What's the best way to create a lead nurturing strategy?

1 Define your goals

Before you start creating your lead nurturing campaigns, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. Do you want to increase awareness, educate, qualify, or persuade your leads? How will you measure your success? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will track? Having SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals will help you align your strategy with your business objectives and optimize your results.

2 Segment your leads

Not all leads are the same, and they don't respond to the same messages. That's why you need to segment your leads based on their characteristics, behaviors, and needs. For example, you can segment your leads by industry, company size, role, stage in the buyer's journey, pain points, interests, or actions. Segmenting your leads will help you tailor your content, offers, and channels to their preferences and expectations, and increase your relevance and engagement.

3 Create your content

Content is the fuel of your lead nurturing strategy, as it helps you deliver value, educate, and persuade your leads. But you can't just create any content. You need to create content that matches your goals, segments, and stages in the buyer's journey. For example, if your goal is to increase awareness, you can create content that showcases your expertise, such as blog posts, ebooks, or webinars. If your goal is to qualify your leads, you can create content that demonstrates your solution, such as case studies, testimonials, or demos. And if your goal is to persuade your leads, you can create content that motivates them to take action, such as discounts, free trials, or consultations.

4 Choose your channels

Once you have your content ready, you need to decide how you will deliver it to your leads. There are many channels you can use for lead nurturing, such as email, social media, SMS, chatbots, or phone calls. But you can't use them all at once. You need to choose the channels that suit your goals, segments, and content types, and that reach your leads where they are most active and responsive. For example, email is a great channel for sending personalized and timely messages, while social media is a great channel for building trust and community.

5 Automate your campaigns

Lead nurturing can be a time-consuming and complex task, especially if you have a large and diverse audience. That's why you need to automate your campaigns using tools and platforms that can help you streamline and scale your efforts. Automation can help you trigger your messages based on your leads' actions or behaviors, such as downloading a resource, visiting a page, or filling out a form. It can also help you track and analyze your results, such as open rates, click-through rates, conversions, or revenue. Automation can help you save time, money, and resources, and improve your efficiency and effectiveness.

6 Test and optimize your strategy

Lead nurturing is not a one-time thing. It's an ongoing process that requires constant testing and optimization. You need to monitor your campaigns and see what works and what doesn't. You need to experiment with different variables, such as subject lines, headlines, images, calls to action, content formats, or channels. You need to measure your performance against your goals and KPIs, and identify your strengths and weaknesses. And you need to make adjustments and improvements based on your data and feedback. Testing and optimizing your strategy will help you boost your results and achieve your lead generation goals.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?