How do you gain new marketing and sales leads without spending 8 hours a day cold-calling? Over at the Watercooler, our senior account manager, Megan, talks about Lead Nurturing and tips to land new sales leads successfully.

Cameron: Hi, Megan, welcome to the watermark watercooler. Good to have you back. Just a reminder to the audience who you are. Could you tell us a little bit about it? Yes. So I'm on the account team here at watermark and I specialize in marketing automation. So I'm excited to jump into our topic. One of the many things that Megan does but she's very good at that as well.

So talking about marketing automation, we're going to be talking about lead generation. And what does that look like and, and nurture campaigns. Yes. So what are they? Nurture campaigns that are out there first. Yeah, absolutely. So obviously lead nurture is one of the biggest problems. A lot of our clients face day to day.

Megan: Mainly because it's very time consuming and to efficiently follow up with leads, you need to be. Personalized timely and then also deliver content that's valuable to them. So we use a few different softwares and marketing automation platforms to make this work easier for us to make this more efficient.

Yeah, we're timely within our communications and then ultimately delivering. Marketing qualified leads to sales, qualified leads to kind of continuously move them through sort of that lead nurture. Yeah. So our platform of choice is HubSpot. They make it really easy for both agencies and clients to use their interface.

It's really intuitive. And I think that is a good base for people to use, but there's also other ones like SharpSpring. Different platforms out there. Those are the two that we are partners with. Okay. So there's these different types of. Lead nurture campaigns like educational ones are one of them.

There's re-engagement there's service. What, what, you know let's just talk through education first. Like, what's that, what's this? So these different lead nurturing campaigns can pretty much be set up in any way that is customizable to our clients. So that's what makes it really nice. We can do different types of content.

Send them to different resources, create different internally. But education is obviously a large campaign that we often use for our clients. Since it is very authentic and really gives some highly educational information for people to make decisions, to see if either ourselves or our clients are the perfect match for these leads.

So education is a big one. Re-engagement is another. Campaign type that is often used. Again, these are for colder leads. You've had communications with them before, but you need to continuously stay top of mind in order to potentially close and build that relationship. There are also service and product type campaigns.

And when we're talking about campaigns, Mainly talking about creating these workflows that will drip information to leads based on their behaviors. So you can tailor them really specifically to their needs. And then you can also create a number of these different workflows. And what's really great about them too, is that once you set them up, you do all the work upfront.

You can kind of like, just turn them on and based on these behaviors, people kind of filter and go down these workflows differently. So products and services are another big one. For example, we build websites. We could create a workflow that is geared towards our web process. So we can have a number of different drips here.

Again, kind of explaining our process, potentially giving some case studies, and then we can even link to different resources of some of our past projects or things like that. Again, all going to be configured to. Drift specific information based on the user's actions. So what's really nice is that once someone does take action, they go down a different path than someone who is taking no action.

Another one could be more like milestones in your sales process. Say you have a kind of like three meeting tier to your sales process. You can set up workflows for each one of those tiers to have. Move people through that process, more seamlessly. And the last big one that we sort of often see in our day-to-day lives.

I know I engage with this type of workflow, probably on a weekly basis is the abandoned cart. So this works a lot better for that, those B to C clients. But again, if you have something in your cart, you can tailor the followup message to actually include a link to the. Things that you're interested in.

So those are a few types of workflows, but again, what's really nice about them is you set them up, tailor them to your specific client's needs behaviors once, and then you can kind of set them off, launch them live, and the leads will kind of go through that process through automation where there's really no manual.

Until someone's ready to take action. Then that lead is transferred over to sales based on a number of different triggers actions, follow up emails, reminders. Yeah. I think the other cool thing is like, it doesn't even have to end there. Right? You can, you can use your current clients as campaigns. Like yeah.

There's a way that you can take an existing client and say, we know the existing client has done X, Y, Z. Let's send them down some paths of. Maybe some upselling your client or a new service offering that you have. It could be a lot of. Yeah, no, it definitely does not need to end only at Leeds. It can work really well for customers and clients who also have repeating kinds of processes.

So once you kind of know what those are, again, you can build the bones and then again, tailor them. At, in personalizations for your current clients products services, and really build them to be very robust while still being personalized and more streamlined for your team's time. What's so awesome about automation is that we were trying to meet people where they're at.

So what are some other types of things that you can use in a lead nurture campaign? Yeah. So first and foremost, we're going to use emails. A lot of times these workflows are going to be facing. Prospects. And a lot of times email is one of the easiest kinds of pieces of information to capture.

But within there there's different types of emails. It's like a designed email. There's a plain text email that looks like it's actually coming from another individual versus them. Designed email blast. There can be different resources. So if there's a piece of premium content, you can link out to that.

You can link to case studies. People always love to see proof of concept. Another big one to include, could be reviews depending what your industry is. What's also really nice. So those are going to be more of the items that are going to be facing the client and prospect, but you can also have internal.

Pieces within these workflows. So it can be a reminder for your sales team to call them. It can be a kind of task for them to send a personalized email to them. It can be a reminder to move them through the pipeline once they kind of complete one of those milestones and checkpoints. So really the list can go on and on, but that's just kind of a few did they do what could be?

It could be really any type of reminder you could say. For your internal team, these six go on and on, like we said, we're going to try and keep those videos a little bit short and to the point, so Megan, thank you so much for your time. And I am always a reminder to, you know, if you have any thoughts.

Cameron: Future videos, any comments we would love to create better content for you. So shoot, shoot us a line and thank you for watching the watercolor.