I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this week about middle of the funnel marketing challenges. As technology marketers, we’ve learned the lessons about how to get found on the internet, convert web site visitors and analyze the results.
We’ve spent time and money on implementing marketing automation systems to help us score, prioritize and nurture the leads we generate. And, we’ve discovered that the fuel to feed this marketing engine is content. Free, compelling, content. And lots of it.
So, what’s the problem?
The Middle of the Funnel Challenge
Are we really capturing and optimizing our middle of the funnel engagements? Let’s consider how a typical lead nurturing program works. We sit down in a room and map out our various buyer personas and content library. Then, we develop a series of lead nurturing tracks based on those buyer personas, identify the appropriate offers and build out the drip programs and emails. Depending on the number of products and product lines you support, this could be a relatively simple exercise or incredibly complex.
By its very nature, a drip program is a push campaign, meaning you’re sending email and hoping that the prospect will deign to open your email and consider your offer. How many times have you seen these types of emails in your inbox? Do you open them?
Plus, for lead nurturing to work, it is wholly dependent upon you knowing who the prospect is – you need to have a prospect profile in your marketing database with name, email, and role in the organization. That prospect either needed to previously fill out a form on your web site, or come in via an offline campaign. And, that is the real conundrum.
Intellectually, we know that we need to remove barriers to web site engagement by ungating our content and removing forms. However, if we ungate the content, how are we supposed to capture the prospect’s info, so we can put them in a lead nurturing program? It’s a chicken and egg scenario.
Our current lead nurturing practices only enable us to engage a portion of our total web site visitors – the ones who are known prospects. We are missing a huge opportunity to further engagement with these unknown visitors. This is the next big opportunity for marketing software vendors.
We are beginning to see a new type of marketing vendor emerge who is addressing this middle of the funnel challenge. Companies like Attention Sciences have developed a solution to address this need, and I suspect the major marketing automation vendors will be joining the bandwagon soon.
Real-Time Lead Nurturing
As a marketer, I would love to find a way to nurture web site visitors in real-time, while they are active on the site. We need to understand what type of a buyer they are based on the pages they’ve visited, and then present relevant content to them. This type of web site engagement is really a form of “real-time lead nurturing.”
Real-time lead nurturing does not only benefit unknown web site visitors, it’s also a great way to further engagement with your known prospects. How great would it be to present those next few pieces of content that you would send in a typical email drip program directly to your prospects while they’re still on your site? Not only does it help you to get past the flood of emails in your prospect’s inbox, I think it also has the potential to help shorten the marketing cycle by sharing content sooner than you might in a traditional lead nurturing program.
The Takeaway
So, does this mean that traditional lead nurturing is dying? Maybe, as we are all trying to find ways to send less email. But, I think it’s more likely that it will continue as not all prospects are going to respond to the offers presented while they’re active on the web site. There will still be value in continuing to communicate with them post web site visit. Real-time lead nurturing will become another tool in the marketer’s toolbox to drive engagement and work to create sales-ready leads more quickly.
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