Hi. Welcome to the importance of lead nurturing. I'm Courtney
from HubSpot Academy. Lead nurturing is important to
inbound marketing because it's your opportunity to provide
value to your leads and customers and help them grow
with your business. As an inbound professional, you might
ask yourself, "How do I connect with my prospects and turn them
into customers in the most helpful way?" Lead nurturing is
the answer. Lead nurturing is the process of building
relationships with your prospects with the goal of
earning their business when they're ready. In practice, lead
nurturing is a marketing effort focused on engaging with your
leads and customers in a way that encourages them to progress
toward a specific action. Lead nurturing is the
timely,efficient, and targeted approach to connecting with your
contacts. And by taking this kind of approach, you can
deliver helpful content with the right context. So the big
question you need to answer is what makes lead nurturing so
important to your success with inbound marketing? It's
important to know where your lead nurturing efforts fit into
the inbound methodology. How are you going to use lead nurturing
to achieve your goals? When we look at the four stages of the
inbound methodology — attract, convert, close, and delight —
lead nurturing lives primarily in the close stage. Successful
lead nurturing helps you focus on providing value to your leads
by offering them the information they need at the right time.
Each lead you have in your database should be nurtured
according to their interests and lifecycle stages. Pages they've
visited and content they've consumed all indicate shifting
interests. Good nurturing adapts the messaging to stay relevant
and helps you win new customers, faster. Good nurturing helps you
keep up the conversation with your contacts. And this helps
you continue to connect after they become customers and could
be looking for more information from you and your company. You
provide this value to your customers, and they give you
value in return, helping you grow your business. This is
where you see success with lead nurturing. It's the best of both
worlds - growth for your leads and growth for you. So what
exactly is lead nurturing? It's the timely, efficient, and
targeted approach to connecting with your contacts. Let's look
into each of these three aspects to understand how to connect
with your contacts. The first aspect is timeliness. One
problem that inbound professionals face is finding
the right time to connect with leads when they're most
interested. And one problem your leads face is being contacted at
the wrong time. This is where lead nurturing comes in. Lead
nurturing is delivered through marketing automation. When we
say marketing automation, we're referring to the software that
exists with the goal of automating your marketing
actions. Many marketing professionals have to automate
repetitive tasks, such as emails, social media, and other
website actions, or they want to build systems of automated
workflows that help them streamline and manage their
campaigns. Marketing automation technology makes these tasks
easier and helps you delivers your content to your leads at
the right time. With marketing automation, you can develop
nurturing campaigns that deliver the right content based off the
actions your leads take with your company. Using your
marketing automation software, you can trigger events to happen
after your contacts have taken certain actions, such as
downloading a piece of content, opening a specific page, or
requesting information from you. For example, if a contact
downloads a piece of content on "The Best Ways to Create Subject
Lines for Email Newsletters," you'll then be able to send a
follow-up piece of content that builds off that subject. This
could be a blog post on how to write effective email copy.
You're continuing the conversation with additional
content that has context in what they're interesting in learning
about. With marketing automation software in your inbound
toolbox, you can take full advantage of the benefits of
timeliness and help your leads get their answers faster.
Marketing automation software doesn't just help you be timely
but helps you to automate in general. That brings us to the
second aspect of lead nurturing: efficiency. HubSpot found that
the odds of an inbound lead becoming qualified are 21 times
greater when they're contacted within 5 minutes vs 30 minutes.
This type of speed is possible through automating tasks and
reducing the time a salesperson has to spend on qualifying or
warming up a lead. It's all about efficiency. The content
and interactions a lead will experience through your lead
nurturing campaign will do the heavy lifting to leave you and
your teams to focus on creating helpful content, connecting with
leads through sales faster, and reviewing data to continue
optimizing your efforts — in other words, being human,
helpful, and holistic. Your marketing automation doesn't do
marketing and lead generation for you, but it can scale your
efforts and increase the value you provide to your contacts in
a more efficient way. Timeliness and efficiency together bring us
to the third aspect of lead nurturing: Targeting your leads
in the right way. By using lead nurturing, you can tie a series
of emails to a specific activity or conversion event. In other
words, you can craft your emails based on the action your lead or
customer takes. This shows them you're aware of their interests
and providing them with what they might need next. When
connecting with your contacts, you want to be as human as
possible. Being human is what builds trust, and trust is what
helps you become successful as a business. Your lead nurturing
campaigns provide contextual messages to your contacts, which
is key to building that trust — it's about being targeted and
more engaging to your lead or customer. These are the three
most important aspects of lead nurturing and why it's crucial
to your success with inbound marketing — it's a timely,
efficient, and targeted approach to connecting with your
contacts. Inbound professionals use lead nurturing to help their
contacts grow with their business. You can nurture your
leads by engaging with them on an ongoing basis and gradually
guiding them through the buyer's journey with both helpful
content and context.