Over the years, Kuno has written many blog posts about lead nurturing. However, most of them have been centered on the use of email to nurture and nudge leads further down the funnel. Today’s technology doesn’t limit marketers to just email. Channels like social media, SMS and the very website the lead converted on can be used to nurture in some amazing ways over time. Below is a look at one such channel and the future of content marketing—the very website the lead converted on (on-page lead nurturing).
However, before we dive into this lead nurturing channel and show examples, let’s look at the content marketing sales funnel itself. In order to nurture leads southward in the most efficient manner possible, a marketer must deliver the appropriate content to the right lead at the right time on the correct channel.
In order to accomplish this, it’s imperative to identify where the lead resides in the sales funnel. That is defined by the content they’ve consumed in the past. This content can be grouped and identified as traffic generation, lead generation (TOFU), prospect generation (MOFU) or customer generation (BOFU).
Logically, the content delivered to the lead via nurturing should reside in the next appropriate content category, thus nudging them closer to the bottom of the funnel.
Rather than sending a lead an email, tweet or text message, on-page nurturing allows for the delivery of the next appropriate funnel content on the actual website the visitor converted on.
The deployment of this tactic can be slow and deliberate utilizing robust data or instant and confrontational using gracile data. Either way, the deployment of such nurturing on a website is based on the past behavior of the lead.
This type of nurturing is the simpler of the two and generally happens immediately after a website visitor consumes sales funnel content. The example below, from HubSpot, shows an opt-in to attend a webinar (MOFU). After the form is engaged, the confirmation page automatically offers up customer generation content in the form of a software demo (BOFU).
Not all of the MOFU conversions will be at the correct stage of the buying cycle to engage with the BOFU content. However, the ones that are represent an incremental revenue opportunity for HubSpot.
This type of lead nurturing is much more advanced than the example provided above. The best instance that many are familiar with is Amazon.com. Amazon looks at a person’s previous purchases and pages visited in order to come up with lots of very targeted and personalized recommendations.
The recommendations are presented most everywhere a person goes on the website and they’re based on and triggered by behavior. This same concept can also be deployed using content, as opposed to using products.
For a company like Kuno, it could work like this: A new visitor watches a “3 Steps to Social Media Success” video. A few days later, they come back and view five blog posts about Facebook marketing. After that, they download the Facebook Marketing Cheat Sheet.
The fourth time they visit the Kuno home page, content and images are customized for the individual visitor showing more Facebook-related blog post snippets, downloads and a customized free Facebook marketing consultation offer.
The visitor's past behavior triggered the custom content deployment with personalization and relevancy. The likelihood of the visitor moving from TOFU to MOFU will be increased substantially.
The capability described above does not require an Amazon-sized budget. Static on-page lead nurturing can easily be deployed on a landing page confirmation. Marketers who use landing pages can implement this tactic today. On the other hand, dynamic on-page nurturing requires advanced marketing software to deploy.
On-page lead nurturing is just one arrow in the multi-channel nurturing quiver, but the end result remains the same: Creating acceleration and velocity through and the widening of the sales funnel by delivering the right content on the right channel to the right person at the right time. This is the future of content marketing.
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