Empower Your Life Sciences Business with airSlate SignNow's Lead Nurturing Funnel

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hi I want to welcome everybody to the webinar today we've given it a little bit extra time for people to go ahead and get on the webinar and so let's just jump in and get started this is the webinar three roadblocks to lead nurturing success a little bit about janu janu has a the most comprehensive and affordable marketing automation and web marketing system available to small and mid-sized businesses we make it easy even for single person marketing departments to achieve phenomenal growth by effectively capturing more leads guiding them through the buying process building relationships and converting them into customers that allows you to grow your revenue agenda for today's webinar this is what we're going to be covering we're just going to look really quickly at the current state of lead nurturing we're going to identify the three roadblocks that really do hold up your lead nurturing effectiveness then we're going to talk about designing and creating content pathways that produce results and layering that content in the nurturing sequences that can be triggered in specific ways and you'll start to see the flexibility of this as we go and then I also will be talking about you know how do you actually identify your most responsive and profitable leads how do you do that so we're going to touch on that as well also after this we will be following up with specific information we're going to cover some stuff quickly and we can get into more detail after the webinar through follow-up emails that we send out and whatnot for the things that you might want to make sure that you get what you want just put a question in or let me know that you would like to receive it and you'll have all of our contact information at the end of the at the end of the webinar all right so let's look at the current state of lead nurturing there was a study in august and sep tember this year from b2b magazine one of their most recent headlines from that study is lead gen adoption strong but nurturing remains a challenge and they reveal that less than half of marketers engaged in lead generation activities have a lead nurturing process that supports those lead generation efforts and that led me to sort of scratch my head and say wow this is something that we really need to help people get their arms around and so really this webinar comes at a good time the biggest challenge with lead nurturing is developing appropriate content for each stage of the buying process and buyer persona and if you have multiple products in multiple personas it just starts to multiply from there and then it looks like a daunting task so you have people doing basically batch and blast emails for their nurturing programs and calling that lead nurturing and so what we want to do is is is really look at what does it take to provide you know to really build out your lead nurturing in a way that works if we look at the content marketing institute study from this past August basically people are talking about you know content marketing surges content marketing comes of age and of course I don't know if any of you have been privy to this but over the past I would say four years or more it's become more and more and more of a den that you know with the advent of the Internet and the change in the way that buyers are really engaging in the process of research and understanding what they need and that sort of thing content is king and eighty percent of companies by the end of twenty thirteen eighty percent of companies will be fully engaged in content marketing you already see people engaged with blogging and social media and all of those sorts of things but really content is coming of age and understanding how to create good content is really important interestingly enough for those that are engaged in content marketing today only thirty-six percent of them report that their content marketing is actually effective so we want to talk about that because uh what we're going to share with you today is a process for really looking at how to build the content what we'll call content conversion pathways and and why that appears to be missing right now but it really is something that you can leverage to move forward in your in your marketing and online marketing efforts both from a lead gen perspective and from and from a nurturing perspective because lead nurturing really does require good content but not just content so on we go now content what most people say is that content marketing is viewed as having the most significant impact on lead gen 51-percent of marketers see it as really a significant impact on Legion and their legion activities have increased with their content marketing efforts and their thought leadership content and things like that while only twenty-nine percent sock content is having a significant impact on sales results so there's a disconnect somewhere so if you look at lead gen effectiveness at the top of the funnel marketers are focusing on creating and generating contents indicating that content getting it out to their target audience and it is generating more leads it's working but you've got to ask yourself once you have a lead what do you do then now over half of the marketers who engage in lead gen have no lead nurturing process to follow up with leads so if we look at the top of the funnel you get them in but at the top with your great educational content your information and that sort of thing but leads have no one guiding their way through their buying journey there's no progression it's just a bunch of content there's no purpose to that leads engagement with you they consume your educational and helpful content and they could spin and consume that for a long time the problem is is that for most of you I hear this all the time is where are my leads in their buying process I have no idea so leads may continue to consume your content but without any guidance or any purpose to that engagement they just spin and rotate at the top of the funnel and every now and then you get lucky with somebody who says hey can I have a conversation with you or they take some action that they've decided you know it that they're ready to take so I think there's this this interesting place we find ourselves in we've been told and it's been hammered into us at keynotes at conferences and and by the thought leaders and the and the consultants in the space that you've got to educate and inform stop selling stop selling start helping right and you've got to educate educate educate inform inform inform and so there we are creating all of this content and we're just informing and informing and educating but we've left out an important ingredient and that important ingredient we're going to get to hear but we've left out an important ingredient that makes all the difference so that leads us really the the place of not having any nurturing and not guiding our leads what do we do well there's a lot a lot of marketers a lot of companies that I talked to they generate leads and then they drop all of them into their newsletter subscriber list so as they find new people and they mind them and they look and they work on their content generation they might have content generation that that that leads to additional leads coming in but then you know maybe they put them into a telemarketing loop to try and set an appointment and if that doesn't work then they drop them into their newsletter subscriber group and then they send out the same message to all their leads until the lead context summer ops out so that's an easy way to go and if you're using a traditional email marketing provider email service provider they're their metrics and tracking is insufficient to do anything much more than that so over time you're just doing batch and blast email so forty percent of marketers report poor database accuracy followed by lack of adequate technology as roadblocks a generating effective lead nurturing so you have to ask yourself what is the kind of information that you're asking of leads when you do capture their information are you asking for way too much and you're getting a bunch of bad data are you asking for way too little or you know and no way to grow that over time what you know about them you know with marketing automation you can ask for what's appropriate so when you walk into a party and you shake someone's hand and you tell them your name hi I'm Kim and then as you talk with them you reveal a little bit more about yourself but you don't just go in and say hi I'm Kim I live in you know Minneapolis and here's my address and I have three kids and two dogs and bubble you just don't you don't go through that process right up front it's something that takes time yet as marketers RIT group is putting together our lead capture forms in many cases when I talk to companies they say well we need to get all this information and they want address and phone number and everything else right up front first contact with a lead first lead gen opportunity and so you end up wondering why you have bad data because people they're not going to tell you the truth but they want your content they'll just lie so what you want is you want to encourage them to engage with you from where they are when you then capture those leads and you just plop them into a newsletter bin then what you're doing is you're over time all you can do is you can send generic messages out to them you can send high-level messages but you can't really ever get deep and as leads go through the buying process at the top of the funnel maybe they want that more general information that really does identify some problems or some opportunities or things like that but as leads progress with you they get more specific in the questions that they have in the kinds of things they want to know and so you've got to understand how that lead progresses and guide them along that path so what you want you want to go beyond click level metrics and we at Janu with our tools you have the full ability to track everything only does when they engage with you the full activity stream so that you can see this is how many page views they got an email here they click through that email they went to these other pages beyond that click this is what they actually did so that no matter where you are with deciding how you're going to do lead nurturing you don't have to necessarily think it all through upfront but if you have really good metrics that show you depth of engagement and interest you can start to design content that's going to hit because you know what people are all timeo interested in so let's take an example this is an actual example of what I receive from one vendor between april twenty fourth and May thirteenth all of a 20-day period I receive how to get them emails and these are the headlines of the emails of subject lines how to get the most out of your business blog the science of lead generation learn the science of analytics website maximum website maximization for maximum lead slow learning SEO from the experts mobile marketing done right your guide to video marketing turn prospects into evangelists with social media so I got these and it didn't matter if I was interested in getting the most out of my business blog and I clicked through I didn't get more information about business blogging I got learned the science of analytics next so I got these in a 20-day period and if that isn't drinking from a fire hose I don't know what is because I know as a marketer all of these things are important but it's like everything is a one-off hit so so they were actually just batching blast emails and very high level surface content which is fine but there's no clear pathway for me to further engage with this organization so I can consume any of these but I don't I don't get more on a subject they don't say wow this person is really interested in business blogging let's take and think of all the things that you got to know about blogging they have your blog be successful so you could really go into depth there in ways that are bite-size and spoon-feed that and achieve an outcome and guide people the content doesn't guide leads and that's your next roadblock you're not taking people into their buying process then they scatter in your funnel there's no clear pathway okay so then the third roadblock you can't identify your most responsive leads you sending emails out people are clicking through who are your most responsive leads where are they in the buying process most people I talked you don't have any idea you know how do you know a lead is ready to pass to sales to have they downloaded a white paper an e-book sometimes one download of a white paper and you're getting a call back from a sales person and it was the first time you ever had any interaction with that company and the thing is is that that that's just such an expensive way to go from a from a sales perspective to take every inbound lead and try and touch them when the majority with a considered sale or purchase requires nine touches before they're actually even may be ready to talk to somebody so people attend the webinar they look at your pricing page maybe they have several visits to your website in a week does any of that qualify them if these are things that people act on that people take and say that leads ready for sales and it's the kintu leads coming in through marketing and just tossing them over the wall to sales and marketing is got to do a better job so how does how does you know how do you identify what level of engagement is necessary because quantity of consumption doesn't identify where they are in their buying process if i met your site three times in a week you may be answering a question and i may be curious but i might be just be doing research or just kind of be about a subject but it doesn't mean that i'm ready to move forward yet what we want to do is we want to design content conversion pathways now there's a lot in this slide and this is a high-level introduction so we're going to go a bit fast through this will follow up with more information on this exactly for people who are interested but there are four conversations that are important that you have to cover most with the newsletter and you drop them into your newsletter you know deal that's a stay in touch conversation so you're only dealing with this one layer of stay in touch conversation okay but what you want to know is that there's there's four conversations that you got to cover they have to be addressed when you're designing a conversion pathway with your content that will guide leads through their buying journey add value and allow you to understand where your leads are so it's not just about having educational content it's about what's your goal what's your endgame what do you want in you know how are they going to move through this process to they become a client or not a client of yours so you've got a design content that addresses each of the stages so I've just got four stages here very simple you could make it more complex you've got early stage where it's status quo and you're trying to see if you know become a priority in their mind then you've got research or investigation where they're going to go through their process and have their questions and you've got them forming an opinion what really is the the vendor for them or what really are the issues they need to address and how did that how does that need to be addressed and finally you've got the decision to go with you or go with a different vendor so so those of you that are just putting everybody into a one newsletter you're just addressing the stay in touch conversation with your leads but you're not necessarily addressing these others in a way that takes them through it in a process in a systematic pathway so how do you do that well you start with your goal so so I don't think that helping and selling are mutually exclusive and I don't think that our leads want them to be but I don't think you can just toss sell you know by now by now by now by now sign up now sign up now sign up now messages to your leads and have that be effective you've got to help them so if you look at it start with your goal what do you want leads to do right before they become a customer what happens do they meet with you that they start a trial do they determine you know you you know what do they do they download you know some software at what so you want to determine the outcome you're after and have that be that goal right before they become a customer what is it that you really want your leads to do identify your end goal you know do you want them to ask for a conversation or median etc and then this next thing is really look and ask yourself what benefits do your customers enjoy from working with you and stated from their perspective because we talked to people all the time and will hear the goal stated as the benefit that you determined in your marketing and it's a statement about you it's not a statement about them so if you deliver that benefit that you say you deliver what did what do your leads what does your your customer actually get to enjoy so you want to identify that increase new customers by thirty percent for example or increase qualified appointment to customer conversion by X percent or you know increased higher Mart increased margins from their billable from their billable time from their billable hours what is it what are those benefits and then ask yourself how do you initially engage leads how do they find out about you do you speak or do you give a webinar do you you know how is it do they find you inbound marketing through searching and Google and they come into your page how to leeds find you do buy lists and then send out emails or do you do you know sort of email promotions with other people's lists do you add have banner ads you know how do people find you and how do they engage with you and then if you think about that so there's any number of ways they could find you what's a headline born out of the benefit identified in step 2 that might engage your target audience what's it what would that be and then following on that because a lot of us we develop headlines and we come up with content and all of that but that content we come up with gets consumed then there is no follow-on call to action that we request there's nothing that we point them to except for we get lazy and say contact us for a you know contact us for more information or call us for a quote and so we always go back to those and they're not bad to have as it may be a secondary or tertiary call to action but what's a call to action that moves people forward so we're going to go through an example but I just want you to think about the high level that and that call to action correlates with the problem or pain that that the benefit and the headline addresses so you want to think that through and and if you don't so it's almost like okay what do I want them to do out of this out of this content or from consuming this content what do I want them to do and if they don't do that what else do I want them to do so you want to come up with two or three different options for them that could maybe locate your lead at some other place on their buying journey for instance so that you could you can be appropriate to that and then six is well what after all of this what would be the next interaction that's going to move your lead closer to your goal you know your end goal what was that Angola meeting starting a free trial what was that so what's going to move the league closer while still providing Val you to them and helping them think about a benefit opportunity a pain point you know what is that so you think about that and you just keep cycling through this all the way down along the cycle so let's look at this this is an example of a Content conversion pathway it's a professional services marketing consulting firm the pain that their customers experience is price pressure so always having to lower their prices or be more competitive on their prices which reduces their margins and the benefit that they provide to their customers that their customers enjoy that work with them are actually higher margins so their customers are less price sensitive or influenced by having to reduce their pricing and the end goal that they've got is they want to provide a free assessment so it's some sort of a meeting okay so here's an easy way to start so what would be that that thing in the door well one headline could be realized higher margins through effective branding and the call to action would be download this our free branding checklist so that you can walk them through how to how to do that how to evaluate where they are right now and and where they could go that might help them realize higher margins the second thing is you know check out a video of our partner answering common questions about branding now if we go back up to if we go back up I'm just going to go up a few slides back we go back up here and we say questions well early on in the stage you have high-level questions high level questions that could be answered and if you know what those questions are you could come up with different ways to answer them you also have an emotional conversation around you know where are the emotions at will in the early stage leads want to find out who are you to work with are you kind of pushy are you are you somebody that that you know I like and they're just looking you know when you walk into a store and you're just checking things out a sales person comes up and they say can I help you and you say no I'm just looking thanks so that's what they're doing they're not particularly committed to the process of changing anything but they will examine high level problems can get their attention so you can you can look at problems and identify them you can illumine some pain point or you can create some hope or aspiration so so you want to look at that early on you know what are those things and develop content that's going to help so check out our video of our partner answering common questions about branding could be one that's early on but moves people along you know starts to answer questions learn how branding increases your margins we have a webinar you can and if it's after the fact you can actually say that you know watch the webinar that we did on this and they can watch a replay then you have a case study that they can take a look at that's actually shows how one of your customers went through this process and actually achieved higher margins and moved where they might have been in price you know price sensitivity before now they're actually realizing higher profits as a as a result of more effective branding then are you stuck about branding because you need buy-in so now look at where we are so again if we go back up to this process you're in this place where you might be oops you might be wanting you might be right in here where you've got questions that are specific you know their specific about that opportunity they're like well you know I would love to be able to move forward with branding but how do I get buy-in to get the dollars or the budget to do that so you're looking at are you stuck because you need buy-in will share this video of our client telling your partner's why this is important so it's our client it's one of someone that that that is going to share their experience of working with with this firm you know so that's what you're going to have so that's like a client talking to a client that can be super powerful but you're now starting to build trust you're starting to show through that through case studies and through that call to action they're further down the pathway somebody like this this question isn't one that would be way up here at the beginning it's much further down the road and then as you move into you know right before somebody moves into wanting to engage with you they start to have more fear so they fear bad decisions it's an emotion when they start to form an opinion and then start to decide while I'm going to make a commitment I want to make sure I don't make the wrong commitment or I don't commit to the wrong vendor or make the wrong selection so I've got to understand you know where that person is and if I can if I can do that then I can start to I can see that there are very specific questions that start to come up right in here before i'm going to make a decision so that fear kind of raises its head is a good thing it kind of tells you where people are because the up in here there's no fear early up in the stage you're just doing research there's nothing at stake here but as you get further down there's a lot at stake and so you want to be able to address those conversations and then are you wondering and they could be any number of questions that would be here well sign up for our free assessment take our free assessment let us help you because now you've got some trust and now you can see that that's the next obvious pathway so now now there's a whole pathway and it delivered really good value but it also accomplished a result for your marketing for your selling process so let's layer this into a nurturing sequence what are we looking at in terms of that well now you could come up with this is one pain to one benefit you could come up with many different benefits that your customers enjoy maybe you'd come up with five to seven benefits maybe it's 325 benefits but their core benefits and around that there might be several different pain points and as you come up with these pathways you can take the beginning part you know what is it that starts that conversation and you could even do a sequence of just those right and as soon as somebody then takes your call to action boom they click into what would then be a follow-up sequence down that path where they've shown interest so you can combine these in many different ways but look at the way that I can then say okay if I start on day zero and maybe I'm going to do my day zero is actually a speaking gig so I'm going to be speaking at an event and at that event i'm going to offer people there download to download their free running checklist and that's going to be my call to action out of my event right or I could say this could be an email maybe I have an email list and i'm going to email this out to everybody on that list and there are my target audience and that's going to have a call to action and everybody that clicks through and takes that call to action will then be entered into this sequence I could have inbound marketing where people are looking at price pressure maybe there's some keywords in there about four you know professional service organizations and how do they contend with that and maybe I've got a search engine optimized page and I'm going to bring them into that I'm going to buy some AdWords bring them right into a landing page that answers this question and then through there they're going to take those who sign up and take that call to action I'm gonna so it's going to be a lead gen and it's going to trigger right into my my follow-ups okay so i can then also have cross promote so i can go and offer them something that actually takes them to another one of my of my pathways right so I'm only going to have so many pathways but once I know those pathways there's all kinds of different benefits and pains and questions that come up and so now I've got this really focused way to generate and develop content and different ideas around what we can do whether those are videos or webinars or podcasts or blog posts or download checklists or reports or ebooks they can manifest themselves in many different formats and I can utilize those formats in different ways and from different angles and for different audiences okay so but you can layer this in and you currently talk about okay well what would that look like and you can see here where we've kind of just done an even distribution out over approximately a month period but you can you can look at it is it one a week I mean one of the things that we look at and I've said this before and this why it's not in this in this webinar because it's in other presentations that I've done it's a frequency with which you would do nurturing and so we've got you know there is a there is there's a couple of different things you can look at on our site even that better presentations that walk you right through how frequently to nurture leads we think about the Fibonacci sequence a lot because as human beings when we're really into students something we want to know about it right now but then there's this other kind of thing so so that's how this layers right in and then you start to see well is this a landing page and and you know how are we going to do that you know once they're on here is at our YouTube channel and we're going to pull it through on a landing page and you know and there's all kinds of ways that you can then promote your your your your content and guide people right into where you know where they are guide them right into your pathways and then take them by the hand and lead them right through till you have that meeting or that end goal gets realized that is the beginning of what your sales process is if you will so now let's talk about how do we identify your most responsive so again pulling reports that allow you to see most responsive leads based on email clicks page user activity score is easy with marketing automation tools like Janu has and other market animation tools it is very difficult to do this with an email service provider like a constant contact or a vertical response or anything like that it's really hard to do because they don't track the nearly what you need to track to know where leads are and who's most responsive but if you can pull e-toll reports that are easily that just show your most responsive leads and give you different ways to slice and dice you're in a different position so if i can take information and understand and sort based on different things i can start to see who are some of my most active and most responsive leads and then i can click through and actually look at a specific lead at their entire engagement profile with me so i can actually start to gauge that and i can make that information available to my sales team so that they can design their interactions as well because if I design these pathways so let's just back up just a little bit if I design these pathways and at every point I also offer a free assessment so that people can can jump to where they might want to be so I may move you know offer calls the action that moved people further along in the process then I I want to make sure that if I'm gonna hand something so a lead that I've been doing this with off to sales I want to make sure that sales is going to pick up in a in a contiguous way in a way that makes sense based on what that leaders experience from us to date so I have got to be coordinated with sales in order for what is happening here in marketing and what we're doing to build this conversation and to guide the lead so that when it hands over to sales that they actually pick it up and it is a seamless experience from that leads perspective because they're experiencing your organization so what does that have to look like so i want to be able to identify who are those people that are really likely to be ready for a sales conversation and i want to be able to hand those leads off to to sales in ways that sales can really forward so i want to be able to arm sales with the information that they need not just here's a lead for you but i want to be able to arm them with the information that says that sales can look at and say wow this these are the things that they have gone down this was the pathway that they that they were engaging us through so this is what we're going to go forward with and this is how we can engage them and find out more and take this forward to produce that result so that's the so you want to have easy ways to take all that data and track so an example and I did a I did a seminar for the digital marketing summit in late-september that talked about targeted and segmented email marketing and what it did was it looked at it from the very beginning standpoint you know you you have your emails you may be just doing batch and blast emails that's what you've got but if you can get metrics that go beyond the click then you can you can actually start to look at how leads are engaging so I'll take an example that's actually a school a continuing education organization out of Virginia that took or had emails and they would just send out a mostly a batch and blasts sort of an email to everybody letting them know a new term it started and it's time to register for classes and what they found if they would have just looked at the metrics so they have personal enrichment classes and they have professional development classes and if they had they always thought that professional development and personal enrichment were two separate animals you never mix them now they did a test in a big email send they had an open spot in their email down in the lower right corner and they basically put and it was all professional development classes but they put a personal enrichment class they actually put in a sewing class and what they found interestingly enough they weren't expecting it to do anything but what they found was a lot of it was the second most clicked length in the email the second most click link yet nobody registered into a sewing class now email service providing the the metrics that you would get from your email provider on that that they had gotten in the past from email providers would say wow that was popular content that was the click Wow a lot of people interested in that when they could spot check and go further and deeper and follow the pathways that those that that those leads had taken through that click what they discovered was well nobody registered and sewing guess what they had registrations into much more expensive professional development courses like a grant writing class so instead of a twenty-dollar registration into a sewing class I got a three-thousand-dollar registration into a grant writing program and it all started from somebody clicking through a sewing class so they started to say well wait a minute maybe our assumption that nobody clicks through you know that that personal enrichment and professional development are mutually exclusive well maybe personal enrichments a pathway to professional development and maybe we can actually leverage that in ways that a will fill our personal enrichment classes but B also help enrollment in our professional development classes and understanding who's most responsive and what they're doing so you can follow up specifically and find patterns so that's what you get when you're looking at this from a more holistic standpoint when you actually have the available metrics that take you way beyond just one campaign or one email or just emails to see web visits to see a downloads to see the ways that they're engaged with you what are the visits in between the emails that they're getting that they have you know how are the way what are all the ways they're consuming your marketing materials so that leads you too much more effective content development strategies as well so let's see if we've got any questions today so so far I've got no questions coming in so if there's no questions coming in I don't really have a whole bunch more content I wanted to talk to you about how you can really think about map through content that takes leads by the hand and not only provides that educational value but also provides you know that can engage but also provides and meets with your expectations in terms of what you're out to accomplish as a marketer all right well I want to thank you very much for being on the call and again if there's any questions you can email me directly kim at janu calm you can follow me on twitter at kim all be i'm also out on google+ and you can follow me there are also on linkedin and I'd be happy to connect with any of you there so at this time I want to thank you so much for your listening and for tuning in here's to more effective lead nurturing you