DemandGen Report just put out a study that revealed a third of marketers don’t see any difference in the performance of their nurtured vs un-nurtured leads. This seems shocking at first, but if you look at the way most nurture programs get built, it’s no surprise.
Nurture programs are usually built to solve two issues:
- Lead qualification concerns—either from sales feedback or purely high disqualification rates—and a need for more qualification from marketing before sales handoff
- A place to put the disqualified leads passed back from sales
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these pain points, but the issue is the approach used to solve them. Nurture is often positioned as a low hanging fruit project, one that simply involves repackaging existing content, serving it up a series of nice looking emails, and watch the qualified leads roll in.
Most of the time this is picking the lowest common denominator that unifies the database, selecting content that generically speaks to it, and hoping for the best. I think most marketers aren’t fooling themselves – they know a more targeted, personalized approach is likely to perform better. But the shotgun approach is defended because it’s the shortest, easiest path to launch.
The thinking is – once there is a basic, broad nurture up and running, the company can learn from it to build more targeted nurture streams later.
So the team puts a ton of time and effort in getting the broad nurture up and running, with a a lot of fanfare and…crickets. Invariably the broad nurture stream fails to perform. No big surprise, but because the company started with a program destined for failure, the likelihood of more investment in the narrower, more targeted nurtures (ironically those most likely to succeed) dries up.
Marketers design nurture programs destined for failure, and then see poor performance from nurtured leads. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
There are no shortcuts in nurture – doing it right requires dedicated investment, and at times, dedicated content production, and starting with small, focused audiences with specific content. If our shotgun approach to inbound and outbound marketing is failing to get leads to a qualified level, why should we expect the same approach in nurture would yield any different results?