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How do you provide the right content at the right time to the right buyers?
While it's great advice, I hear it way too often without specifics on how marketers actually go about doing it. If you're going to lay out the principles of lead nurturing and marketing automation, there's really no need unless it's original. Thanks in advance for sharing your approaches.
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6 Answers
That's indeed a great question. Many marketers I talk to are overwhelmed with the idea of having to guess which prospects need which content at what time AND with having to create all that content.
Often, their first challenge is to gather enough content for a single lead nurturing campaign. So my recommendation for them is to focus on the buyer persona that is most important to them and create enough compelling content to support that segment during their buying process.
From there, you can start supporting additional buyer personas and add sophistication to the nurturing process. For example, some advanced marketers are adjusting the frequency of nurturing emails based on the prospect's responses. However, that's only a small group, and most marketers would be happy with _any_ content they can send out.
So - clearly - my perspective is a very realistic one. I also agree with the process that Tony describes, but not every organization may be ready for that yet.
Hope that helps.
Jep
www.leadsloth.com
Hi Chris,
I love the question. If I may, I would like to first re-phrase the question in this way: "How do you provide to the right buyers, at the right time, the right content?" What this allows is for is three critical steps: first conduct qualitative research to understand who your buyers are and develop buyer personas, second learn about the buyer experience journey and buying processes including the timing, and third determine how to design and map the right relevent content to your buyers and their buyer journey. Rephrasing and answering the question in this way may allow one to think with a buyer experience orientation.
Thanks for a very good question!
Tony Zambito
Research, understanding, and consistency.
1. Define User Personas
2. Conduct a Content Audit
3. Identify Buying Stages
4. Map Selling Stages to Buying Stages
5. Determine Questions Asked at Each Stage
6. Develop Content to Answer Questions
7. Create a Content Map
8. Create Nurture Paths
8. Set-up Lead Scoring Triggers
9. Analyze Response to Content
10. Adjust Content, and Continue
Thank you Tony and Jep, your points are helpful!
I find it helps to spend a bit of time chatting with Sales and Product Management to understand a few of the topics that determine the shortlist of vendors and create content around it to help earlier in the nurturing path. Things like a checklist for vendor selection or criteria to use for comparisons. You can then create content around each of those checklist items and have your nurturing program lead customers through each key criteria throughout the campaign.
Mapping content to sales cycles is absolutely critical, but I think the biggest win for early stage marketing automation users is to help push people from early stages and closer to closing.
Great answers here, but I also think the key to delivering the right content at the right time is a good listening program.
Marketing automation systems like Eloqua, Marketo and Silverpop give you the ability to track behavior and learn from it. So if you see where their interest lies, you have adjust the delivery of your lead nurturing campaigns to deliver the ideal content.
Hope that helps,
Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
Find New Customers "Lead Generation Made Simple"
http://www.findnewcustomers.com
@fearlesscomp
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