Lead Consultant - EMEA & APAC
29/6/2020
Lead nurturing campaigns are a core concept of modern marketing and marketing automation that should drive qualified leads to business development and sales teams for follow-up. The reality is most marketing teams are running multiple campaigns alongside lead nurturing campaigns, such as ad-hoc email campaigns, events and webinars, and customer communications channels.
This turns the email marketing strategy into a wall of noise which slowly becomes ignored and doesn’t in turn, reach the goals of driving qualified leads into the sales funnel. Here are three reasons that your lead nurturing campaigns suck!
1. If content is king, then data is the queen
According to SiriusDecisions research, between 10 per cent and 25 per cent of b-to-b marketing database contacts contain critical errors, which in lead nurturing campaign terms means that up to 25% of your target audience is not getting the right call to action or anything at all!
The common challenges with data are simple, it’s aged, it’s poorly sourced, it’s unclean, there are missing fields, or there are duplicates! All of these affect your lead nurturing and lead scoring models, which in turn affect the lead generating capabilities of your nurturing campaigns.
The good news is there are a few tools which you can utilise to help you clean up your data:
Cognism
Almost one in five customers I speak with at the moment has heard of or looked at Cognism, a new B2B marketing data platform. This unique platform takes a new look at GDPR-compliant data acquisition and, importantly provides the tools for sales, marketing and the business to refresh existing data sets to ensure optimal results from marketing campaigns.
Aromerge
Mass deduplication is not a core concept of Marketo; aromerge’s capabilities offer a visual Marketo data hygiene report. The report allows you to improve your data quality within Marketo with simple actions such as enabling “always on” Marketo dedupe to match by email address or a custom key.
2. Lead nurturing takes too long to generate qualified leads
When it comes to lead nurturing campaigns, it’s all about strategy, timing, and content marketing. When we conduct a review of lead nurturing or even lead scoring models, we see that they’ve been built and left to run. Never optimised nor extended.
That is why marketing teams often consider an engagement on a landing page, blog posts, or even a form to fill out a conversion. Leads based on this model ultimately create poor sales and marketing alignment, not to mention unqualified leads reaching a precious resource.
Combatting this challenge is Exceed.ai, an artificial intelligence tool that integrates with your CRM and/or Marketing Automation system. Twinned with your lead nurturing campaigns, Exceed can drive conversions and appointments out of engaged contacts. It’ll help qualify them in or out, or even keep them for later.
3. Go beyond email marketing
The power of marketing automation platforms is not purely about email marketing; it’s about centralised engagement. When we take Marketo, for example its marketing technology inter-connectivity helps you hook up digital advertising channels, social media, webinars and video.
Hooking up video to lead nurturing
As part of our content marketing strategy for lead nurturing, we’re often trying to mix it up using different content types. With 92% of marketers saying that video is an important part of their marketing strategy, many still haven’t integrated video into their social media.
TwentyThree is a webinar, video and soon personal video platform which integrates neatly with most major marketing automation platforms, meaning you can include video in your lead nurturing campaigns, but additionally, you can start to include lead capture, lead scoring and deeper analytics to your investment in video.
Social enrichment to lead nurturing
Whether it’s entry, exit, or even enrichment, social media remains a significant component of the marketing mix and when it comes to marketing automation email campaigns, we tend to find that it’s not linked.
Market leader in B2B social media management and employee advocacy Oktopost integrates into your marketing automation platform of choice and allows you to use analytics and intelligence to drive data decisions within the platform. Enriching, enhancing and supporting your lead nurturing programs!
