Lead nurturing is trendy, but Content is king
It's amazing how much time we spend researching and assessing technology solutions to help automate our sales and marketing lives. What's equally amazing is how little time we invest in the processes and strategies that precede the technology. This morning I had the chance to speak to our local Salesforce User Group. 
The topic was to be an overview of the OnPath Lead Nurturing Platform. Not surprisingly, we had a large turnout because there is a growing demand by these practitioners to better understand lead nurturing technologies made famous by companies like Marketbright, Marketo and Eloqua. I had been allocated 45 minutes for my presentation. Typically, at these events, that time is spent doing a point-and-click demo of some Salesforce.com (SFDC) feature, or of some complementary tool. People will ask questions about how it integrates with SFDC, or why wouldn't we use a not-quite-perfect feature of SFDC to achieve pseudo-similar results. I didn't want to do that today. I felt like what was missing from the education aspect is the "Why" aspect. Why do we do marketing at all? Why do I send emails? Why do I want to nurture a lead when many simply consider that spam? Why do I want to score a lead when a sales representative could simply call them immediately once we have their contact data? Why do we spend so much time on social media when it has nothing to do with closing business? In other words, I wanted the attendees to understand that your leads have to consider you relevant, that you have to nurture a relationship with them which will ultimately result in them trusting you enough so that you can finally engage them in a discussion about their requirements.
I related these truths in anecdotes we could all relate to. One example is shopping online.
We all start our search for a desired product by going to Google and searching things like "Widget reviews". In this way we're taken to online shopping sites that sell widgets and, more specifically, list real user reviews relating their experience using the widget. We value the feedback from all of the review contributors even though we've never met them. In essence, we trust total strangers more than we trust the online merchant. We look at what other people additionally purchased when they bought their widget and then review and assess whether we should also consider the additional spend ourselves. Again, we trust these communities because their feedback is relevant to our immediate needs. Ultimately we leave the site because we're not ready to buy. Some of the merchants will continue to email us daily, weekly, or monthly with updates on the products we looked at. These emails share additional feedback, video demonstrations, product testimonials, etc. And each time we receive the email, we contemplate again whether or not we should make the purchase. We look to justify our spend by reading the content the merchant included in the email, hoping we don't see red flags that would suggest we shouldn't buy it. As you can see, the merchants are simply nurturing us in a relationship, establishing trust, and overcoming our objections. Finally, the time comes when we decide that we're going to buy. So which vendor do we pick? Clearly the one we have the most comfort with, the one who has developed a relationship and established trust with us, the one who makes it easiest to engage with them in the physical purchase. And when we're done, many weeks later, the merchant engages us again and asks us to provide a product review for the next person who may want to buy the very widget we bought. And thus the cycle repeats itself.
In B2B lead generation, or B2B marketing programs, the technology automates the above interactions. In the case of OnPath, we use Hubspot for inbound marketing to identify and create relevance for our services online. We use Marketbright for marketing automation to perform lead nurturing and lead scoring. And we use Salesforce.com as our business CRM system for customer engagement, sales funnel management, appointment setting, and lead tracking software. It's an integrated lead nurturing platform that automates what would otherwise be a very manual and labor-intensive process, and eliminates the human element that would otherwise cause the process to break down.
One point that I tried to stress was that all of these interactions, such as email, require content as part of the associated call-to-action. Content truly is king. Content is the reason people engage when being nurtured; content like product reviews, or videos, or customer success stories, or podcasts, or social media posts and tweets. Remember, we trust the community because we believe they are being non-biased. The community speaks the truth whether it's acceptable or not. Critical to any lead nurturing platform is honest, forthright, opinionated, biased, and constructive content. It's about being genuine and not being scripted. You can have all of the technology and automation in the world, but without content your solution is destined to fail.
I must have said something right to the attendees. The feedback was positive. I heard someone say "I finally get Marketing." And, best of all, I finished within my allocated 45 minutes.