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.
Mark Mathis
Mark wrote his first direct-mail fundraising letter in 1981 for the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. The effort raised a few million dollars in undiscovered wills and legacy gifts. From that day forward Mark discovered a love of the big idea that moves the needle. After 12 years at KWWL, Mark became a business owner as a co-founder of ME&V — rebranded as AMPERAGE in 2015. After 25 years of leading creative teams in video production, graphic design, PR, writing and web development, Mark transitioned out of ownership in 2021. Today he serves in an employee role as special projects consultant. He is creatively ambidextrous — son of an artist and engineer — and famous for distilling complex ideas down to a few words and a few visuals. Mark is a writer. When he found that many nonprofits struggled with complex branding puzzles, he wrote the book, “NonProfit-NonMarketing .” He also wrote a novel called “Reenactment.” Mark is an active blogger OneMinuteMarketer® with nearly 1,000 readers each week on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. One of his most popular YouTube videos is on “How to Look Good on Zoom.” One of Mark’s fondest business memories was being named to INC 500 two times and attending the INC 500 conference with other winners. Mark is considered by some a Civil War expert (and that explains his novel). Mark also served as an adjunct professor in the business and in the communications departments at Wartburg College. Mark is a graduate of the University of Iowa and is currently vice president of the University of Iowa Journalism and Mass Communications Advisory Board. Mark is married to state Sen. Liz Mathis, and the two love to travel, even when it means being trapped by a volcano in the Czech Republic for three weeks.
