How to successfully nurture leads for your engineering firm
Lead nurturing is the focused approach to engaging with a defined target group by publishing informative content for each stage of the buyer’s journey. This relevant content will educate your prospects, addressing problem areas they regularly encounter and providing useful information around their pain points, all the while establishing your engineering firm as an industry expert and the best choice for their needs.
Many people confuse lead nurturing with sending untargeted, monthly business newsletters. This definitely isn’t the case - nurturing is a structured, clearly defined process based on the following steps:
- Educate: the initial focus should be on educating your customers, showcasing your commercial viewpoint on relative engineering industry topics and trends.
- Advise: Communicate to your prospects how they can make better informed decisions.
- Engage: Through sharing relevant content in the form of blogs or eBooks for example, you can improve prospect engagement and form a business relationship.
- Convert: Make it easy for prospects to engage with you and encourage them to do so.
How to create an effective lead nurturing campaign
Below, is a simple step by step process to successfully nurture leads for your engineering firm:
1. Outline your buyer personas
How can you attract and engage with potential customers without understanding who it is you are trying to reach? Establishing your buyer personas will take time, but once they are defined you will have a clearer focus and greater control over your marketing efforts.
Tip: A good starting point is to focus on who your engineering firm has worked with in the past and who you would like to work with in the future.
2. Progressive profiling
Gather and analyse information on your website visitors – what content they are viewing and downloading and where your traffic is coming from? This valuable data is a powerful tool to improve your message and will guarantee to generate conversions.
3. Content creation
Creating relevant content is a must in order to engage the right prospects for your engineering firm. Publishing blogs on current engineering and manufacturing issues, creating downloadable “How to” eBooks and eye-catching infographics are just some of the ways you can educate and nurture your leads.
Follow these valuable guidelines to ensure your content remains relevant:
- Identify your audience
- Always consider their stage in the buying process
- Make it conversational and interactive
- Simplicity is key
- Give your content a personal touch (without sounding too salesy)
4. Decide on appropriate platforms
Are your prospects avid social media users? If so, are they more active on LinkedIn or Facebook? Are you going to use email to move your prospects towards making a sale? Will you offer a free consultation with an engineering professional in your firm? These are just some of the questions to ask yourself before campaign set up. It’s important your engineering firm has the sufficient manpower and knowledge to execute the chosen steps in the lead nurturing process.
5. Set clear goals
Establish clear goals from the outset so you can easily determine what is deemed successful from what’s not. A campaign lacking defined goals is essentially time wasted, as you will never know what elements contributed to improved sales and what factors had a limited impact. Goals might include achieving a percentage increase in website conversions, a certain number of blog views and eBook downloads or a specific email open rate.
6. Test, measure, analyse and adapt
Test, test and test again! This is the only way to determine what works best with your chosen buyer personas. Take every prospect touch point as a means to A/B testing - social media posts, blog landing pages and emails for instance. Testing factors such as blog titles, target keywords, email subject lines and social media post interaction can move your engineering firm closer towards achieving your goals.
7. Bring it all together
Successful lead nurturing can have a massive effect on your engineering firm’s success. Creating and implementing a focused lead nurturing campaign requires analytical thinking, efficient planning and a dedicated team to carry out the entire process from start to finish.
Lead nurturing can help your engineering firm reach out to your ideal customers, successfully engage and educate them with the goal of converting them into buying customers. When implemented correctly, an effective lead nurturing campaign can transform your business and how you approach sales.
