So you already have a killer inbound marketing strategy. You may find yourself wondering  why you’re still having trouble getting your qualified leads down the pipeline. Why aren’t they converting?

If you find yourself asking this question, it’s important to note that in digital marketing, it takes more than providing your audience with the right content to get them to convert. In fact, data shows that 80% of leads never translate into sales.

You’ll need lead-nurturing activities and continued engagement to keep bringing them closer until they reach the end of the marketing funnel.

In this post, I’ll outline the best lead nurturing best practices that will help you take your leads from TOFU to BOFU in no time.

1. Find a More Accurate Way to Target Leads

In creating an email campaign, having a targeted mailing list is crucial to driving bigger numbers. Getting in touch with invalid contacts and emails is a waste of time. You need to develop an accurate lead nurturing strategy that gets you in front of the right people in order to get the best results.

The main point behind targeting is to help you find the right people and segment those who are ready to buy from those who will never buy. Weeding out people who will never buy from you gives you more room to engage with those who are more likely to make a purchase.

2. Create a Personalised Content Strategy

Another way to nurture your leads more effectively today is making use of account-based marketing (ABM). Account-based marketing allows you to focus your sales and marketing efforts on well-defined target accounts so you can personalise your campaigns that appeal to each of these accounts.

You can create and deliver a specific message according to attributes that may appeal more to these accounts. As a result of catering specifically to targeted customers, they are twice more likely to engage with the content you put out, which drives better conversion and ROI. According to research, ABM had a 97% higher ROI than other marketing initiatives.

3. Adapt to Predictive Lead Scoring

Typically, leads are ranked according to how they engage with your content, respond to an email or a newsletter, or get in touch with you. A higher score coincides with the likelihood of them becoming a customer.

Ranking your leads gives your sales and marketing team a clearer focus on how they can best interact with the lead throughout the buying cycle.

Traditional lead scoring, however, is prone to errors.

Using predictive lead scoring that analyses historical and current data from your CRM or marketing automation platform gives you a more accurate way to qualify leads. It can be integrated with your current sales process to identify a lead’s value and buying phase.

4. Get Better Alignment Between Sales & Marketing

No matter how much you want to optimise your sales cycle to get the most conversion, a disconnect between sales and marketing sometimes happens, which can lead to low returns and unmet goals.  

To prevent this from happening, it is important to get your sales and marketing team to communicate better and align on goals and targets while adhering to a solid strategy by which to measure success.

Get both teams to come together to analyse the sales and customer decision process so they can come up with a unified set of standards, goals, and requirements by which to adhere to.

By sharing CRM details and notes, they can find common bottlenecks that may delay leads from going through the purchase cycle faster and revisit how this can be improved.

5. Get More Detailed Reporting

To ensure you have the most accurate data about your leads, you need to know exactly where they are in your sales and marketing funnel. It is therefore crucial to use a CRM or marketing platform that gives you a detailed report of your leads according to interactions and engagement so you can employ the right strategy to drive better conversion down the pipeline.

6. Use Video to Nurture Leads

Though many may not fully realise it, the need to nurture your leads throughout their journey down your marketing and sales funnel means you have to make the most of every interaction to get them to convert.

With so many entrants in the market today, it is relatively easy to lose out on your qualified leads when they get stuck down the pipeline and you fail to engage them so they follow through.

To stand out from the competition today, it is important to think outside the box and be as creative as you possibly can.

One of the ways to do this is to explore the use of video not only in your inbound marketing strategy but in your lead-nurturing efforts as well. Without fully realising it, you can use video not only to transform your content and attract leads, you can use it consistently in more targeted lead-nurturing campaigns that helps your leads down the funnel. Video is a great way to continue to adapt, interact, and respond to their specific needs in every area of the marketing funnel until you can get them to fully convert.

Get to know your lead’s buyer persona to come up with video content that appeals the most to them, understand why they are hesitating and what they may be looking for so you can give them the information they need to make the purchase decision.

Recommended reading: Why You Need to Have Explainer Videos in Your Marketing Strategy

7. Use Multichannel Lead Nurturing

To get better results, it is crucial for marketers to think outside the box. Multichannel lead nurturing is a great way to reach more people effectively. It involves using targeted marketing to spread your message  throughout different touchpoints and platforms.

For this to be effective, you have to be able to integrate the right channel, the right content, and the right lead at the best time.

One of the best ways to do this is to combine email and social media marketing. Use email to expand your social followers and increase your reach. In the same way, you can also use your social media channels to draw more of your audience to subscribe to your mailing list or promote your email marketing campaigns.

To get started, here are some tips for multichannel lead nurturing:

• Supplement each email address in your database with the contact’s social media data
• Increase opt-in conversion rates with social sign-in capabilities on your forms
• Feature a Facebook and Twitter connect button in email opt-in confirmation messages so that enthusiastic new subscribers don’t miss out on other ways to connect
• Add a Facebook and Twitter connect button to your preference centre for recipients who’d rather stay in touch over social networks
• Listen for keywords that are used by your audience in social media, and then send segmented emails that use those keywords
• Keep a close look at what your followers are looking into and who they follow.  Tracking the content they are interested at can help you improve how you segment them to get the best results for your campaign strategy.

Tying It Together

There is truth to what most markers say: lead nurturing could be the most important marketing strategy to focus on because it helps you do two things all at once: drive conversion by nurturing your leads so they become more sales-ready.

Lead nurturing not only drives conversion, but it is essential in helping you track, measure, and analyse your goals so you can bank on the right strategy and best practices that get the most result for the business.