These are fairly robust flows and contain multiple branches with personalized content based on website behavior, content engagement, self-identified interests, and other attributes.
We entice them with content based on interests. Below, you can see emails, delays in timing, and triggers to push them to other workflows.
Image from author, December 2024
You can use automation to provide that intent-driven content we talked about above.
Your strategy should include thinking clearly through the customer journey to current customers (think upsell, cross-sell, retention).
Automation can be used across the journey and is great for converting abandoned carts, showing personalized offers to users on your site, or getting prospects to convert into your newsletter.
There’s so much more to unpack here, but hopefully, you can envision how workflows are powered by data and segmentation and help your team spend their time in other places by nurturing leads for you.
Targeted Retargeting
There’s power in building a well-intentioned segmentation and tagging workflows.
Building on the segmentation above, you can serve targeted ads to leads or customers when they’re on their favorite social media site or just browsing the web.
If you’re running retargeting, how much personalization is going into it? Or are you going straight for the bottom of the funnel?
This is another opportunity to show you’re listening, you know them, build loyalty, and stay top-of-mind.
Join Your Marketing And Sales Teams (& Customer Service) At The Hip
I’ll say it again: If you want more quality in your pipeline, you need more quality in your marketing efforts.
You have a wealth of knowledge under your roof. How well are you leveraging it? Here’s your chance to knowledge-share in order to make more informed decisions.
In order to put your best efforts into the most impactful places, sales and marketing should collaborate on ICP development, a content strategy to attract, nurture, and retain customers, and, of course, a feedback loop on lead quality.
Marketing needs to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly of their efforts.
When you’re looking at marketing to drive quality leads more than anything, feedback on customer interactions gives them a vantage point to create/modify content that speaks more closely to their needs.
For your sales team, knowing the customer more deeply enables them to personalize efforts during their sales journey, and create more meaningful connections.
This builds trust, increases the likelihood of closing deals, and helps with greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Communication and feedback are really the core components here.
I could go on and on here, so let me know if a deeper post might interest you.
Actions For Sales & Marketing Alignment:
Collaborative persona development: marketing can provide data on market trends and behaviors, while the sales team contributes insights from direct customer interactions.
Shared use of customer relationship management (CRM) and data tools – centralized, single source of truth.
Regular communication between teams: Slack, standups, joint training sessions.
Collaborate on nurture sequences – a place content mismatch can break a deal.
It’s important to note that ICP knowledge and sales and marketing collaboration are the foundational blocks for success. Everything in this post hinges on this working partnership.
Holistic Marketing Campaigns For A Full, Consistent Journey
A holistic marketing strategy takes into account all stages of the journey, and that different people consume content differently across multiple channels.
This is your opportunity to test different content formats with different CTAs.
You may find that certain content formats perform better on specific channels, and optimize toward that.
To keep building on quality, maintaining brand consistency is so important here.
The more types of content and channels you put them on, the more imperative it is that you treat each as an extension of the current campaign and not a one-off.
Nothing can turn off a lead faster than an inconsistent experience. They see that as a reflection of your brand and the rest of the journey with you.
Get Real About Costs And What You’re Willing To Pay For A Lead
I said it before: “Investing in quality resources for lead generation may mean higher costs, but it can lead to higher quality leads and lower overall Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC).”
CRM access and continual feedback from sales fill a blind spot to help marketing more fully understand lead quality and where content/channels need to be tweaked.
It’s up to marketing to convey the value of the marketing and the expected return on the investment.
Sometimes, ROI is long term and not easily realized in the short term. And, not all metrics or journey stages are going to be easy to quantify.
When presenting the plan to stakeholders, take the time to go through shifts in strategy and provide the whys behind it.
Explain the importance of focusing on content to drive better leads, and tell the story. Show the numbers.
And, use examples that might help them reflect on their own buying habits to get the buy-in you’re looking for.
Which brings us to a stakeholder’s favorite marketing excuse…
Get Real About What You Can Track And What You Don’t Need To Track
Not every click or conversion holds the same weight. This will become evident when you plan your lead scoring. And it’s time we stopped treating marketing performance metrics that way, too.
Sure, it’s easy to track form fills on a gated whitepaper in the consideration phase, but it’s not as easy to track awareness efforts from an optimized blog post.
Yet, that blog post counts as a touchpoint along the journey, and needs to have budget and resources allocated to it.
This is where asking for budget and showing attribution gets tricky. With the move to quality, lead costs can be more expensive (especially at first while you’re optimizing).
Stakeholders and your CFO are asking how many of those awareness leads converted and at what cost – when, in reality, those may not be realized for months or years, depending on your sales cycle.
So, what do you track? It depends. For each stage of the journey, you will have different metrics to track across different media types.
Awareness pieces are designed to drive engagement, so it usually doesn’t make sense to push a “buy now” CTA when they’re just becoming acquainted with your brand.
Podcasts, for example, are an awareness tool. You should track downloads, listening time, reviews, and followers.
For a blog post, tracking track time on site, scroll depth, along with any engagement like social shares of blog posts.
You might not be able to directly attribute these efforts to sales, but they do aid in the sale process and, as such, need resources.
If your efforts are well-developed and backed with insightful data, these awareness pieces should help you continue nurturing leads along the way.
Be patient, but also be testing.
Adapt your thinking to evaluate lifetime value rather than needing to value each individual touchpoint.
Adapt Or Get Left Behind
There are so many more things I could have talked about. I feel remiss that I didn’t even touch on AI, but that’s a whole post we’ll save for another day.
Quick plug for AI: Let it be your sidekick, your research assistant, the Robin to your Batman. Use AI to help automate tasks that are taking up human resources. Think about where you need humans to do the work, and see what you can offload to AI. I also use AI to inspire me when I’m short on time. It can also help you analyze data or perform competitor research.
Building the strategy, journeys, and segmentation to power the personalization and automation engine will take your team time. Be tenacious and patient – don’t wait for perfection.
Know that your email is golden, and can be your biggest source of conversions, especially if segmented properly. This is your chance to have one-on-one conversations and meet prospects where they are in their journey.
A strong segmentation strategy will help with lead-scoring power automation and support a great retargeting strategy.
Now, it’s time to get real about what you’re willing to pay for a quality lead, what resources need to go into making that happen, and what makes sense to track as you forge into this new strategy.
Here’s to driving quality leads and focusing on the journey in 2025!
More Resources:
Featured Image: Lightspring/Shutterstock