Empower your business with digital lead nurturing in IT architecture documentation

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thanks for joining us for today's webinar in today's presentation Chad Khalid director of marketing at ledge view partners will walk you through our 12 step guide to getting started with lead nurturing before I let him dive into this exciting and comprehensive presentation however I have a few quick housekeeping notes to cover so sit back relax sip your coffee and I'll run over a few things before I tell you more I should introduce myself I'm Julia Flaherty digital marketing specialist at ledge view partners we are a business and technology consulting firm who partners with organizations to transform sales marketing and customer service operations and processes supported by core technologies including customer relationship management and marketing automation our certified experts provide strategic business advice to clients process definition and technology solutions that advance business processes forward helping you to achieve your unique business goals in sales marketing customer service and CRM for those of you that have been on our webinars before welcome back and for all of you newbies thank you for joining us for the first time we can't wait to see you back for more we'll be taking up about a half hour of your time today this webinar is being recorded and will be available on demand after the live session all of you will receive a follow-up email after the webinar is complete with a link to access the presentation so who haven't already I suggest adding at lechery partners comm to your safe senders list to ensure you have no trouble getting an email or if you happen to find any email from us in your spam folder please mark it as a not spam we encourage you to share this within your company and professional networks to ensure the best audio quality we have all of you on listen-only mode but if you do have a question or comment go ahead and submit those in the question pane of your GoToWebinar control panel and we will be sure to follow up with you afterwards a Ledge view we have a lot of excellent resources to offer you when you're interested in learning more about our comprehensive services and customer service sales marketing and crm from a variety of ebooks infographics to blogs and case studies so after this webinar you can go and check them out at legend partners dot-com alright now that that's out of the way it's time to introduce Chad Colette today's presenter chad has prepared a great presentation for you if you've yet to hear one of his presentations it's my absolute pleasure to introduce him to you now Chad is the marketing director here at luxury partners who does many things within the digital marketing sphere day in and day out from website management to lead generation to nurture campaigns to content management and much much more and somehow he still manages to be super involved with soccer and being an all-star dad so now that you know a little more about Chad it's time to welcome him and let him get things started and teach you about what you really came here for today thank you so much Julia for that amazing introduction and I'm really excited to be here today to talk about lead nurturing and 12 steps or best practices that can set you up for success with your program it was really difficult to get it down to just 12 steps and that we only have 30 minutes means we'll lift these at a very high level don't worry I'm confident that you'll still take home quite a few concepts that you can put into play right now now building these nurture campaigns is a lot of work I'm not going to sugarcoat it and I mean it's no walk in the park and I want you to think there's these are 12 magic bullets that will just launch your program tomorrow because it's a lot of work is why so many companies either one don't do lead nurturing or to skip several steps which really affects their outcome this is evident in this statistic ing to an act on research study 61% of b2b marketers are sending all leads directly to sales and only 27% of those are actually qualified or ready to talk to sales do you see the major issues associated with this I mean these numbers don't benefit marketing sales or the company now before we dive into my 12 steps or tips as they should be known let's first take a step back and look at the lead definitions now a lead by definition is someone that you've identified or they've identified themselves as being a fit for your product or your service if we take a look at this deeper and look at marketing qualified leads as someone who has really raised their hand and identified themselves as being interested in learning more about your product or service but they might not necessarily be ready to purchase for example let's say that you work in the real estate industry and I became a lead in your CRM marketing automation system I became a lead when I filled out a form on your website indicating that I was interested in information on condos for sale and let's say Fort Myers Beach nice and warm there on the form I indicated that I had an interest in purchasing in the next two to three years unless of course winters get worse and worse we're here in Wisconsin so anyway while this is a lead for your real estate business I would not consider it a hot lead that your sales teams to be following up on right away however this is certainly a marketing qualified lead and the marketing department should have a set plan to nurture this lead with information about condos for sale until the point in time that the triggers indicate that a one-to-one conversation is appropriate and then that we can be assigned to the sales team for follow up the biggest change here is one of really discipline and patience not every prospect that contacts you is ready to buy now if you are currently sending all of your leads to the sales team and they are quickly disqualifying them because they do not have an immediate buying intent or if you have leads that have indicated that they're not ready to purchase right now what are you doing with them are you waiting for them to contact you and they're ready ready or maybe your sales team has a phone call reminders have to touch base every six months it's a mistake to ignore your prospects that are not ready to buy yet in most cases this prospect will purchase from either you or your competition within the next 24 months so don't you want to find a way to stay connected and top of mind when they're ready lead nurturing let you stay engaged now if you're new to this it's imperative that you have a strong understanding of how these leads are converted into revenue to do this you need to understand your target market what they're purchasing behaviors are and how you can solve their problem this is critical knowing which leads need to be nurtured and who is ready for a sales call well there's no exact formula organizations will have different criteria from one at MQL and an SQL are defined as the key takeaway is that it's important to have a definition within your organization rather than treating all these leads as equal by aligning your sales and marketing the focus is on high quality leads which will lead to increase conversion rates and a more efficient sales process one aspect to that alignment and step number one is knowing the difference between marketing automation and CRM and how marketing and sales utilize each of these solutions from the start marketing automation helps to foster leads and get them ready for the sales team once the lead has progressed through the bottom of the funnel and become a qualified sales lead and hopefully ultimately a customer that's when companies track their interactions through a CRM well CRM savvy evolved tremendously over the years and our nearly unlimited possibilities at its core CRM store information like how long the contact has been a lead a prospect or a customer records all their opportunities order history of purchases they've made in the past dates and notes of phone calls emails and social conversations you've had with them records inbound emails and to your sales and also your customer service teams and a whole lot more when it comes to marketing automation and CRM the choices seem endless these g2 crowd grids provide a plethora of options including leaders in marketing automation such as HubSpot act on par dot and many others on the crm side we see a lot of familiar names which include two of our favorites Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 now in some cases you'll find that CRM software has limited marketing automation features and vice-versa for marketing automation technology but to realize the full benefits of these systems most companies operate both a marketing automation system and a CRM system however the most successful companies use these two technologies together and provide an integration or connector between the two since its marketing snoring leads for the sales team we're going to focus on marketing automation today we see many companies who may have marketing automation but simply just use it for emails marketing automation is much more than just sending emails at the core it's simply technology that helps streamline automate and measure marketing activities across your channels or said another way it's the engine that ensures that the right message gets the right person at the right time thinking back to all those companies listed in the GT grid a good marketing automation solution will provide not only email marketing but things like web tracking lead scoring nurturer drip marketing campaign tracking form surveys landing pages and definitely CRM integration and much more if I need to prove my point any further here's a few relevant statistics for your marketing automation plan not going to go through all of them but I want to highlight number three it's my favorite 80% of marketing automation users see an increase in the number of leads and 77% had an increase in conversions I mean it speaks highly to the power of marketing automation and how it helps you meet and hopefully exceed your goals know when developing your lead nurturing strategy before we can start to create and send all those messages it all starts with establishing your goals at the end of the day what do you want to accomplish why are you developing a lead nurturing strategy at all I believe for most organization these high-level goals are fairly Universal when it comes to lead nurturing using lead nurturing programs will help you create better engagement with your target buyer it ultimately increase your conversion rates and turn new and even larger scale opportunities these are just a few examples of lead nurturing KPIs that you may want to consider for each campaign you're executing things like delivery open and click rates your conversion rates or number of marketing qualified leads that are generated take time as you're planning to set your goals as you execute your campaign so you can effectively measure your goals versus your actual performance indicators now if you're new to this it may be difficult to put the Mitchell goal estimate together but you know start somewhere and you can adjust as you go with some goals and KPIs in place it's time to connect with our buyer now it doesn't mean we're ready to actually jump on the keyboard and connect with them it's important to take the time upfront to develop your buyers personas remember patience is a true virtue for marketers developing buyer personas is one of the key steps that many organizations bypass because they think they know their customers ready and they don't need to do this or that it's already done building your buyers persona or profile is key in the beginning or your lead nurturing messages may miss the mark completely depending on your industry and your suite of products solutions or services you may actually have a different bio profile for each of those product segments as your business evolved over the last few years even if you've created a buyer persona in the past it's a good idea to verify that who you think is your target buyer still holds true take the time to do this exercise and don't do it in a silo engage with your sales team or others in your company that may play a critical role to learn more about your buyer the decision-maker that you ultimately want to reach what roles or titles are you seeking what is their background or demographics what are the goals their wants their needs the challenges of this buyer faces on a daily basis how can the product or service that you are offering help them directly with input from sales what are the common objections of day here in this nurturing campaign it's a prime opportunity to counter those objections early by how you position yourself as I said this step is one that far too many companies simply bypass they say up we target the VP of Sales but then fail to complete the rest of the worksheet leaving huge gaps in the marketing potential with your target buyer in mind it's time to decide how you're going to differentiate them from others in your database within your lead nurturing program and that's what leads storing comes into play starting at the top for anybody unfamiliar lead scoring is a valuable shared sales and marketing methodology for ranking leads and prospects to determine their sales readiness as you take a look at your database of leads and prospects you can create lead scoring models across kind of two main types explicit and implicit when we think about lead scoring many companies jump right to the implicit scoring and they kind of leapfrog right over explicit if you take a look at your lead list how many fit your target buyer you know that exercise we just talked about with explicit lead scoring you can score a leader a prospect based on who they are that DPS sales buyer you really want to target will get a much higher score than a sales manager or sales rep are they in the territory does the company size match your target list goes on for what implicit modeling this is a fun one how are they engaging with you are they visiting your website clicking on your emails downloading your ebooks or attending your demos but the elements just have dive deeper into each of these starting with the explicit scoring model keep in mind all this information should be in your CRM by completing your buyer profiles you know who you want to target so as leads and prospects enter your CRM and marketing automation list you can determine how interested you are in them is it worth keeping them on your list at all carefully consider all the details that are important to you and how you want to score and ultimately segment these leads and when it comes time to score these leads the points they're up to you make sure that you bear your lead scores if specific job titles or purchasing authority is key to your target buyer you can see examples here of how we score a VP a director different than a manager some people may use a scale of 1 to 50 to get to a marketing qualified lead and some may go 1 to 500 the choice is yours but don't forget to also take advantage of negative lead scoring if they don't fit your profile and this will help keep them off your radar switching gears let's quickly talk about implicit scoring models how marketers identify how engage the lead or prospect is with you with your marketing and with your content this is where your marketing automation really comes into play and all the amazing information it can provide you taking just a dozen options here here is what your scoring model could look like less points for minimal action and greater points for focused engagement completing a form spending time on a webinar like all you folks are doing going from a standalone landing page to your website to learn more as a marketer it's exciting to see that your content the use slaved over is being absorbed by your leads but just like the explicit model please we encourage you to use some negative scoring as well for those that say maybe looking for a job working for your companies versus with your company and with that lead scoring in place this really gives us a lot of options to segment our audiences as we build our lead nurturing programs but there's so many ways to segment your database it's impossible to list them all we can break down into four main categories geographic demographic behavioral and psychographic now these are just a few ways that you can segment your list based on each category and these can also often are combined let's say you're looking for a target buyer on the west coast who is a VP of Marketing and is actively engaged in your content this will allow you to personalize the experience for this specific segment you're targeting with the lead nurturing and it kind of goes without saying these days but let's say it anyway your lead nurturing should not be the one-size-fits-all approach doing that will be reflected in the results you experience and to personalize that experience we need content that is important to them IT managers and sales managers have different needs they have different challenges and they have different motivations the content that you choose to send should be aligned to the specific target audience you're trying to reach as well as the sales stage that they are currently in and the sales stage that you're trying to move them towards now here's a small sample list of content that may be relevant to the nurture campaigns you're building what assets do you currently have give a list of your assets you have ebooks promotional videos webinars or case studies and do they relate to your target audience your target buyer do they relate to the nurture campaign you want to run do they relate to the ultimate goal of you have are these assets dated are they still relevant it's time to take stock in what you have so roll up your sleeves and dig into your content library or realize that you need a content library at this point you need to know what you have to work with this simple exercise will help identify gaps in content and may affect the timeline that you release your nurture campaign if you needed time to develop additional resources knowing your target buyer and how they like to observe content is key and having that content contain the right information to help them overcome their challenges position your product your solution and have a strong call to action developing content scares many people but having these assets will definitely set you apart from your competition how many times have you heard someone say oh I'd love to help but I'm definitely not a writer many people think that creating all these assets is time-consuming and expensive well it definitely can be but it doesn't have to be and there's so many companies that do webinars every single month but they don't have a blog infographics ebooks or promo videos the content has already been created in your webinar for example alleged you we've taken a single hour-long webinar we've turned it into a 70 book series with accompanying infographics promo videos blogs and I think thousands of social media posts and that's all just from taking content that we already had created in place and turned around and the turnaround that we did on that was faster than you can imagine as you analyze the content you need to know if you have the right pieces to match the buyers journey that you want to create for your target buyer now this is a great infographic for marketing automation provider act on that I just love to share it outlines a content strategy based on the sales stage as you move your leads down the funnel from the awareness or attract stage all the way to marketing qualified and beyond as you assess your content and determine what you need the content should map to the buyer stage and help bring them down the marketing funnel again these stages may not map specifically to you but it's a good check against your current process or a guideline as one is developed at that top of the funnel at the awareness or track stage you want to focus on the problem and pain points that buyers are experiencing do that through social media surveys blog posts infographics and simple webinars as their lead score increases may get interested focus on your solution by educating the leads in prospect with contents like ebooks checklist videos some events both live and on-demand webinars and as they move to the evaluation or the consideration stage show them what it's like to work with you if you offer them demos trials case studies or product or solution comparisons as you make them marketing qualified lead and get ready to pass them along to sales but at this point marketing's job is not done as sales engages with them marketing can continue to provide content in that purchase phase to validate their decision and with additional content like more webinars and as they move to the post / or repurchase stage using content it will keep them up to date with your products and solution and it will also assure user adoption with continuous learning and loyalty programs now one example alleges you we hold monthly CRM user group webinars and in those we focus on a specific training topic each month and kind of field how-to questions this keeps users continuously learning engage with the product engage with less view as well as learning about all the new enhancements that are coming they can take advantage of and how less you can be assistance to them as your leader prospect or even your customers move through the buyers journey they will continue to engage they'll continue to increase their lead scores and keep in mind lead scores for prospects and customers as well which we discussed earlier segment into newly engaged groups and get closer to being marketing qualified and sales ready and not to get off-topic but this just doesn't include new leads like I said automated campaigns have a wide range of uses to keep your contacts engage with you sales ready prospects new and existing customers and many others now that you have all the moving pieces it's time to start drafting your lead nurturing program and start building a relationship with your prospective customers the look and the feel of the technology will differ a bit but for most parts we'll accomplish the same things as you build the emails need it for your nurture and the buyers journey get a few best practices to keep in mind as you develop your automated campaign the actual setup will vary based on the marketing automation solution they're using but you will need to create their email for each of these campaigns and it all starts with the subject line I mean that's what's going to get your email opened a few best practices to consider our avoiding keywords associated with spam email like using words free or help or percent off or sale did you know that 69% of emails are flagged as spam just because of the subject line you want to include content of interest inside your subject line when appropriate for example if you're creating your September sales promotional email you might want to stay in the subject line what it contains us different from August you want to keep it short both the subject line and the body of your email message unless you do know that your target Myer may be response to attacks and really avoid tricking the reader into opening your email it's not going to build trust let them know what the email contains and what they can expect and of course a be testing that your email subject line is a must but a be testing goes way beyond just testing your email subject lines as we get deeper into step 9 think about your from address will your target buyer be more receptive to receive the email from your company or from a person test the body content including opening lines use of different graphics and calls to action the day and time that you send your emails however many marketing automation solutions now and even some CRM solutions are using predictive analytics to send emails that the optimal time your recipients may have the best chance to engage with them and it goes beyond email because your emails only do so much it is rare these days that someone will immediately pick up the phone based on an email sent many times they're sent to a landing page typically with a gated form to gain access to some of your awesome content similar to email a be test your landing page copy your headlines your graphics and also your call-to-action and for your forms utilize your marketing automation technology to pre-fill forms making it easier to complete those forms or better yet use progressive port for profiling that will keep your questions to a minimum as it only asks the information you've not collected yet depending on your audience one method may work better than the other but you want to trust the results even if it crushes your spirits a little bit because you know that email or landing page that you thought would just be an absolute winner and it just didn't make the cut now in order to even get our emails read we also need to make sure that we get the cadence right here's a few basic best practices to consider first don't overdo it based on your target buyer your promotion your industry and other components you need you have to find the right mix of message to send and the frequency odds are people don't want to wake up to one of your emails every single morning if you see a spike in your unsubscribe rate you may be sending two in emails spaced them out a long time for them to digest and react to your content select the date and time you want someone to receive your first message if you bypass this step and they get added to a marketing campaign let's say at 1 a.m. on a Saturday night that could trigger the first message you need to know your buyers and when they typically open and engage with your emails for instance for b2b marketers open rates are typically the highest mid mornings on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday but you also need to consider factors like the cadence that they'll be receiving multiple emails over a shorter period of time consider tracking and using send features that include time zones if you're on the East Coast and you have customers on the west coast or internationally consider when they will receive this email sending it at 9 a.m. your time doesn't always work for all your leads and prospects and as I mentioned in the a/b testing you want to make sure your messages are going out on dates and times that are optimal not going to be open but have engagement and action now this is a few years old but testing never gets old as you can see here in overwhelming 68 percent of digital marketers rated the ability to test new campaigns as having the greatest impact on their marketing efforts the world is moving faster than ever and buyers have so much more information these days and marketers have to rely on testing to ensure that they stay out of the curve and while we want success we will have failures but we don't want lost leads so we need a process to close that loop you worked really hard on this nurture but the fact is that not everyone's going to engage with you they may not open your emails they may not click on your emails and they may not advancer the buyers journey as you'd planned once elite finishes with a specific nurture program they're often left on the cold neglected and lost just cluttering up your marketing lists try pushing them into a new nurture with you calls to action evaluate and see if they were maybe miss segmented and the content didn't resonate or maybe it's time to move on and you just have to deactivate that lead any way you decide to go make sure you have a strategy where non-moving leads go after their nurture and if they're stuck to one spot the funnel know at the beginning we started setting our goals as you create and execute your lead nurturing program you want to continually monitor and measure the results make changes as needed based on what worked and what didn't and yes you will have nurture failures along with many successes the key is to measure learn and adjust off a bull measure what goals you did yet or you exceed it how did that happen which ones did you fall short on and can you pinpoint why that happened was there a tactic for a piece of content that worked well that really surprised you or did you encounter any gaps in the experience that you need to adjust and what questions came up and maybe these are questions that are either internally or externally that you can build on if you are not on board before with marketing automation campaigns which I'm guessing you work because you're on this webinar you can see that lead nurturing emails get four to ten times the response rate compared to those standalone email blasts I mean how do we know this we measure the results now I'm at my time limit so I hope these 12 steps tips or best practices however you want to call them can help guide you they can get you excited and confident about lead nurturing now as I mentioned there's no silver bullet no magic 8-ball but just hard work to pull it all together into execute with success but if done correctly the reward can be tremendous as a recap here in my 12 areas that you need to make sure that you include when you're developing your lead nurturing strategy in your program and I know I mentioned this a few in the beginning and throughout but please don't do it in a silo use your lead nurturing program to create a strong bond between sales and marketing and don't skip any of these areas you'll only be skipping out on potential revenue all right as I said I'm at my time limit but I appreciate you spending it with me I could have named at least probably another 12 tips or lead nurturing and maybe you have to do another webinar to follow up on those but take those and use those and be the best you can with them if you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me all my contact information is on your screen and yes you'll all be getting an email for me after the the event as well so you'll have it in your inbox so now with that I want to turn it back over to Julia to close it out and give you some of the great content and resources and let you partners all right thanks for all that wonderful information Chad lead nurturing is such a powerful strategy that so many organizations can leverage to produce more effective outcomes and I know our audience has many actionable takeaways to apply once they log off today but before you hit that button I have some awesome things to share with you if you'll give me one more minute of your time we have published a few new ebooks this month recently about applying inbound and outbound marketing principles for your organization strategies and have many recent ebooks on the concepts of lead nurturing lead scoring sales and marketing alignment the power of marketing automation how to select the right marketing automation system for you and if you can believe it even more than that so I encourage you to go to ledge view partners comm and download your own complimentary copies of all those that interests you finally if you missed it in my intro we did record today's presentation and we'll be sending you all a link to access this webinar on demand you can go ahead and share that with in your professional networks and that email is going to be coming from Chad quit with any questions you have that didn't get answered during today's presentation you can also expect a follow up on those all right that's all today folks thanks for joining us subscribe to our blog to keep updated with future webinars and we'll be back soon have a great day