Lead Nurturing for Brokers – Part 1

The Right Content for Each Stage of Your Conversion Funnel
Gone are the times when you could plaster the Internet with banners and wait for conversion-ready leads to come flooding in. Nowadays, it’s important to develop a relationship with your prospective customers as and when they’re exploring your products and services. Rather than thinking of conversions as either successfully occurring or not, it’s better to imagine each lead as going on a journey through your content.

As a marketer, you want to influence these individual journeys at key moments, by pointing them to the material they’re likely to find most relevant to them. At the initial stages, this creates brand awareness and builds a sense of confidence in your offering. Later in the process, it helps to convince prospects to do business with you.

What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is a strategy of repeated engagement as your leads make their way through your various funnels. Its aim is to maintain contact, assist, educate and entice these prospective clients, so that when they’re ready to decide, your brand will be at the forefront of their awareness.

Different figures get thrown around, but it’s widely accepted that it takes between 5 to 8 “touches” with a brand’s marketing materials for a lead to convert. This means that without some sort of lead nurturing initiative, you’re not making the most of your online advertising.

How it looks in practice
Most sales funnels break the conversion process down into four stages. They sometimes use different synonyms, or even add extra steps, but it broadly divides into: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, and Decision. A successful lead nurturing campaign will engage leads with different content at each of these four stages, but is focused primarily on the Interest and Consideration stages.

Awareness
In the highly competitive market of online brokerage, marketers focus on whatever differentiates their company at the awareness stage. A good all-round example would be to promote high profile sponsorships the brand may be involved in, awards recently received, as well as any promotions, competitions or new instruments on offer.

Your visitors that are most likely to convert will vaguely know what they need (access to markets) and are curious to see whether your business can provide it. At the Awareness stage, you hit them with all the evidence to support your case as an established and experienced brand in the industry. This will bring incoming traffic and hopefully inspire them to give your offering a serious second look.

Interest
This is where lead nurturing strategies really come into play. Assuming that you’ve made a good first impression, your leads will proceed to dig a little deeper into your offering. This is called the Interest stage. Here is where all the content explaining your services, the assets and platforms on offer, will come into play. Ensure that you cover all the areas of your business independently and in a variety of formats (blog post, email blast, social media post). This allows you to use website analytics paired with your CRM to target the right message to the right lead at the right time, and in the most appropriate format.

Consideration
At the consideration stage, your leads are close to converting but may need just a little more convincing before they make their decision. This is the stage at which other factors are considered. Testimonials work well at this stage, as do other aspects of how your company conducts itself, such as your customer protection policies and corporate social responsibility initiatives. Remember that younger traders are far more likely to do business with a company that shares their own values. So be sure to promote your company’s green initiatives and charitable partnerships at this stage of your conversion funnel.

A sense of community is also a selling point that can really tip the balance in your favour at the consideration stage. Social trading forums, social media polls, blog opinion pieces, competition results, all these can create a buzz and convey that trading with your company is a great idea.

Decision
Finally we arrive at the decision stage. In online trading, conversions at this stage are typically aided by a competent sales team with access to each lead’s conversion path, demographics and other key behaviours. Part of your lead nurturing strategy can include a ranking system that scores leads by how likely they are to convert depending on certain predefined criteria. These can include how many touches they have already had with your marketing materials, or whether or not they have downloaded one of your trading platforms. Using lead scoring to prioritise which leads are contacted first, your sales teams can be far more surgical in which ones they contact first and what their approach will be when they do.

Conclusion
The key at this and all other previous stages of your funnel, is to ensure that you have the systems in place to keep track of incoming traffic data and make it actionable. Armed with it and a catalogue of high quality content, you can approach lead conversion in a far more sophisticated and targeted manner.

As with all the material on this blog, if you would like to discuss the technical aspects of how to set up your brokerage systems so as to run effective lead nurturing campaigns, don’t hesitate to contact one of our success managers, who will be delighted to help.

Continue reading in part 2.