In this article we will cover several things about the processes of enriching our business opportunities. Traditionally it is known as an Inbound Marketing activity, but as you know, at B2B Growth, we focus on it from the perspective of personalization and Account Based Marketing . We will mainly talk about Nurturing. We will also talk about Marketing Automation and Next Best Action Marketing. I hope that with this article you have a basic idea of the concepts, and what you should do to apply it in your company. We will start with its explanation in case you have not heard it before.
Nurturing or Lead Nurturing is the attraction technique in Marketing or lead generation in which a valuable relationship is created with potential clients and users with the aim of making them make the purchase for which they entered a certain page or online store. The idea of this is to accompany them in their purchasing process.
And this is because there is a high percentage of clients who are not captured and converted into real purchases. But to do this, you have to provide valuable content to clients, and give them a reason to want to stay. In addition, specifically in the case of B2B , multiple interactions over time are needed to achieve a real business opportunity. For vp maintenance email lists the conversation to flow in that relationship for several weeks, even months, we need the 2 parties, buyer and seller, to stay connected. We achieve this through nurturing. It is, in short, the enrichment of the commercial conversation through marketing actions where we provide the interested buyer with more information about our product or company.
Nurturing is such an important point because it is the connection between marketing and sales. This is how you convert the opportunities you have already attracted thanks to marketing into customers. In order for these customers to continue with their purchasing process, you have to follow a series of steps:
Segmenting the audience. A common point in the marketing process. This helps us save time, money and effort in directing resources to users who do not need them.
Set a goal for each part of the process. Know what you want the customer to do by a certain point. Whether it's time for the final purchase or time to download free content, etc.
Plan and implement the sequence for dealing with users. It has to be a complete plan. You have to be consistent in each response. All users should receive the same response and have the same level of satisfaction.
And for nurturing content to work, it has to be personalized and useful for users. That's why you need to pay special attention to your communication with users. After all, this is one of the most important points. If you want to make sales, you need to know exactly where the B2B customer is in the process, and how you can help them. This is the ideal point to offer them valuable content, and it's the right point to have an effective and intense customer follow-up. If you have to answer numerous questions, this is the time.
In addition, nurturing will help you to have better information and knowledge about your clients, because with communication you will get more insights and better understand their behavior. Nurturing does not only go in one direction, but flows in both directions, providing more information to the B2B client and more knowledge to the company about the behavior of its clients. It can also serve as an experiment for each case and each interaction with users, and to know which follow-ups were effective and led to sales and which did not. In nurturing we can apply great A/B test experiments that help us better understand our client.
You can understand by what means customers want to be contacted, and which ones work best for them. It's all about having experiences, and the more, the better. But to get to that point, it's important to first have solved all the possible problems through Marketing Automation.
And what is Marketing Automation?
As the name suggests, this is the process of automating marketing. Because nurturing is important, but there comes a time in your company when you can't have 1-on-1 conversations, or at least it has to be the last solution.
That's why Marketing Automation and Nurturing are related. You have to think of Marketing Automation processes in which you can follow up with the client during their purchasing process or their interest in getting to know your organization, but which do not require a lot of time and effort in the early stages of the sales process. In many cases, the B2B client only needs certain information and the value lies in providing it to them quickly and immediately.
Some of these tools could be sending information about new content, or sending content at the same time that the client has accessed other content. You can also send automatic responses to new users or classify these users and send them content that fits their user profile.
What matters is giving the customer a quick response. Nobody wants to wait 3 days until their query is resolved. That's why it's best to create processes to answer their queries when they have them.
It will also be useful to have a FAQ section on your website, which answers questions that you repeatedly receive in the customer service section. It is important that all the exchanges that the company has in this customer service section are useful, either to obtain more information from the user, or to find out what the most common concerns of a user are at a given time.
Another type of action is based on having automated emails so that the user knows that they will soon receive a response from the company. But you have to have predefined actions to take depending on what part of the process a customer is in. And this is logical. A customer who has just landed on your page may not have the same level of interest as a person who has already downloaded an e-book or some content.
For this reason, you have to give quick and effective responses, covering the customer's needs, taking advantage of the " momentum ". Think of it almost like when you go to buy something at a supermarket, and they tell you that you can take an item with a discount when you are at the checkout. That customer is more willing to buy than a person who is entering the store's parking lot. And it makes sense. The customer who has already bought has spent time, energy and money. The commercial activity will be different depending on how close it is to the moment of conversion. The proposals are not the same for each customer.
What do we mean by Next Best Action in Marketing? Can we say that everything is related?
Next Best Action Marketing uses the user's past actions, behavior, interests, and needs to determine what is the most effective action to take next to achieve the desired results, but with a greater interest in the user. Sometimes, artificial intelligence is even used to determine what is the best next action for that customer.
