How Do You Nurture a Lead Once You Have One?
When you go fishing, people like to talk about the lures/bait, the casting and the location. Little time is spent on how to land a fish. I think of all the fish I’ve lost because I didn’t know how to properly set the hook or keep the fish in play all the way to the boat.
Landing leads is the same way. There are plenty of techniques and advice in the industry on how to entice the next big client, yet little on how to nurture a lead once it is first cultivated.
A recent survey found that 8% of business-to-business marketers feel they do an excellent job at “nurturing.” According to a report by Demand Gen and PathFactory, most find that very low results come from very low efforts. Only half the people who had lead-generating campaigns also had nurture campaigns to follow up.
Most are finding that webinars and content development (gated and ungated*) including educational newsletters and reliable personalized direct mail work best to continue to build the relationship.
Enticing a lead is relatively easy compared with landing the lead in the boat. It’s always good to spend as much time on nurturing as you do on developing the next shiny lure.
*Gated means that you must fill out a form to get the content you want from an organization. By gating the content, the results are lower, but the leads tend to be warmer.