Marketo Engage is one of the most popular marketing automation platforms (MAPs) on the planet. Why? For a lot of reasons!
One major reason is its lead nurturing capabilities, which we’re going to talk about in this blog post.
**If you’re newer to Marketo, feel free to check out our previous blog post, What is Marketo Engage.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of connecting with potential customers (leads) throughout various stages of the buying process. The ultimate goal is to help and encourage leads to make a purchase.
Lead nurturing is often personalized.
For example, a lead acquired via a company’s SEO efforts may receive different lead nurturing communications than a lead who was acquired through a referral or targeted social media ad.
An Example of Lead Nurturing
A good example of lead nurturing that many of you reading may have experienced before is purchasing software. The process often goes something like this:
- You want to buy Software X, so you fill out a contact form on the company’s website, requesting a product demo.
- A business development rep/account executive calls you and you have the product demo.
- You inform the sales team that you need time to review the info and discuss it with other team members.
- During this time, you receive an email from the company that contains content on how to get the most out of Software X.
- Then, a few days later, you receive another email that contains a free case study on how a company used Software X to achieve significant business results.
- This content aids you in your decision (in a perfect world). It gives you added confidence in what you’re buying and it helps you articulate Software X’s value to your colleagues.
- Your sales experience was good, and you eventually purchase Software X.
In this rudimentary example, the software company used email marketing to “nurture” you as a lead.
The emails you received were strategically crafted (and timely) with the intent to encourage you to make the purchase.
Lead Nurturing with Marketo Engage
A major benefit of Marketo Engage is that the product enables organizations to nurture leads in a highly strategic, well-organized, and at scale manner.
Here are some key ways a business can leverage Marketo Engage to perform lead nurturing:
- Email marketing / marketing automation
- Content marketing
- Retargeting/display ads
- Your website
- Social media
- Lead scoring
Let’s take a quick look at each of these!
Email Marketing
Marketo Engage’s world-class email marketing capability is one of the strongest lead nurturing features the Adobe product offers.
Email marketing continues to be one of the most profitable digital marketing investments for companies.
Did you know that “79% of B2B marketers find email to be the most successful channel for content distribution” and that over half of B2B marketers “cite email as their top channel for revenue generation”? (source: OptinMonster)
Companies can utilize Marketo Engage to send timely, insightful, and unique emails to encourage prospects to become customers.
Emails can be strategically planned and executed so that potential customers are receiving optimal content over time to help them make a purchase.
This leads us to the next way your organization can leverage Marketo Engage to perform lead nurturing: content marketing.
Content Marketing
In order to nurture a lead with regular communications, you need content! Content is the fuel for a successful lead nurturing campaign.
Content you send a lead should be highly useful to them and unique to your brand. It can be in the form of written content (like blogs, information on your website, eGuides, etc.), audio content (like podcast content), and/or video content (YouTube videos, social media shorts, etc.)
The better your content is, the better your lead nurturing campaigns are most-likely going to be.
The better your lead nurturing campaigns are, the better your sales are most-likely going to be!
Your Website
Your organization’s website is one of its most important assets.
A person’s experience with your site is not only important, it’s often times critical to a company’s sales process. This is true regardless of how large or small your business is!
Here are two major ways Marketo Engage can help you enhance your website’s user experience:
- Empower you to easily and quickly create targeted landing pages for your various marketing campaigns
- Help you create personalized content that’s featured on your website.
The better a landing page is on your website, the better user experience a potential customer will have, and the more likely you will generate quality leads and sales.
Personalized content refers to content that is tailored to an individual. Different types of a content can be displayed on your website based on the characteristics of the person visiting.
For example, a clothing company might display winter items for people accessing its website from northern geographic regions, while at the same time displaying summer clothing for site visitors from regions near the equator.
If you want to learn more about Marketo Engage’s personalized content capability, check out this article from Adobe!
Retargeting / Display Ads
Retargeting / display advertising is another great way to nurture leads using Marketo Engage. Retargeting is a digital advertising strategy that shows ads to someone who previously visited your website.
One way Marketo Engage can help you retarget potential customers is by identifying and retaining important information about your leads, such as the industry they work in.
According to Marketo Engage’s official documentation, web personalization data types that you can use for retargeting purposes with Marketo Engage are:
- Industry
- Group
- Category
- ABM List
- Segmented Audience
- Web Campaigns Clicked
All of this data can be used to create specific audiences that you can then market towards with relevant and useful ads.
Social Media
Social media is another channel companies can take advantage of in order to nurture leads and win business.
Marketo Engage can help your organization use social media to optimally engage with potential customers, get to know them better, and use that knowledge to build the best, most personalized ads to ultimately earn their business.
Lead Scoring
One final (but very important) lead nurturing feature of Marketo Engage is lead scoring.
Lead scoring is the process of giving a numerical value to potential customers (leads) based on the level of interest they’ve shown in a product or service.
A high lead score typically means a person is very interested in becoming a customer.
The purpose of lead scoring is to help companies make the most out of their leads by empowering marketing and sales teams to properly direct their energy and efforts towards the right leads at the right time, with the right content and messaging.
