What is Lead Nurturing?

Abandon the classic approach to traditional marketing, but aim to focus completely on defining your target audience and typical customer.

Lead Nurturing: How to 'nurture' the contacts you find

Once potential customers' contacts have been obtained, what do companies do? Often, they end up forgotten: nothing could be more wrong. That is why we need to understand what is meant by lead nurturing.

The term refers to all those activities that enable companies to establish a relationship with their leads through various channels in order to 'convert' them into potential customers. Once the contact acquisition phase has been reached, it is necessary to move on to nurturing the established relationship with one-to-one communications.

Converting the user's interest into a sale is the most difficult task: lead nurturing is an integral part of a marketing strategy, from contact acquisition to its ultimate 'conquest'.

Trust and empathy with the potential customer must be built and in this it is content that plays a key role. Not forgetting then that it is necessary not to leave aside campaigns on Google AdWords or Facebook and the use of Marketing Automation software. But more on this later.

Why is lead generation so important for business?

The acquisition of a lead represents the beginning of a sales funnel in which it is essential to accompany the potential customer, by means of specific tools and messages, on a path that ends in a purchase.

The advantage that lead generation offers is to be able to do business on a profiled list of contacts interested in the company and to obtain greater chances of conversion, because through a targeted strategy and a precise path (funnel), the contacts are led to the purchase phase.

What becomes vital for companies is to understand how many potential customers (leads) they can obtain in the medium to long term, how much turnover they can generate from lead generation strategies, and how much all this costs. 

Inbound Marketing and Lead Generation

The inbound method is of fundamental importance in lead generation, as it puts the user and his needs at the centre of communication. No invasive advertising and background noise, but concrete data that serves both the company and the customer. And the competition is all played out online, the world in which the consumer becomes an active player in the choice and purchasing process.

Inbound marketing is about offering value to users, creating contacts and nurturing relationships: fundamental actions for the promotion and growth of a company's business. In fact, the general logic of Inbound marketing is based on 4 phases: attracting traffic, converting traffic into leads, turning leads into customers, and building loyalty.

It is therefore possible to say that lead generation itself is divided into 5 phases: traffic acquisition, attraction, conversion, retention and sale. But it should be emphasised that there are no universal rules for lead generation: each strategy must be structured on a case-by-case basis, because each company has its own specific characteristics and meets different consumer needs.

A well-designed online lead generation campaign allows you to acquire customers at the lowest acquisition cost compared to classic channels. But how? Through a lead magnet that attracts users' attention and offers them valuable content (e.g. brochures, webinars, eBooks, podcasts, etc.). The lead generation campaign becomes a real investment in the future of your company, measurable in terms of ROI.

By putting the customer, who will have a problem to solve or a desire to satisfy, at the centre of your strategy, you can achieve surprising results for your business, thanks to a whole series of tools, from Facebook advertising to blog articles to SEO activities. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)