Content marketing is one of the best ways to put your lead nurturing on autopilot and guide your potential customers through the buyer’s journey while you sleep.
Lead nurturing is the process of cultivating relationships with potential customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey – whether or not they are ready to buy from you yet.
Here’s how you can use content marketing to make this process as effective and easy as possible!
Why Content Marketing Works for Lead Nurturing
Research by Aberdeen Group shows that it takes 10 marketing “touches” to successfully take a new lead through the buyer’s journey.
If you can create content for each of the main touchpoints of a typical buyer’s journey, you will be well on your way to turning a new website visitor into a paying customer.
To understand why you have to think about the way customers typically do research online.
A customer usually starts their research by looking up more information about the problem they are having. This is often called the “Awareness” stage of the buyer’s journey.
Once they have enough information about it, they will look up potential solutions (“Consideration” stage) and evaluate their options (“Decision” stage).
If you can create valuable, high-quality content that answers their questions and showcases the advantages of your products in a non-salesy way, you will get those 10 marketing “touches” with ease.
It is much more effective than repeatedly shoving a “Buy” button in their face – and it costs you way less!
Content marketing has been shown to cost 62% less than traditional marketing, for example, paid advertising.
5 Tips for Using Content Marketing for Lead Nurturing
1. Understand how content maps onto your buyer’s journey
Understanding your buyer’s journey will help you create content pathways that lead your potential customers from one stage to another.
Think about it: what content assets can be used to lead your customer from awareness to consideration, to decision? What content assets are you missing?
How can you adjust the messaging in those assets to make the journey from one stage to the next as smooth as possible?
2. Use lead scoring
You can use lead scoring to understand where each prospect is in their buyer’s journey.
You can attach numerical values to consumer behaviors. For example, how much time they spend on your site, which pages they have already visited, and if they have engaged with your brand on social media.
By using lead scoring properly, you will be able to determine when a lead is ready for you to approach them and trigger a sales call at an appropriate time.
3. Structure your website with content in mind
Structure your website with lead nurturing and content marketing in mind from the get-go.
You want your website to lead the customer from one stage of the buyer’s journey to the next without requiring any additional assistance from you or your employees.
Put up strategic landing pages with clear calls-to-action. Share relevant content on your blog. And provide a “Resource” page for potential customers to check out.
4. Use email content effectively
Email can be a great way to deliver the right content, to the right people, at the right time.
Your lead must
Make sure you segment your list as much as you can. That can
Email is not a one-way street. Encourage your audience to reply to your emails and tailor your response accordingly.
5. Take advantage of marketing automation
Combining content with marketing automation can work wonders for putting your lead nurturing on autopilot. It helps you work smarter, not harder.
To keep filling your sales funnel and growing your business, you are most likely going to need more leads than you can nurture manually with one-on-one communication.
However, you don’t have to go for an all-in-one marketing automation solution immediately.
As a result, let s
Or, if you are not ready to invest in expensive marketing automation software yourself, consider hiring an experienced content marketing team for the job.
That will give you free access to all the nifty marketing tools and resources you could ever need. It also brings you lots of expert knowledge, to make your content marketing strategy a huge success.
How Handmade SEO Can Help
Great content can help you build relationships with customers on autopilot.
Here at Handmade SEO, we create and execute content marketing strategies that help you cultivate strong relationships with potential customers, so you can be the first person they think of when they are looking to buy.
Want to see how we can work together?
