It can sometimes feel like a lot of work just to get in the leads through the various touch points along the sales chain or funnel, but this is the reality of the buyer’s journey, and without proper touch points set in place, no digital marketer is safe for the sale.

A great deal of New Zealand digital marketers may have all their touch points for their client’s brand in place, but never seem to see the results they want. In fact, MarketingSherpa shared an interesting fact about this, suggesting that almost 80% of marketing leads never convert. That’s a sad waste of time. Could it be that you aren’t nurturing your client’s leads at each touch point the way you should?

Here are FIVE pointers to bear in mind when it comes to nurturing leads:

• Targeted Content

Leads that are nurtured with targeted content produce an increase in sales of more than 20% according to studies undertaken by Forrester Research. This means that you should consider targeting your content with more care. Now how do you do this? For one, you can start by using more effective SEO strategies such as investing in proper Keyword analysis so that the right content meets the eyes of the right reader.

• Buyer’s Journey

The “buyer’s journey” is really the sales funnel – all the touch points you have in place for the prospect to touch and with which to engage. It is at these points that you need to introduce real-time nurturing and not simply let your client’s prospect follow a chain of set commands/steps. For example, you should include in your social media management, conversational responses. As the name suggests, it’s social. Start a conversation.

• Touch points

Prospects could need to touch base with your marketing plan as many as 10 times before making a purchase. However, a great deal of New Zealand digital marketers are not using enough touch points. According to Demand Gen, 49% of you are using less than five touch points. This is a suggestion to start increasing the touch points, which will add to the nurturing and trusting process, which will increase sales by 50% with a 33% lowered cost.

• Channels

It’s no longer just email marketing that should be included in your buyer’s journey. There are so many options today that you should not limit your client’s means of obtaining as many leads as possible. You should also include regularly-written blogs with an SEO strategy in place. You should make use of social media management for your client’s brand so that engagement and nurturing of the relationship is maintained. A study showed that 68% of successful marketers say that lead nurturing through content and engagement is their strongest marketing tactic.

• Automated Nurturing

Finally, it was reported in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review that it is 21 times more likely for a lead to become a sale if the prospect is contacted back within five minutes compared to half an hour later. Knowledge of this information is critical to converting leads and helping the prospect through the sales funnel. What is suggested is to advise your clients to invest in an automated response system that alerts the prospect within minutes of website conversion. This will significantly raise your client’s chances of success.

As you can see, if you are a digital marketer in New Zealand you need to pay attention to the nurturing side of marketing, which has become the very nature of marketing in today’s digital world.

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