Some of this high quality content might include white papers, free downloadable guides, monthly trials, free consultations, archives of how-to videos, infographics, and much more. But, what kind of content should go where? Here's a shortlist to consider:

    Top of the Funnel: Content like downloadable ebooks, white papers, videos, infographics and other easily "consumable" content are perfect for that initial awareness of your business to the lead. They can be informed of what exactly you are providing without being given a sales pitch. You are just providing useful information for their buying decision.

    Middle of the Funnel: The second stage of lead nurturing happens when the lead is interested but needs that extra push to become a buyer. Content like case studies, comparison sheets with competitors, demos, and open contact between you and the lead all fall into this category. At this point, you can start exposing them to your business's purpose.

    Bottom of the Funnel: Finally, the buying stage! It's time to bring out the big guns at this stage with promotional deals, sales, coupons, free consultations, estimates, and other incentives to make them become a customer.

All of your content should be aligned with your sales funnel, easily and seamlessly directing leads to the final sales pitch. This should be done in a way that is highly customized based on lead behavior. Drastically segmenting the leads by group at the top of the funnel will only increase the potential of isolating them before uncovering their true buying intent, so having a comprehensive content and lead nurturing strategy is a must.

Filling in the gaps within your own sales funnel can now be much easier, allowing you to ramp up sales and see a significant increase in conversions simply by rearranging content to fit the needs of prospects during that particular stage while remaining cohesive throughout the entire funnel.

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