Lead nurturing is the process of strengthening relationships with your audience at every stage of the sales funnel. As you engage buyers by sharing relevant content, you’ll guide and support them throughout the buying journey.

This is a great way to build brand awareness, trustworthiness, credibility, and authoritativeness. You’ll capture new leads, enjoy a higher click-through rate (CTR), save time, reduce customer acquisition costs, increase brand recall, and build thought leadership.

In this blog, we’ll offer a closer look at five incredibly effective lead nurturing techniques for small businesses. Use our lead nurturing guide to maintain consistent communication with your audience, strengthen client-business relationships, and grow your brand. Let’s begin!

1. Email Marketing to the Rescue

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to nurture leads. It drives a staggeringly high return on investment (ROI), especially when you play your cards right.

There’s a common misconception floating around the digital marketing industry: email marketing is more expensive than advertising. This isn’t true; in fact, the opposite is true.

Email marketing is extremely cost-effective. It can also be personalised to achieve precise results. As you leverage the power of behaviour research and email segmentation, you’ll nurture leads like a seasoned pro.

Let’s consider an example. If you recently published a press release via PRWeb, you could email it to subscribers who have engaged with and enjoyed your press releases in the past. This means they’re more likely to welcome the content, not get annoyed by it.

Email segmentation will help you strike a chord with different segments of your audience and avoid rubbing the other half of your audience the wrong way.

If you want to ace this technique, make sure you dip your toes into the email optimisation waters as well. Try these techniques:

• A/B test email copy
• Opt for a short subject line that stands out
• Use catchy calls to action (CTAs)
• Launch mobile-friendly emails
• Focus on relevancy
• Prompt replies from your audience
• Keep things short and fun, not long and boring

If you want to take things to the next level, look into email automation. The right commands will help you whip up email lists, schedule emails, and target hyper-specific audience segments with accuracy.

Recommended Read: 5 Email Optimisation Strategies Recommended by SEO Experts

2. Create Personalised Content

One-size-fits-all content is the biggest lie that’s sold to businesses that are entering the online marketing scape. People want to read unique content that was written for them, not the Google algorithm. You’ll get penalised if you try to please Googlebot with off-the-shelf content.

Create personalised content to strike a chord with your audience and nurture leads. Start by understanding your audience to a tee. As you develop a good understanding of unique buyer personas, you’ll be able to create targeted content that appeals to them.

Develop content plans for your audience based on their interests, goals, content preferences, and marketing triggers. For instance, if a portion of your audience keeps exiting your site every time a popup appears, remove it from your content.

Specific segments of your audience will have unique triggers and penchants. Understand these to create masterfully tailored content that resonates with them.

Recommended Read: 5 Guaranteed Ways to Find New Content Ideas for Your Industry

3. Jump on the Social Media Bandwagon

Over 80% of Australians use social media. And they don’t just use it, they thoroughly enjoy it. If you want to nurture leads, jump on the social media bandwagon stat.

The top social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) are home to billions and millions of users. Launching a power-packed social media marketing and advertising campaign is your golden ticket to building strong relationships with prospective clients and making it easier for them to communicate with you.

You can also use social media to share your content. Write engaging posts, distribute your blogs, post eye-catching infographics, share exciting media (images, videos, GIFs, etc.), create polls, ask questions, and request feedback. The sky is the limit.

Pro tip: Social media is only useful when leveraged in continuity. If you create a profile, actively post content for a few weeks, and abandon your page, you’ll go back to square one.

If you want to reap the full benefits of social media-driven lead nurturing, maintain consistency. Update your content, humanise your brand, have an insightful exchange with your audience, and keep supplying the kind of posts your audience wants to see.

4. Follow Up with Leads 

Successful lead nurturing and generation is contingent on timely, thoughtful follow-ups. You can’t take care of potential leads and abandon them after they make a sale.

Make sure you stay connected with your audience, especially after they make a sale. Check in with them, request feedback, and let them know you’re there if you need any help.

When a lead is contacted right after they make a sale, they feel valued. This is an excellent way to ensure your audience knows you’re there for them as a brand.

5. Research, Research, Research!

No matter how well-meaning your lead nurturing efforts may be, they’ll fall flat on their face if you fail to leverage the power of research.

Audience interest changes with time. The market evolves. Industries also undergo change. Almost everything about your business will change over time.

If you want to keep nurturing and generating leads in the long run, make sure you perform frequent research to maintain a good understanding of your audience.

We also recommend closely tracking and monitoring your results. This will help you understand whether you’re on the right track. If your efforts are falling short of the set expectations, you’ll be able to make the right changes and improve your lead generation performance.

Test, track, monitor, and analyse your performance to turn casual visitors into qualified leads. It’s that simple (when done right, that is).

Recommended Read: How to Strengthen Your Brand Identity on a Budget

Let TocToc Take Care of the Legwork for You

If you want to reap the benefits of an actionable lead nurturing and generation plan, TocToc should be your first stop. As an established, experienced, and trusted SEO company based in Canberra and Sydney, we craft masterful SEO plans for clients.

From using advanced lead nurturing techniques to leveraging the power of lead generation, we help you get seen by your target audience and make enviable sales. Explore our SEO services to get started!

We also specialise in content marketing (article writing, blog writing, eBook writing, and web copywriting), email marketing, app development, social media marketing, and web design and development. Contact our team to kick-start your upcoming project with TocToc.