Skip to main content

Cloud

The Controversial Campaign

I bet you thought, wow is she really going to go into the whole Presidential Race ‘thing’…nope, not touching it!  I’ll touch on another campaign that most marketers stress or think about on occasion.  To Nurture or not to Nurture!

If you have a nurture campaign, congrats! If you don’t, why not?

When I’m talking with my clients, these are the top five things keeping them from doing a nurture campaign.

  • Content
  • Time
  • Resources
  • Personas
  • Sales cycle

Let’s dive into how even with these challenges, you can overcome them.

Content

Content you have it.  You’ve sent an email out.  You have at least one of these, maybe more…right?  Why not use them, yes again!  The emails that you spent time and money to create the first time can be repurposed.  My kids came home from school repeating ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’…hmm…marketers can apply this mantra to content strategy, too. You have whitepapers collecting virtual dust.  Targeting them to prospects or clients make that original expenditure worth it.

Ok, you might be thinking, “These outreach efforts/this content had limited success before.” You need to ask yourself why.   Was the content poorly aligned with the rest of the outreach? Was it the segment it went out to?  A previous boss once told me “Put on your 3-year-old hat, and ask why.” Thinking about the why’s is a great way to revive great content that has already been created.

Time

Putting on my 3-year-old hat…why don’t you have time?  Is it because you have to create more content? Then don’t…reuse.  Don’t have time to plan because there are other critical campaigns that need to go out?  The best use of time is to find a way to make a process better without recreating the wheel…reuse.  Time is our great commodity, we only have 24 hours in a day and there isn’t one of us that wants to use all 24 hours for work.  Take the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ mantra and apply it to your marketing habits.  There are campaigns that you’ve run before that did really well, reuse them to make the customer or sales cycle more impactful for your prospect or client by using the information that you already have.

Resources

Resources and time go hand in hand.  With resources, you need the people to have the time to create, right?  YES!  Ok, so if that is the case, you have the content, you need help to determine cadence, audience, timing, etc.  It’s taking those components and putting them into a campaign that makes sense.  The flow of the campaign is usually where people get stuck, but there really isn’t a right or wrong answer on this one.  Key dependencies are your sales cycle for prospects or renewals, and the amount of information that a client may need to know to navigate your company.

Personas

“We don’t know who to target for a nurture campaign.” Do you have clients?  Do you have NEW clients?  Did you answer “Yes” to both? So start there!  You have people who have already bought and they need to know where to go for product information, what’s the latest release, who to contact if there are issues or questions, and the list goes on.  Utilize what you know.  I understand, you want to have an idea of who that buyer is, well, if you start with your clients you are destined to know them.  It takes resources to generate more complex personas but sometimes starting with what we know is best.  You can get to personas once you get to know the client base and apply them to prospects that sales isn’t touching and go after them.

Sales Cycle

No matter what the length of the sales cycle happens to be, you want to get your message out at the right time. With either a long or short sales cycle the message is impactful when targeted correctly to where they are in the cycle.  To do this we need to rely on data coming from sales and I know, we are a little skittish about doing so.  However, the impact once made is a great motivator for sales to provide the detail so that Marketing can help.  See that is what you are, Sales helpers, Sales enablers!

So in closing to Nurture or not to Nurture…It’s up to you. Content is available, time is the great commodity, resources are stretched, personas will come and we want to impact the sales cycle.  How much impact do you want to make and how many excuses are going to stop you?  Don’t forget, relationships are what we are building and nurture campaigns can be an excellent tool to grow that relationship.

Stay tuned for more posts on Marketing Automation.  If there is a topic you would like me to address, please add a comment.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Amy Anderson

More from this Author

Categories
Follow Us