7 Lead Nurturing Tips Every Advisor Should Try
Lead nurturing is an essential part of the sale and marketing process. This nurturing process is not much different than caring for a house plant. For your house plants to grow, you need to provide water, nutrients, sunlight when the plant requires it. Too much or too little of any may kill it.
Now, apply the same principle to your leads. Nurturing your leads and providing the things each relationship needs, when it needs it can push leads closer to a sale. Similarly, neglecting your leads can cause those relationships to wither and may eventually die.
Here are some tips that many successful Advisors use for effective lead nurturing.
Understand your leads
How can you sell insurance or financial services to leads if you don’t know what they want? Make sure to get all the information on your leads – their problems, their likes and dislikes, their needs and current financial situation. Creating buyer personas is a good way to gather all this necessary information and separate your buyers in different categories.
These profiles of your ideal buyers can be created by surveying clients and noting similarities and differences among certain occupations, age brackets and stages in life and career. Identifying buyer personas relevant to your business can help you carefully understand your leads and just what they need in time to move along the sales pipeline. According to a HubSpot article, a successful persona should be based on a semi-fictional character, include a snapshot of a day in their life, demographic info, occupational goals, common sales objections and more. Check out What Does a Great Buyer Persona Look Like? Dissecting 3 Real-Life Examples to learn more.
Lead lifecycle stages
Lead lifecycle stages help you understand where your lead is in the buying journey. By analyzing their place in the lifecycle stages, you can provide prospects with exactly what they need to move forward and make a purchase.
These stages will be a little different for everyone, but commonly used generic stages include Unknown Lead, Known Lead, Engaged Lead, Qualified Lead, Opportunity, and Client. Specific to disability insurance sales, our Regional Sales Reps use these lifecycle stages…
- Sales Idea/Proposal
- Contact/Discovery
- Present to Producer
- Awaiting Producer Presentation to Buyer
- Awaiting Buying Decision
Engage your leads
Engaging your leads – including the frequency and messaging – is a critical step in nurturing leads. Make your leads feel valued and special by personalizing all communications with them. This doesn’t just end at adding their name in the email. You should also personalize the content you send to them depending on their location, buying behavior, interests, etc. This will allow you to only deliver highly relevant information in every communication – resulting in a higher engagement level.
Inbound marketing content – like this blog post – is a great way to nurture leads in the early stages of the lead lifecycle. It helps provide the information your client needs and pushes them along the pipeline by building trust and establishing you as an expert in your field. Since inbound content aims to educate and not sell, it is a great tool to better your brand management initiatives as well.
Monitor the leads
Once your lead lifecycle stages are defined, you know where in the process the leads lie and what you need to do to move them along. Analyze how slowly or quickly leads are moving from one stage to the next. This will allow you to identify where leads may be piling up and help determine what the issue is.
Monitoring the leads in this way allows you to have a smooth flow of continuous leads and that is critical to having a great lead nurturing strategy.
Always be available
When leads want to contact you and get more information about your products and services, you should always be available. We live in a right now, instant gratification culture. If clients can’t get in touch with you, they’re likely to move on to another Advisor. It is best to have multiple ways available to contact you and communicate with you, including phone, email and text messaging which is very popular with younger clients.
You can also have a live chat assistant on your website to provide instant contact or offer online appoint scheduling for easily connecting with each other in a meeting.
Leverage the power of social media
Social media engagement – including instant messenger on Facebook and Twitter are almost a must these days. Offering inbound marketing content via social media is a great way to engage with many clients at once. How you engage with clients via social media is very important, check out How Social Media Can Grow Your Disability Insurance Business to learn about successful social media marketing.
Social media advertising is also a great way to reach large audiences in a targeted way. Social media ads can be very granular – targeting a very specific audience – and it’s more affordable than many believe. These ads allow you to market to the exact demographic you are looking for and if your ad is executed properly, the return on investment is very high. Make sure to use images that are eye catching and engaging content that makes leads excited to know more.
Running contests and offers on social media is also a great way to capture and nurture leads. It also works as an effective tactic for engagement.
Engaging with landing pages
When you send out emails or create a post on social media, it should always link back to a landing page on your website that explains amore about your product or service to the lead. This Call To Action that makes people click on the link must be enticing, because once they click on the link half your work is done. The next half can be done by creating enticing and informative landing pages that can push the lead to do what there are on the website to do, whether it is fill out a survey, watch a video, set up an appointment with you or buy a product.
The landing page must inspire the lead to go to the next step in the buying process and not shut the page and move on instead.
Nurturing leads to move along in the sales cycle is not as difficult as it seems. All you need to do is put yourself in the leads’ place and think about what you would need in order to make a purchase.
Additionally, there are many CRM and sales pipeline software options available to help you nurture your sales lifecycle.
