You’ve cleaned your Sales pipeline, primed your Marketing team, and gotten everyone off to a running start. So, why aren’t your leads converting? Are you refining your lead nurturing process?

If you’re losing out on qualified leads, despite a clean pipeline, that’s a red flag that your lead nurturing isn’t working, and it’s time to find out why. Here are three reasons why your lead nurturing might not be delivering results.

Poor Communication

It takes an average of ten, some say as much as 15 or more, touches with buyers for leads to convert. It varies a bit based on what you’re selling and what your Sales cycle looks like, but the net result is the same.

If you want to make a Sale, you need to communicate with your buyers. No buyer is going to convert with just one touch–you have to convince them that you’re worth the time and that your product or service is compelling enough to take action. Convincing a buyer that you provide relevant outcomes or solutions that make communicating with you worthwhile doesn’t happen with the snap of a finger.

We’re not saying that you should inundate your buyers with marketing messages–that can chase away even loyal customers. But you have to find the right balance between breathing space and encouraging customers to keep thinking about you and that talking to you will provide potential value.

Generic Marketing

However, if you’re reaching your customers with generic, boring Marketing, it isn’t going to matter how many touches you have. This is part of a common failing: not having a targeted market.

You should know your target customer so well that you could pick them out of a crowd. You should know their likes and dislikes, what motivates them, what makes them unique. Most importantly you should understand the pain points or struggles your customer faces and be able to easily communicate how your product or service bring outcomes they need.

In this day and age, customers are surrounded by Marketing messages. They don’t need another marketing tool trying to sell them something–they’ll stop paying attention in a blink.

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Customers want to see that you care about them. They need to have trust in you as a brand, and personalizing content goes a long way in helping customers humanize your brand–which, in turn, makes it easier to trust you. And if they trust you, they’re more likely to convert further down the line.

The Curse Of Good Enough

Quick question: if you were driving your car in the morning rush on the highway, would you settle for brakes that are good enough? You wouldn’t, and you shouldn’t settle for mediocre Marketing either.

“Good enough” content isn’t going to cut it when all of your competitors understand that content is king. Good enough gets the job done, but it doesn’t drive value or solve problems. And if you’re not driving value for your customers, you’re not doing your part to prove why you’re the best possible solution on the market.

You can’t really expect your customers to settle for a mediocre solution when they could get a great one. So if you want your leads to convert, “good enough” just isn’t enough to see real results.

Ready For Effective Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is an art and a science. If you want to master it, you’re going to need the right tools for the task. That’s where knowing the latest Marketing Automation trends becomes necessary to survive.

First, you need creativity in marketing, not conformity. A lot of marketers hear creativity and think slogans, color schemes, and typeface. But creativity runs deeper than that, and if you think about creativity in those narrow terms, you’re not creating–you’re conforming.

Creativity is about imagining a solution that no one else has thought of. Something different yet brilliant. The good news is that marketing automation is freeing up marketers to see the big picture. Don’t be afraid to go off the beaten path–if you can do it in a way that’s relevant to your campaign and compelling to your customer. Personalized content allows you to directly address individual customers, showing that you care about their experience and their business.

Second, you need to stand out with personalized content. Here’s the thing: personalized content sounds like a lot of work, but it’s actually better for customers and marketers. The truth is, you don’t need to market to everyone, and your customers won’t thank you for trying to target everyone. You just need to talk to those few valuable customers.

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Lastly, be prepared to embrace AI and chatbots to streamline personalization. For marketers, the reason is simple: it’s an unparalleled tool to track user behavior, needs, and requirements. Better still, it can offer suggestions on what kind of content to show customers throughout their buying journey.

On the customer side, chatbots allow you to have a conversation with a customer without dedicating precious manpower to wait around. The key is to program your bots to respond in a human way, making it easier for customers to relate and see the bot as helpful.

Marketing Automation is evolving every day, and that’s fantastic news for marketers. The better your automation, the better your team can deliver an unforgettable customer experience. Marketing Automation tools abound, selecting the right one for your team that will actually get used effectively is critical. You need more than a simple email tool yet some Marketing Automation systems are completely overwhelming, overpriced and hence underused.

In the end, use the right tech, do your homework on customer targeting and messaging and be persistent in your contact with messaging that shows your value and in the end, you and your customer both win.

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