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Kim Albee,
Genoo LLC:
763.383.6081
ki*@***oo.com
www.genoo.com
IF YOU’RE LIKE MOST small to mid-sized businesses, you’re sitting on a gold mine of prospects that you don’t have the time to engage. These are the prospects who need five or more contacts before they’re ready to buy and they’re a perfect group to be wooed by your website and automated lead-nurturing efforts.
You already have a website. Where most small and mid-sized companies cripple themselves is not utilizing that website to drive leads and interest. This means having tools that allow you to collect prospect information, track their activity and send automated e-mails to them. If you need these tools look for marketing automation; there are many affordable choies.
Why is lead nurturing so crucial to your website’s sales performance? Let’s look at two sets of numbers:
19 percent of sales close with four contacts or less, and 81 percent close on or after the fifth contact.
90 percent of businesses quit following up sometime between the first and fourth contact. Only 10 percent of businesses keep going to a fifth contact or beyond.
The vast majority of your prospects need five or more contacts and if you’re like most businesses, you’re quitting well before that. This is where automated lead-nurturing comes in. Let’s look at what you need to attract and nurture those 81 percent of leads you might be missing.
Without tackling your content, nothing else you do online will matter. I know that’s not sexy to hear. It’s not that silver bullet that’s going to be no effort at all but still get results. It is, by far and away, the single most important thing you can pay attention to. All effective marketing starts with content that engages your target audience.
Think of your website and lead-nurturing e-mails as a conversation between you and your potential customer. Too many people make their website a blowhorn: “Hi! This is who we are. Isn’t it cool? You want to find out? You want to sign up for a free trial? Well, we can help you … contact us ” Who cares, right? We already get so much of that in our daily lives.
Who is your target market? What do they want? What’s their pain? How can you help them solve their issues? Do you have content on your website that talks about more than just your company and your products or services?
If the only way a visitor can actually engage with your website is to complete a “contact us” form, then nine out of 10 visitors will leave your site and never return. Interestingly, providing a “sign up for our newsletter” option is getting less effective as a way to generate leads. You need to show that you understand the predicament that your target audience is facing, and can help.
For all your content, whether it’s on your website, offered as a download for lead capture, or in your lead-nurturing system, you need to map it to your customer’s buying cycle. You can do this by talking to some of your existing customers and asking them about their process. You can also talk to your salespeople about common questions they hear.
Map the questions that arise during the buying cycle and create content that answers those questions. This allows you to enter into the conversation going on in your prospect’s mind. Like a great salesperson, you want your website and lead-nurturing content to address the core issues they face, their pain, and the solutions to that pain.
When you address their pain, your content becomes an emotional connection and a conversation. In your regular conversations, you probably speak very differently than when you’re being all buttoned up and corporate. Find that voice for your online content-the voice that’s most authentic and engages your customers.
In long-cycle sales, the most common reason visitors come to your website isn’t to buy; it’s to research and get answers to their questions. Only one in 10 visitors actually wants to talk to you. You want to motivate visitors to trade a little information about themselves in exchange for your content.
Offer enticing downloads and capture at least their name and e-mail address. (Don’t ask for too much information at first or visitors will just leave, but if your software allows you can ask for more information on subsequent visits.)
This content doesn’t have to be hard to come by: it could be a webinar you’ve delivered, a recorded speech given by someone in your company, or resources you already use during the sales cycle. Just make sure it actually answers questions your prospects have. Give away real value.
Then nurture and track responses. This step can be tough when you’re using multiple tools in different systems, so try to unify your tools and have a centralized lead database that tracks how leads are responding.
Tracking lead activity is distinct from the generic information you get with Google Analytics. Rather than knowing you had 400 visitors to a page, you want to know that Fred Jones went to that page, then downloaded your e-book on XYZ, etc. You want to be able to see which leads are reading your e-mails and clicking through to your website so that when a lead’s activity rises, you can have a salesperson make contact directly.
A good website with lead-nurturing sequences can take effort to put together, but with today’s automation technologies, once you have this set up it will go on taking care of your leads even when you’re asleep, on vacation, or have your head down managing other parts of your company.
The question to ask yourself: Would the effort be worth closing potentially 81 percent more business than you do today?
