Lead Nurturing With Video
Last Updated: 10 months ago by Astral Studios Staff
Lead nurturing is the process of maintaining and enriching business relationships, on each stage of your client’s buyer’s journey.
The agricultural farming process from planting to harvesting entails meticulous attention in nurturing plants to fruition. This concept provides the ideal analogy to nurturing leads and developing and growing a business.
This article provides a closer look on how you can apply this farming concept in marketing by essentially converting prospects into clients bearing fruit.
Using a business video in a marketing strategy will bring faces, voices, personality and heart to the organization and makes it simple for viewers to become customers with just one quick click of a button.
This can be achieved through the creation of video content relevant and geared for each of the Buyer’s Journey stages.
The Buyer’s Journey
The stages of the Buyer’s Journey are commonly known as AWARENESS, CONSIDERATION AND DECISION.
What this involves is to engage customers by providing valuable information on how to solve various problems and in turn associate your product and service alongside given solutions. This is what lead nurturing is all about.
For each stage, there are several types of videos to help prospects along in this journey. These videos are strategically created in order to connect and engage with customers bringing about better brand recognition, trust and thought leadership.
Consumption of marketing videos across multiple platforms is now a global phenomenon. Marketers and media companies are now leveraging such opportunities to capture consumer attention and get people talking about their products and services.
Even small-business owners can now afford the cost of producing a business video due to the affordable and easy way to widely distribute video content through the Internet.
Seeds take time to grow.
A tree bearing fruit is not created overnight.
Building a strong relationship will take PATIENCE, EFFORT and TIME.
In order for plants to grow and “bear fruit” they mainly require four basic elements: air, water, nutrients, and sunlight. As the roots grow out of the seedling they will carry water and nutrients to ensure that the plant grows healthy and strong.
Similarly, your attention and only concern is to ensure that your prospects are being “nourished” with valuable and relevant information. This will, in turn, help them succeed in their business.
This will begin to establish a closer relationship from which you will need to continue to nurture the plant at its growth stages. You can do this by sharing videos that will help them achieve greater and faster results enhancing that relationship even further.
The goal is to reach the stage where your customer will “bear fruit” by closing sizable and profitable business. This process may yet seem to be some distance away, but that day will come in time.
1. The First Step Is To Plant A Seed
In this step we want to get the attention of prospects, who may not have any knowledge of your company or even about your products and services.
You want to create an awareness about how your business will help them succeed in theirs.
Your goal here is to plant the seeds for a future business relationship.
Awareness type videos
Customer Case Study videos
Convert more leads and opportunities into customers by showcasing successful customers like them
Educational Videos
Hubs are engaging, educational videos that help solve a prospect’s specific needs. They live on social sites like YouTube, or on your own site. These videos can be found via search or social, and the content is designed to meet existing proactive demand. Hubs are almost exclusively product agnostic.
Thought Leadership Videos
A mentor video is an educational or informational piece that is designed to display thought leadership in your industry. These videos can be recordings of lectures or be used as supplemental pieces of content for blog posts. They can sit either on- or off-site.
Creative Branded Content
Heroes are typically large viral videos or ad campaigns, designed to achieve mass brand awareness. Hero videos usually require a lot of media or promotion spend and can involve an ad agency for creative help. These videos typically don’t live on your website, but rather on YouTube or Facebook.
Once the plant has germinated, it needs food, just like people and animals, to keep growing.
2. Grow your seedling with information
This is the opportune moment to introduce your company and to establish a closer relationship with your future client.
Want to continue to grow the relationship with your prospect? Try adding valuable information to the mix.
The prospect seed you planted is now sending out one or two tenuous roots, looking for more information. Give them plenty of things to choose from!
Offer resources they find useful. Become an authority in your field by creating:
- Buying guide videos
- Video interviews and case studies with well-known experts in your field
- How-to videos and product demonstrations
This is important: offer this information for free, but ask for an email address in exchange so you have a way to keep in touch and nurture your prospects. Once they’ve given you their contact information, they’ve evolved from a prospect to become a lead, and this is where lead nurturing begins.
3. Nurture your young plant with consistency
This is the part of the process where many people give up: don’t do it!
Your efforts will pay off soon.
Here’s the crucial middle point.
At this point, you want to prove that your business is trustworthy by following up consistently over time.
This is where your consistent marketing efforts like content marketing and social media will pay off.
Continue to add water, sun and nutrients in the form of information, follow-up and responsiveness to inquiries.
Because this is where the click really happens. This is where you see action, and your prospect becomes a first-time customer. Finally, you can see the results of your efforts. Your seed has grown into a plant that’s fully mature and ready to interact with your brand as a customer.
4. Care for your full-grown plant with great customer service
In order to keep that relationship alive and flourishing, you need to have a system in place for
after the sale. How will you follow-up with your customers? How will you make sure you’re meeting their needs?
What will you do about problems?
It’s not enough to get a first sale.
You have to keep your customers happy over time, so you can enjoy the fifth and last step.
5. Show gratitude for the fruits of your relationship
Start planting now to reap rewards later.
You can’t go from a seed of interest into harvesting the fruits of the customer relationship overnight. Building that relationship takes time, patience and effort.
Start planting the seeds now so you can count on healthy conversions in the future!
In the final stage of the farmer-style marketing process, you continue to nurture your customer relationship over time, and it bears more fruit.
Your current customers become repeat buyers. They “seed” new prospects for your business by recommending your company through testimonials and word of mouth.
Show them your gratitude for helping spread your message.
.
Send thank you notes, offer discounts, bake a cake! Get creative about making your current customers feel appreciated.
The 6-Step Marketing Strategy
With video content becoming a significant ranking factor for search engine optimization, a large number of companies are now using video content as their preferred online marketing strategy to increase brand awareness and to engage and interact with their customers.
To address these needs, our video content creation is complemented with an online marketing strategy (6 Step Sales Funnel ) applied to selected social media networks
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This strategy has been developed to assist companies to take advantage of the Online Digital Space, helping to connect with their customers by attracting, engaging, and converting qualified leads.
For a more detailed explanation on this sales funnel with video please see our 6-step video marketing strategy.
