10 Tactics for Building an Effective Lead Nurturing Strategy

Prospects are rarely ready to become paying customers the moment they hear about your agency. But that doesn’t mean you have to leave their business on the table. By implementing a lead nurturing strategy, you can keep those potential clients engaged and build a strong relationship that will lead to business in the future. 

Sales cycles can be long, making lead generation and nurturing essential for agency growth. Securing a steady stream of new clients requires consistently finding new leads and guiding them along the lead generation funnel toward conversion.

In this blog, we’ll cover 10 tactics for creating a lead nurturing system that delivers reliable, repeatable results for your agency.

What Is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is a process through which businesses educate and build relationships with potential customers who have expressed an interest in their product or service.

It involves engaging with prospects throughout the buyer’s journey—the time from discovery to purchase—and providing them with relevant and personalized content that addresses their needs at their stage of the journey. The purpose of a lead nurturing strategy is to guide prospects through the sales funnel until they’re ready to become paying clients.

Given the complexity of digital marketing in our hyper-connected world, lead generation systems use multi-channel strategies to capture and nurture leads. Prospects can encounter touchpoints with your agency across many platforms, from lead generation landing pages and organic lead generation content to newsletters and live events.

A thoughtful strategy ensures marketing and sales efforts are aligned to create a cohesive, consistent, conversion-boosting experience.

Benefits of Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing strategies are instrumental in the growth and success of digital agencies—here are some key advantages:

• More conversions: By providing prospective customers with stage-appropriate content and messaging throughout their buyer’s journey, you earn trust and build credibility for your business. This regular engagement keeps your agency fresh in their minds, so when they are finally ready to buy, they’ll be informed about your services and have a positive impression of your agency. The result? They’ll choose your agency over the competition more often.
• Greater customer loyalty: Lead nurturing isn’t always explicitly about sales: it’s also about education and reputation-building. The more robust your strategy is, the greater loyalty you’ll earn from clients. Those strong bonds result in longer relationships, boosting the average lifetime value of your accounts.
• Higher revenue: The faster you can move prospects through your sales funnel, the sooner they’ll start generating revenue for your agency. Lead nurturing strategies align sales and marketing to shorten the sales cycle and close deals more efficiently, boosting revenues.
• Cost efficiency: Capturing leads but failing to nurture them to conversion can be costly: you’re always paying to find new leads, but few of them result in revenue for your agency. By implementing a lead nurturing strategy, you can optimize your resources to turn leads into customers, improving your ROI and lowering your customer acquisition costs in the process.

Tip: Are those complex ROI calculations causing mind-boggling confusion? DOWNLOAD your free ROI calculator today.

Challenges With Lead Nurturing

These are impressive benefits that will make any agency owner’s ears perk up, but it’s important to be aware of some of the potential challenges you may encounter when building your program. These include:

• Scaling your lead generation plan: As your business grows and you work with more lead sources, keeping costs in check to scale sustainably is imperative.
• Offering personalized, stage-appropriate content: Content marketing lead generation and nurturing is powerful, but it takes a lot of work and organization to maintain a content plan that suits every customer profile and buyer stage, while also offering personalization.
• Data integration: A CRM for lead generation that effectively integrates data from a variety of sources is essential. Otherwise, you risk wasting resources due to poor data tracking.
• Aligning teams: Marketing, sales, and customer support teams need to be on the same page about their responsibilities to ensure a smooth experience for prospects. Teams should be clear on distinctions between lead generation vs. demand generation vs. lead nurturing, and their roles with regard to each type of campaign.

10 Powerful Lead Nurturing Strategies

The right strategies can help you lower client acquisition costs, grow revenue, and foster gratifying, profitable long-term relationships. Use these lead nurturing strategies to reach your business goals faster:

1. Leverage Targeted Content

There’s a saying in digital marketing that content is king, and this certainly holds true in lead nurturing campaigns.

Before running any campaigns, create ideal customer profiles (ICPs) for your dream clients. Next, map out their journey: how do they find out about your agency? What knowledge do they need to acquire before converting? What questions or problems do they have that you can address? How can you build confidence in your skills and capabilities?

Only after these steps are complete should you move to content creation, creating blogs, videos, infographics, and other resources that are tailored to your ICPs and map onto the buyer journey. 

Use lead nurturing marketing automation tools to deliver the ideal content at the right time, maximizing its impact.

2. Focus on Timely Follow-Ups

Timing is critical to conversions. Responding quickly to inbound lead inquiries showcases your agency’s attentiveness and reliability.

But the power of timely responsiveness extends beyond inquiries: by using a lead generation database that ranks leads in response to their behaviors, you can use automation tools to initiate conversations and strike when the prospect is most motivated to buy. 

Again, sales-marketing alignment is critical here. There should be no question whose responsibility it is to reach out to a prospect, and the handoff from marketing to sales should be seamless.

Tip: Receive automated, personalized needs assessments about your prospects so that you can time your outreach perfectly. With Snapshot Report, leverage these insights to tailor your conversations around how your solution can solve your prospects' pain points. 

3. Implement Multi-Channel Nurturing 

Internet users jump from one context to the next, and your prospects are no different.

Your plan should address how you interact with them, from your lead generation website to your email lead gen communications to paid ads and beyond. By taking a multichannel approach, you can ensure prospects have a cohesive, on-brand experience throughout. 

4. Personalize Nurturing Campaigns

 Personalized experiences resonate more deeply with prospects, addressing their unique needs and preferences. But what does personalization look like in practice? It can include:

• Using lead nurturing marketing automation tools to customize emails with content based on customer behaviors
• Segmenting audiences in your email lead generation tool to better align with buyer’s journey phases
• Run a variety of SEO lead generation and nurturing campaigns to target different ICPs and phases, with website content for every stage

AI tools vastly expand lead nurturing possibilities. Check out this video to see how:

5. Deploy Lead Scoring

Lead scoring ranks prospects based on their potential value, making it easy to prioritize where you focus resources.

The best lead gen databases come with built-in lead scoring, but you can set parameters based on your goals.

Work with your team to define which lead generation metrics are most relevant to your agency goals to ensure your lead scoring model aligns with your desired business outcomes.

6. Nurture With Multiple Touchpoints

Prospects encounter plenty of noise and distraction on the buyer’s journey, and it’s your job to keep them on the path to conversion. Using multiple touchpoints can help you do just that, ensuring they don’t forget about your agency.

Lead generation best practices require the use of different platforms and content formats, including:

• Short- and long-form videos
• Webinars
• Ebooks and whitepapers
• Blog content
• Images and infographics
• Live events

The more places you show up, the more memorable you’ll be.

7. Leverage Account-Based Marketing

Some accounts have so much potential value that they’re worth considerable extra effort. Account-based marketing (AMB) is a lead nurturing strategy that takes this into account by offering a more personalized approach to these big-ticket potential clients.

If you’re working on local lead generation campaigns, an ABM approach might include in-person education and sales calls to foster deeper connections. It can also include creating customized pitch decks based on the specific needs of that prospect. The bottom line: some accounts may need extra resources to convert, but the upside for your agency is well worth it.

8. Automate Nurturing Workflows

The lead generation business model may sound complex and difficult to manage, but much of it can run automatically with limited hands-on involvement.

Automation tools, from AI lead nurturing assistants to email marketing platforms, can use triggers to deliver personalized content based on lead score and behavior. Similarly, drip campaigns can be used to keep leads engaged at scale. These same tools enable agencies to offer lead generation outsourcing services to clients.

9. Analyze and Optimize Continuously  

If there’s a secret to successful lead nurturing, it’s A/B testing. By tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), you can maximize the return on your efforts by optimizing for lead quality, reducing cost per lead, and focusing resources where they’ll have the greatest impact.

For nurturing campaigns, you might track:

• Cost per customer acquisition
• Time to conversion
• Conversions by lead source
• Average customer value by lead source

10. Align Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing should be clear on where their responsibilities begin and end, ensuring the customer has a frictionless experience. Establishing a service level agreement (SLA) with clients ensures that sales, marketing, and clients are aligned on which services are to be rendered, minimizing confusing and potentially relationship-damaging misunderstandings.

Conclusion

Implementing a robust, multi-faceted lead nurturing strategy—and continuously improving it—is key to sustainable agency growth.

Strategies like targeted content creation, omnichannel nurturing, timely follow-ups, and the use of automation tools can help agencies boost revenues and build valuable, long-term relationships repeatably.