Lead nurturing is the process of reaching out to your potential customers on a consistent basis across multiple channels to build a conversation with them, engage them and build trust that makes them think about your company and offering when they are ready to buy. Once it is conceptually understood, the next big challenge is how to create lead nurturing campaigns and messages that truly feel like a conversation and not just another keyword-filled marketing message or a press release-like hyperbole.

Its easier said than done, I know, but here are a set of ideas that can help you to ensure your messages feel conversational:

• Use a language that is more like an email conversation rather than like a press release
• Write about relevant industry news and updates that helps make the message feel like a discuss of that recent news update
• Use a personal tone and touch in the language you use
• Using a lead nurturing application, construct messages that relate to the potential customers’ previous activity with your messages or website so it feels personalized
• Structure your email, direct mail and telemarketing follow-ups so they center around a particular topic area to create a multi-channel conversation
• Structure successive lead nurturing messages to be related and building on previous messages to create a conversation that engages potential customers

These are just a few ideas that we have experimented at Nurture and I will update this message with more as we find newer ones that work. In the meantime, I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts and ideas on what has worked for you so all our readers can benefit from it.

B2B marketing and lead generation has becoming increasingly challenging over the past 5 years. While marketers have employed a range of initiatives to drive demand, including trade shows, direct mail, email marketing, webinars and search marketing, buyers have evolved further to block out these messages to focus on what’s most important to them. Yet, the marketing tactics have stayed almost the same without much evolution. Here are a few reasons that current one-way mass marketed messages do not and will not deliver results:

1. Buyers rarely pick up their desk phones and are extremely difficult to reach on the phone.
2. Buyers buy only when they have a need. Else they have learnt to shut off their minds to any and all of your reachouts.
3. Buyers do a lot of their homework online and know a lot more about their exact requirements, their options and what they are exactly looking for. So they end up responding to only those messages that hit their focused requirements. Today marketers don’t know much about their buyers based on one-way feedback-less outreach marketing.
4. Buyers are looking for sources that educate and inform them about a solution that they are looking for and tend to turn off pure salesy messages.
5. Buyers respond much better when they know that you know their specific requirements and are helping them with a personalized approach.

Here are a the core elements of what you need your marketing to be like going forward:

1. You must identify and connect wtih your buyers in a way that they trust you and look forward to hearing from you.
2. You must have a systematic way of understanding the spectrum of problems that your buyers face and how to educate them about potential ways of resolving those. You need a suite of education and information tools like webinars, white papers, case studies and industry research that helps your buyers decide what to do about their pain points.
3. You must have a system for personalizing the interaction with every buyers and to treat them separately.
4. You must have a system for tracking and measuring your buyers’ response to your messages and interaction to create a feedback look to help you understand your buyers.
5. Lastly, you must leverage the feedback to further personalize the interaction with every buyers as you hand hold them towards a qualified lead and revenue.

This, in essence, is the core of automated lead nurturing that creates personalized lead activity streams for every buyer. Most importantly, atleast a percentage of buyers will be well engaged with you via this process and will turn to you when they are ready to buy. And since you are essentially in continuous, incremental and presonalized touch with the buyer, you are their easy first choice vendor. While they have been early solutions in this market, I believe, automated lead nurturing will evolve rapidly in the coming years and will define the furture of B2B marketing and sales.