Do you remember going through high school and being told what to do? What classes you needed to take and in what order? You were given a one-size-fits-all plan designed to get you a diploma and on your way to adulthood. What about college? Do you remember all the options you were given, the liberties, and the opportunities?
Well, the same thing happens in your lead nurturing campaigns. You can either nurture leads based off of an offer (the high school approach) or nurture your leads based off of their persona and their location in the buyer’s journey (the college approach). Let’s take a look at the differences between both lead nurturing campaigns, and the reasons you should be using a persona-based lead nurturing strategy.
An offer based strategy would look something like this:
- Visitor comes to your site
- Visitor fills out a form to convert on a content offer such as an ebook, whitepaper, etc. and becomes a lead
- The lead now gets put into a workflow based on the offer they filled out
- The lead then gets sent emails in that workflow providing them with more information of that offer’s topic, or pushing other offers, in an attempt to push the lead further down the sales funnel
This lead nurturing process usually focuses on the intent of getting leads to bite after being pushed increasing amounts of sales-focused material. The lead does not get a well-rounded assortment of information, based on who they are or what they are having issues with. They are simply told “Hey, if you like this, you may also like this.” Constantly pushing offers, rather than information to leads can serve to quickly disengage them and stop them from moving further down the sales funnel. On the other hand….
A persona based strategy would look something like this:
- Visitor comes to your site
- Visitor fills out a form to convert on a content offer such as an ebook, whitepaper, etc. and becomes a lead
- On that form, the visitor fills out their pain point, position in their company, or whatever you need to segment them into the correct persona
- The lead then gets placed on a workflow based on their persona, and their lead score (current position in the sales funnel)
- The lead will now get sent emails based on who they are, where they are in the buyer’s journey, and what questions, concerns, or pains they may be having (based off your persona profile) until they become a sales-ready lead
This lead nurturing process focuses on providing answers. It’s all about giving your lead the information they need in order to be ready to speak to someone on your sales team. By answering their questions and providing solutions to their pains, you are more likely to drive engagement, which will improve their lead score, giving you not only more sales-ready leads, but more qualified sales-ready leads.
As you can see, implementing the correct inbound marketing strategy is crucial to seeing results. The difference between a persona based lead nurturing campaign and an offer based campaign can have an impact on your bottom line. Interested in obtaining your own strategy? Take a look at our completely free Sample Gameplan below and get insight into inbound marketing strategies that work.
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