Content marketing tends to generate top-of-funnel leads. These leads are at the beginning of their buying process, still researching and learning. Aggressive marketers and salespeople who forget this are often rebuffed by prospects that feel pressured to make a purchasing decision before they are ready.
This shouldn’t be happening, because content marketing can be one of your best sources of leads. According to the marketing firm Hubspot, content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising.
Whether content marketing leads turn into customers depends on whether you can patiently nurture those leads through their buying process by keeping up a flow of content until prospects are ready to engage. Forty-seven percent of buyers view 3–5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep (Hubspot).
Your goal is to provide prospects with the information they need to make informed, confident buying decisions. You should be focusing on helping them to learn more about approaches to solving their problems; educating them on your company, products, and services; and building trust and cooperation.
Two good examples of content marketing tactics that often generate top-of-funnel leads are sponsoring webinars or eBooks produced by content publishers.
For webinar or eBook sponsorship, a life sciences company attaches their name and brand to respected educational content and in return receives leads from the publisher. But rather than aggressively pursue sales—and likely falter—you can set up a lead nurturing campaign to help move those leads forward in their buying process, increasing the likelihood they will buy from you when they are ready to make a decision.
Here’s how:
Clear permission-based hurdles
This step actually needs to be performed during the campaign setup. Spam and privacy laws require that your marketing be permission-based. Work with the publisher to make sure that registration forms on their website include appropriate language allowing you as the sponsor to email and otherwise communicate with registrants, and that the language meets your own legal requirements.
Registration forms should be simple and friendly. It’s probably enough to ask for name, company, and email address to make signup easy. You can acquire additional prospect data throughout the campaign as engagement increases. There’s no need to ask about interest in specific products or services at this point. That’s too much pressure for what’s intended to be an educational experience.
Assign responsibility
Lead nurturing campaigns include many touches, all of which contribute to an eventual sale, and all of which must be recorded and tracked.
Make sure you know who is responsible for getting leads into whatever marketing automation, CRM, or sales system you are using, who is responsible for making sure records are updated with every touch or activity, and who is responsible for distributing leads to salespeople.
In smaller companies, these responsibilities might belong to one person; in larger companies, a team of people might coordinate on these activities. The point is that longer nurturing campaigns require defined roles, organization, and discipline.
Create a framework for the campaign
How often will you email your new leads? There’s no right or wrong frequency, although usually during the early stages you will communicate more often while the lead is fresh. You will also communicate more frequently with prospects that engage with your additional content offers.
Marketers also need to plan out and create the additional content that will be part of your campaign. In the early and middle stages, content may include educational white papers, articles, blog posts, videos, and infographics. Prospects want to know how things work, how your products help them complete a task, what their different options are, and what are the latest technologies and newest products.
As prospects become more qualified, detailed data sheets and case studies may be appropriate. Demos, free trials, and ROI calculators are examples of late-stage content when your prospect is closer to buying.
Develop a lead nurturing flowchart
Because lead nurturing campaigns, also called drip campaigns, involve a series of email communications to your prospects, a flow chart can be a useful tool for establishing and adhering to campaign rules and timelines.
Depending on whether you use marketing automation or other software to support your process, your flow chart might be sophisticated or simple. Sophisticated processes include branching based on how a prospect responds to your offer (such as: If Prospect does X, the next communication is Y, otherwise Z). You might also customize the timing of emails based on the level of engagement.
An example of a simpler approach is to place all leads from a content publisher in the same nurturing campaign process. All prospects receive the same series of touches and you track their behavior (emails opened, links clicked on, content downloaded, etc.) to determine where they are in their buying process and when to get your sales team involved.
A simple nurturing campaign might look like this:
Measure and improve
While content marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies in the life sciences sector, it does require time and resources. Naturally, you want to know if your investment is paying off.
Because you’ve done the work of establishing campaign goals, rules, and responsibilities, you can track what works and what doesn’t in your lead nurturing campaign. Eliminate content that prospects don’t show much interest in. Take what works and branch out with similar offers. Look for patterns in prospects, such as those that read article A and white paper B, and watch video C, tend more than other prospects to eventually buy.
Use the intelligence you gain in tracking to refine your campaigns and you should see improved results. But it all starts with playing the longer game of lead nurturing at the top of the funnel.