Planning for Lead Nurturing Success

Lead nurturing is one of the most valuable tools an inbound marketer has at her disposal. And yet, this simple process can often seem daunting to newcomers. Here's a simple overview of the process to help demystify how lead nurturing works, and to show you how you can get the most benefit out of it.

Step 1 - Create Content

Raise your hand if you love getting more email every day. No? Well, remember that your prospects and leads feel the same way. 

So it's your job to pack your lead nurturing emails so full of valuable content that your contacts are delighted to open them. Remember: It's all about what information your prospect wants to get, at the particular phase in the buying cycle they are in.

So for an early stage lead nurturing campaign, you might create a blog series that offers readers a high-level overview of your industry; pitfalls for first-time buyers to be aware of; or just 3 or 5 points that the newcomer might now know they should look for in a vendor.

Publish these articles on your blog, and you can repackage them later as links in a series of lead nurturing emails. Don't worry that the blog articles already exist -- the value you are providing is delivering that content to the right people, at the right time, without forcing them to go looking for it.

Step 2 - Locate the Leads

Imagine that you are playing matchmaker between your different kinds of content and your different kinds of leads. Some content is only going to appeal to late-stage prospects, while some content is geared specifically toward early-stage prospects. Now that you know what content you want to provide in this lead nurturing campaign, determine where those leads are filtering in to your HubSpot system.

This may be:

• A landing page and form that is geared toward the appropriate stage in the buying cycle
• A list of leads you obtained from a trade show or other offline event
• A segment of leads that already exist in your leads database

Each different type of lead will need to be "hooked up" to your lead nurturing campaign in a different and appropriate manner.

Step 3 - Build Your Lead Nurturing Campaign

Now you have the guts of your campaign -- you know the content you plan to share, and the types of leads you are going to share it with. You've made both of these determinations based on where in the buying cycle these prospects are, and you're respecting the buying process by not forcing your prospects into a stage of the cycle they're not ready for yet.

Now you can build your lead nurturing campaign! Just go to the Convert tab in your HubSpot portal and choose Lead Nurturing. Click Create a New Campaign and start filling in the details!