Value Over Volume
Let’s start with defining what a lead is, and what a lead is not.
A lead is someone who you have qualified to be interested in your product or service, who has a problem that you can provide a solution for, and who has some level of awareness about your brand. A lead is not a name, email address, and phone number.
Spending your time nurturing qualified leads will save time and yield better results. We recommend focusing your time and efforts on a quality over quantity approach that targets high-value prospects.
The primary goal of lead nurturing should be to build relationships with prospects who may not be ready to buy but could be an ideal customer in the future. Combining personalization with a strategically mapped out marketing communications matrix is proven to engage leads at higher rates and lead to more sales.
The first step is to identify your high-value prospects and pinpoint their position in your sales funnel. When you know what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in, you can tailor your messaging to communicate your value proposition, and nurture them with extremely useful, relevant content.
How to Identify High-Value Prospects
Putting some effort into identifying your high-value prospects will help to ensure that your sales and marketing teams are focusing on the right audience and that their time is well spent. When it comes to identifying your ideal customers, ask the following questions:
- Does your product or service meet their needs?
- What need or problem does your offering solve?
- Does your pricing align with their budget?
- Do they have anything in common with your current, highest-converting customers?
- Which of your customers have the highest monetary value?
- For customers you’ve had the most success with, what triggered them to seek a solution, and what does their purchase decision process look like?
- For prospects you haven’t succeeded with, why didn’t they convert?
When you have the answers to these questions, you can start to trim down your sales pipeline to a more manageable and promising list of prospects that are worth pursuing.
Crafting Your Value Proposition
Now that you have a better understanding of your ideal (and not so ideal) customers, as we’ve discussed in a previous article, a critical first step to building the rest of your marketing communications strategy is creating buyer personas. This is the part where you take your focused list of high-value prospects, and segment them based on any commonalities between their challenges, goals, and pain points. Use your buyer personas to strengthen your unique value proposition.
Your value proposition is the cornerstone of your competitive advantage and is one of the most important conversion factors. It should clearly convey why your customers should purchase from you instead of your competition.
Here are three steps for writing your unique value proposition:
- Communicate all the benefits of your product or service and what makes them valuable.
- Identify their pain points and connect the value of your offering to those problems.
- Highlight what differentiates you from other providers.
Once you have a strong value proposition, you’ll attract and convert customers far more easily.
Content Marketing for Lead Nurturing
To build that valued relationship with your ideal customers, you need to nurture them with content that is three things above all else: personalized, relevant, and useful.
Develop content that educates your leads effectively at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Here are some of the most effective types of content to send to your customers at various points on the path to purchase.
Awareness
Extremely useful, relevant, valuable information. Capture their attention by telling them something they don’t already know through blogs, eBooks, or videos.
Consideration
Podcasts, video, live interactions, case studies, comparison white papers, expert guides.
Decision
Vendor/product comparisons, product/service literature, live demos, reviews, value proposition.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to create a plan to convert your high-value leads most effectively, drop us a line! We’d love to have a conversation with you.
