With hundreds of recruitment websites and thousands of job boards, launching a successful nurture campaigns is a unique selling point that can enable you to stand out from the crowd and offer value to new or existing prospects.
Well, that’s where nurture campaigns come in.
These marketing tactics are used to nurture prospects through the sales funnel, with targeted messaging delivered gradually over time. Communications can take the form of ‘welcome’ or ‘getting to know you’ campaigns or even a simple string of emails.
It can be overwhelming at first but when you get it right, the results will speak for themself – so shake up your marketing approach and refocus your attention for maximum impact.
What makes a successful nurture campaign?
If you are trying to cultivate new business, or if your pages have high bounce rates and only a few daily visitors, then a successful campaign is all about how well you convert.
The conversion rate is determined by how well your audience responds to your effort, so make sure to track their engagement. A successful campaign will build momentum within the customer’s mind, and this is what people mean when they say an email campaign is so much more than ‘just growing your list.’
Why is nurturing leads through the funnel important?
Delivering high-quality, engaging content is vital to generating conversions. As a marketer, you must stay one step ahead of your customers, and by providing content that helps your audience take action, you can ensure that they make the right decision.
People like to learn new information, feel included, and –above all– feel valued, so it’s crucial to continue sharing relevant social media posts, engage in exciting dialogues, and respond to comments posted on your content.
Understanding Nurture Campaigns
With nurture strategies, there are four core campaigns you should consider running depending on the demographic you’re targeting.
Your nurture campaign can be divided into the following four categories:
What is a high-visibility campaign?
High-visibility campaigns involve sending various mass emails, publishing a series of blogs, or posting several social media posts for your network to see and engage with.
While this can be a great way to build a healthy contact list, it also means bombarding people with thousands of emails to people who don’t need your service and would otherwise see your communications as spam.
To prevent this, it’s worth considering what the audience wants from you and what value you can provide to them. Moving forward, we recommend reviewing the length of your emails, the frequency of your newsletters, and the value your marketing campaigns are offering prospects.
What is a targeted campaign?
A targeted campaign is tailored towards an individual, a group of people, or even a business. For example, an executive recruitment agency may want to send relevant social media posts and articles to senior executives rather than everyone.
To create an effective targeted campaign, your objectives must be clear, you should be able to identify the demographics you want to target and a customer value proposition should be produced for each one.
If you don’t have any data to hand, you could look at similar companies and websites and see what you can learn from them. If you have some specific data about your client base, you should be able to use that to come up with personalised messaging that works for them.
What is an emotional campaign?
An emotional campaign is one that tugs at the heartstrings and whilst you should always have some emotional appeal throughout your marketing efforts, these campaigns are specifically designed to elicit an emotional connection.
Evocative language and messaging have an increased chance of successfully converting as it engages your target audience in a way that humanises your brand; especially if your content highlights your story or company values.
What is an article-type campaign?
The final type of campaign you should consider is an article-type campaign which involves eliciting engagement through articles or e-books. To run a successful article-type campaign, you should be prepared to plan and produce a range of high-value articles that can be published with supplementary resources.
We recommend having a detailed plan that includes deadlines to ensure you have the time to optimise each piece of content accordingly; value-generating content shouldn’t be rushed.
Put Together a Winning Campaign
You can make your customer journey more enticing by identifying and recycling elements from previous campaigns that converted well, increasing the likelihood of future campaigns delivering even better results. Creating a successful campaign that drives conversions is a highly complex process but the core infrastructure never changes.
All campaigns will always require you to:
7 Steps to a Successful Nurture Campaign
1. Plan your campaign, then implement it
Before you start any campaign, ask yourself what you are trying to achieve, consider your audience, and think about your message. What is it you want to do?
Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Do you want to attract more leads? Do you want to convert some of these leads into clients?
2. Find your audience
Identifying your audience and the needs you want to address is the foundation of any successful campaign. If you understand who your audience is and how they prefer to communicate, you’ll learn to attract attention but also retain it.
Think about your target audience and how you can target these demographics. For example, if you are trying to target jobseekers, target the people already actively searching for roles on public platforms and build a profile of their needs you can later use during your nurture campaign.
3. Choose your message
The most important part of the campaign is the message because it’s what draws people to your campaign and invites them to take action.
Many campaigns use subtle words they know many people wouldn’t notice but a target audience would; that’s why it’s essential your message supports your campaign goals and engages your audience.
When choosing your own campaign message, consider the following questions:
Here are some examples of good campaign messages:
5. Develop a landing page
A landing page is an essential part of any campaign and is used to answer any potential questions about your product or service. It should also provide any information that helps the prospect decide to buy or not.
The most important thing about a landing page is that it’s informative and communicates the essence of your product.
6. Build out your network
Another essential thing to remember is that nurturing campaigns work best with a large audience, considerably more so as it allows you to perform A/B testing on communications to better understand which messaging is working and which isn’t.
Tactics to build out your network and reach a wider audience include publishing value-generating content, hosting contests, or even setting up affiliate schemes to further promote your brand or product.
7. Follow-through
Communication is key and it doesn’t just end after they’ve received the intended message, you need to make sure that it was heard and understood. Consider sending a personalised follow-up email or making a phone call to prospective clients to guarantee the value you’re providing them but also humanise your interactions.
TL;DR Key Takeaways
- Nurture campaigns are marketing tactics that gradually deliver targeted messaging to prospects through channels such as emails, social media, or blogs.
- The conversion rate of a campaign is determined by how well the audience responds to it, and high-quality, engaging content is vital to generating conversions.
- A successful campaign will build momentum within the customer’s mind, making it more likely for them to take action.
- There are four core campaigns for a nurture strategy: high-visibility campaigns, targeted campaigns, emotional campaigns, and article-type campaigns.
- High-visibility campaigns can be a great way to build a healthy contact list, but it’s important to consider the value you’re offering prospects to avoid spamming them.
- Targeted campaigns are tailored towards an individual, a group of people, or even a business and should have clear objectives and a customer value proposition for each demographic.
- Emotional campaigns use evocative language and messaging to elicit an emotional connection, humanising your brand and making it more relatable to your audience.
- Article-type campaigns involve producing a range of high-value articles or e-books and require detailed planning and deadlines to ensure the time to optimise each piece of content accordingly.
- The core infrastructure of any successful campaign is to evaluate each element, identify the value proposition for the audience, have proper research to support the campaign, and consider how the content is delivered.
- To plan a successful campaign, you need to understand your audience, think about your message, and identify your campaign objectives.
