By Drew Lesitter
Event Manager, Lessiter Media
dlessiter@lessitermedia.com
262-777-2412
A large part of sales and growing your business is identifying your target market. Obtaining leads can be the first step in finding new clients, but it can’t be the only step.
As part of my research for this Lessiter Marketing Minute, I consulted multiple experts in the field to determine the best ways to utilize leads. Michael Bird from Spindustry, Heather Reifschneider from VitalEdge, and Tom Flynn from Lessing-Flynn all provided guidance on the best strategies for lead nurturing and lookalike marketing.
One of the points Flynn made was the importance of getting these leads into the hands of those who use them immediately. “When people raise their hand for more information or to be contacted, they want to be contacted soon.” Flynn also stressed the importance of having a robust CRM system and entering this contact data into it immediately. By just waiting, or worse, forgetting to add this data, lots of time and hard-earned dollars can be lost.
Once you have the leads, it is important to make them even stronger via “nurturing” them. Reifschneider states that one of the biggest errors she sees is companies treating all leads the same. “Instead, start by sorting your leads into segments based on who they are and what they need.” Different types of customers move through the buying journey differently and need to be handled differently.
When you reach out to leads, Bird stressed the importance of being able to track the success of different tactics. “Use QR codes, use special phone numbers, use special URLs not available elsewhere, etc. By doing this, you can track the results and see what is working in Google Analytics and other tools.” Thus, you can see which efforts are successful and deserve to be repeated and which ones are not or need to be improved upon. Successful results may not be uniform across the board, further showing the importance of segmenting your audiences even more and learning and refining.
Nurturing leads takes effort, but it will have a compounding impact on your advertising investment. Lessiter Media can help. We offer programs to generate targeted leads via webinars, quizzes, surveys, eGuides, and our TASER lead generation program. We also offer novel value-added programs for print advertisers through our digital download service.
