In marketing automation, the basic goal is to nurture current and prospective customers with appropriate content at the right time, to help drive them toward buying. Nurturing is all about systematically driving engagement through communications tailored to your prospect’s journey and their interests. A strong nurture strategy and supporting architecture are critical to orchestrating and delivering scalable communications that:
- Are timely
- Are relevant
- Are proactive and reactive
- Are measurable
- Drive stage velocity
- Support programmatic initiatives
Evolution of the Nurture
Nurtures typically evolve through levels of maturity in their ability to deliver highly engaging and relevant content to their prospects. See the example below:
How to Handle Customers Qualifying Your Brand
In traditional buying cycles, you qualify prospects and deliver them the content you want them to see after carefully considering their likelihood to purchase. Today’s buying cycle looks much different because people buy differently. In the beginning, the prospect is qualifying you to decide if they even want to engage with you and your brand first. Therefore, understanding each phase of the buying journey and what content should be associated with each is vital.
In the awareness stage, informative content is key. It needs to deliver the information someone is looking for to qualify your company; hence, why brands produce blogs and thought leadership materials to justify their qualification in the space.
Then, when you are being considered by a prospect, more meaningful information is served, to not only say “we can do this” but “here’s how.” This is also when you need to show your competitive advantage, so you need to find content that resonates with prospects in conjunction with the sales team.
What Happens When You Lose the Deal?
The final stage is remarketing which is when you can serve up different information to prospects who may no longer be active in the buying cycle. Since you know they’ve showed interest in your content before, you need to create targeted messages based on why they didn’t convert to a customer in the first place.
Empowering the Customer Journey with Marketo Engage
With Marketo Engage, you can align prospects and move them through the funnel, so you serve them the correct content at the right time based on their stage in the buying journey. Not only that, but you can segment your audiences appropriately, so you aren’t just blasting content to your entire database which won’t be effective. Imagine, you are deep into the buying cycle and then you receive a welcome message from that same company. How confusing and frustrating would that be to think they aren’t paying attention to prospects or customers?
What’s more, with Marketo you can also track other communication tactics outside of email communication, like phone calls, meeting settings, or whatever makes sense for the sales process. See some examples of what all you can do:
How to Get There
With the help of Marketo, and certified Marketo teams, marketing can increase the velocity and the volume of leads moving through the funnel. At the same time, once that content is delivered, you can successfully pass leads to sales who will ultimately close the deal. Creating this seamless integration between your marketing and sales team can be a difficult task. Check out our guide, Your Marketing to Sales Alignment Workshop, to see the benefits of this teamwork and how we can help.
