Lead generation is the backbone of any business that wants to keep raising its sales and growing as a company. However, just high-quality lead generation is no longer enough to keep competitive as what matters even more now is the quality of the leads themselves. Thus, growing firms pay more and more attention to lead enrichment and the benefits it brings. Today, many lead nurturing tools and various techniques, as well as best practices, are available to use and learn from in order to raise the quality of the leads.
The Importance of Utilizing Lead Nurturing Tools and Best Practices
The importance of taking care of your leads
Let us start by looking closer at what lead enrichment is and why it matters so much for the success of the business. This is the foundational procedure and the quality of a lot of best practices in lead nurturing depends on it. Generally speaking, lead enrichment is the process of collecting and acquiring various data points surrounding the leads that the company already has.
Leads are basically the contact and otherwise relevant information about potential customers that the firm has in its database. Thus, lead enrichment, simply put, adds more to this information, enhancing the knowledge about the leads. The additional data can be gathered by the firm itself, or it can be acquired from a reliable third-party source, such as reputable data brokers.
Naturally, this makes the conversion of the leads much more likely. Knowing your prospect better allows you to prepare a more convincing sales pitch, as well as recognize which of the leads are more promising than others. Additionally, lead enrichment allows updating the information that is already stored in the database, thus avoiding using outdated contact details and similar errors.
Finally, lead enrichment is an important part of a high-quality lead nurturing strategy. Broadly defined, lead nurturing is the constant building of a mutually beneficial relationship with a prospect until they become a frequent or returning customer. Various lead nurturing tools and techniques can be used to properly take care of the leads and increase the chances of them becoming loyal clients. Which takes us to other crucial practices and procedures pertaining to lead nurturing.
Main lead nurturing procedures
As leads are data, lead nurturing tools are often tools for handling data in various ways. In addition, there are various tools that help to automate the nurturing procedures or make them more efficient. The examples of most commonly used lead nurturing practices are as follows.
- Lead scoring, which is assigning numerical values to the leads based on their prospected value to the company. This value is determined by the various features of the lead that allow predicting both how likely they are to become a client and how they would act as a client.
- Lead segmentation is the division of the leads into categories a.k.a. segments based on their various characteristics. These characteristics may be either demographic data, such as age and profession, or personal data, like hobbies and preferences.
- E-mail automation, that is sending automated messages to the leads depending on where they are in the sales pipeline and moving them through it based on their responses.
- Personalized and PPC (pay per click) ad campaigns on social media or your website, which show specific ads to particular kinds of leads who, for example, have visited a certain page on the website.
There are of course many important procedures of lead nurturing, but these are the ones where lead nurturing tools can be of the most help. Selecting the right tools for lead generation and nurturing (ex: LinkedIn) will depend highly on which of these procedures are utilized the most in a particular company.
Utilizing lead nurturing tools for best results
Choosing and using the right tools to help in dealing with the leads is another of the best practices in lead nurturing. Some of the familiar software systems and platforms, like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer Data Platform (CDP), and Data Management Platform (DMP) can be considered very basic lead nurturing tools.
These systems handle the crucial lead data, helping to stay on top of all the information needed to nurture and convert the prospects. Some of such platforms also have additional analysis features allowing, for example, to segment the leads. Thus, these tools can do the preparatory work for lead nurturing, especially as it regards data management.
However, to take the lead support to the next level one needs more powerful software tools which may be quite costly. This makes selecting the right tools for the right tasks and purposes all the more important.
Thus, when choosing the tools for lead nurturing one should look at whether their main focus is lead scoring, lead segmentation, automation of the marketing procedures, or some other practice. Some software tools are better suited to handling a large amount of lead data as well as enriching it when additional data sets are available. While others are made for automating as many procedures as possible.
Another important feature to look at is the accessibility and user-friendliness of the application for lead nurturing. Many users from marketing sales and other departments might need to access lead data for optimal handling, making interface capabilities of the tool of the utmost importance.
Finally, of course, price is always a key factor when selecting the tools. Whatever your price range is, you should always look into what you get for the payment and compare it to what the competitors are offering. There is no point to overpay even for a great tool as resources can be directed elsewhere ant the supply of lead nurturing technology is on a constant rise with new developments being made every day.
Benefits of using the right tools
Now, in case there are any doubts that utilizing software tools for an efficient lead nurturing strategy is among the best practices, let us look at the benefits it brings. The main advantages of making the most of what state-of-the-art technology can offer are as follows.
- Increased efficiency. Using the AI tools for lead data management and automation highly increases the speed of the task performance. The faster you can send personalized messages to the leads or answer their queries, the more likely it is that they will feel cared for. This will drastically increase the conversion rates and is bound to build trust within the customer base.
- Better insights. Treating the lead data with utmost care and enriching the data sets with additional data points from reliable sources allows knowing the prospects better. This leads to deeper insights regarding how leads should be nurtured for better results. As software tools are capable of handling and analyzing large volumes of information, they will help to arrive at more of such insights.
- Prioritizing the right leads. With the level of analysis achieved through making use of the right tools, one is able to easily recognize which leads are of the most value for the company. Prioritizing these prospects ensures that the most valuable customers are not lost due to directing the efforts elsewhere.
- Cost-efficiency. Finally, even though to access the best features of the lead nurturing tools one usually has to spend some money, using them properly guarantees a return on investment. The value that converting the best leads brings more than covers all the initial costs.
Shifting trends
One more thing to take into consideration when looking at lead nurturing tools and best practices is how they relate to the shifting trends in digital marketing. These shifts are characterized by changing preferences of the social media users among other things.
When it comes to internet usage, probably the biggest news of 2021 was the fact that Google, the long-reigning most popular domain in the world, has finally been dethroned by TikTok. Naturally, this makes TikTok the most important social media website for digital marketers in the years to come. Lead generation and nurturing specialists will have to think about utilizing this app and integrating it more with their social media marketing strategies.
And social media campaigns will only grow in importance with the demise of the third-party cookies caused by increased data sharing regulations. Thus, new ways to get the necessary data for lead enrichment will rise to fill this gap in the digital marketing industry.
As marketing is becoming more content-driven, it is likely that lead data regarding the content that prospects prefer and engage with will grow in worth. Thus, lead nurturing tools that are capable of assessing and distributing content are likely to be developed and grow in popularity.
Summing up
Digital marketing has risen to prominence in this century and has been evolving ever since. This has changed not only the way companies think about lead generation but opened many new and exciting ways to nurture prospects and build strong relationships with clients. With many more areas in which to compete for the consumers’ attention, businesses have to stay on top of the shifting trends technological developments.
See also: How to run Successful Lead Nurturing Campaigns?
