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What is the difference between marketing automation and lead nurturing?
I am not quite sure what the difference is between the two? Can anyone help explain?
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7 Answers
Laura:
Lead nurturing is the process whereby you engage your buyer and in essence keep the conversation going. As many as 70% of your initial responses will not be in ready to buy mode, so instead of sending them to sales, you should nurture them through a series of communications (email, phone, etc.) to keep building i.e. nurturing the relationship until such time they are "sales ready."
Marketing Automation is a technology that can automate the nurturing communications that you send. Automation allows for the a consistent and repeatable communications to your buyers and also tracks their behavior, allows for lead qualification, data segmentation, metrics and other features. While marketing automation can be a great addition to any companies marketing department, it should not be looked at as an answer unto itself as in order for it to be most successful it should be based on a solid lead management process.
Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
Carlos said it right.
The only thing I would add is that lead nurturing is one of several important processes of "lead management." First you generate the lead, then you nurture it. While you are nurturing it, you are also "scoring" it, that is assigning a value to it from the sales perspective as to whether or not is there is the potential for a revenue producing relationship. Once a lead has scored beyond an agreed upon threshold, then you can "distribute" it to the appropriate sales person based on business rules.
Marketing automation then is simply the web-based platform that digitizes the above process and allows you to generate/nurture/score/distribute at a consistency and scale never before possible.
Some insight into Mikes comment above. With industry statistics showing that up to 70-80% of leads being ignored by sales staff, should the focus of companies be to fill the top of the funnel i.e. "getting more new leads?" Companies would be better served to shift their focus from lead generation/generation of new leads to lead management which is managing leads all the way through the funnel.
Filling the top of the funnel with no lead management processes will not produce the value that sales expects. While nurturing is important, it is only a piece of the overall process and should be looked at holistically with the other process components.
Carlos Hidalgo
The Annuitas Group
Well said Carlos and Mike. Lead Nurturing allows you to communicate with active and non active leads. Marketing automation is looking at the full revenue cycle of a buyer and interacting at the appropriate time, or capturing important information that is filtered through analytics to provide some much needed insight, like correlation of behaviors, what's working well, what's not, ect.
Lead Management is HUGE. Most companies do not have proper procedures and best practices around how do you manage a lead, who is assigned to the lead, what is proper rules to change ownership, to put in a new campaign, etc. Too many leads still float away from queues, views and sales reps. Fix this process, and most likely, you will see more fruit come out of the sales pipeline.
Well said by Carlos above. I think the question itself is interesting and a credit to the level of marketers competing in the marketing automation business. Instead of talking about technology, they talk about business objectives like lead nurturing. The result is a question like above, which is actually good. You will sell more if people believe they have to nurture leads, then decide they are going to do something about it, and THEN realize marketing automation can help them achieve this.
I think you have all arrived at some good definitions. I guess I would add that neither lead nurturing nor marketing automation solves the core problem that most marketers actually have - getting more new leads. Neither help you get more fresh leads into your database - which is critical because most contact info expires at the rate of 20-30% per year I think.
Great answers here but I'll share it a different way. Think of a telephone and having a conversation with a good friend.
The telephone is marketing automation - it makes the conversation possible, but the chat with the friend is lead nurturing. Conversations build trust.
Here's an article I wrote on the "7 Keys to Successful Lead Nurturing" for The Customer Collective http://thecustomercollective.com/jeffreyogden/33811/7-keys-successful-lead-nu...
Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
Find New Customers "Lead Generation Made Simple"
http://www.findnewcustomers.com
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