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Lead nurturing is best known as the process of educating and interacting with leads consistently, building trust and gaining mindshare in the process till they are ready to buy from the marketer.

But despite the best of intents, many lead nurturing programs fail to deliver the desired results, simply because they become nothing more than monthly email blasts to a list of leads in the database.

So what is it that really differentiates a lead nurturing activity from the regular email marketing activity? The answer lies in the approach and how well the marketer tries to address the needs of leads, having a basic understanding of leads and their needs is critical to a successful lead nurturing program.

If the marketers spend some time on putting together lead nurturing campaigns there is a great marketing tactic, which can really improve the quality and success rate of the marketing campaigns.

The B2C industry has always relied on building buyer personas, which then become the core of all their marketing programs. This method of breaking down prospects into different groups based on their demographics, interests, motivations etc. can go a long way in customizing campaign messaging to their needs and ensuring they in turn identify with the messaging and respond to it.

When applied to B2B, building lead/corporate personas based on the size of the company, industry type, their search query, expressed intent etc. can help marketing teams customize their messaging in a way that is in line with the needs of their leads.  Marketers can also add product use case scenarios if possible for the personas they create, it will help them pre-empt a need and offer a more relevant solution than a generic one.

This works best when marketers have a large lead database to tackle and need a starting point for initiating the lead nurturing process.

Developing lead personas

1) Base personas on past interactions with clients – Since marketers would be measuring marketing efforts and know what kind of leads are entering sales funnel, they would have noticed their behavior and their responses, which can be used to put together the lead personas.

2) Take Sales feedback – During lead generation sales team works closely with the leads and hence have a more real feel of their needs, apprehensions and requirements, speak to them, use their experience and insights to build lead personas.

3) Talk to customer service teams – They are the ones who deal with the customer on a regular basis, they can share data on the experience matrix of the company’s existing customers.

4) Work backwards – Since marketers understand their product well and its real world applications, think of the real life problem scenarios and the kind of leads who are more likely to face those problems to develop their personas accordingly. This helps immensely for lead management as well.

Creating lead personas can come across as a tedious task, but is very useful in ensuring how marketers connect with leads better. Also, the persona templates+ should be a work-in-progress document, with the team fine-tuning it every now on then, based on the responses they get or other insights they might come across.

Once marketers have lead personas are in place they can also use them to develop content that will help connecting with these leads, when reaching out to them as part of the lead nurturing campaign. Creating personas will not only make the marketing efforts more targeted, but will also help in building a better relationship with leads.