Lead Nurture Campaigns for Agribusinesses

So, you’ve successfully generated several new leads for your agribusiness. What can you do now to ensure these leads become paying customers? A lead nurture campaign.

Lead nurturing is a long-term strategy used to interact with customers and prospects at different points in the sales funnel. This could mean converting leads into customers, short-term customers into long-term customers, customers into promoters, or vendors into affiliates.

A Definitive Guide to Understanding HubSpot for Marketing

Here’s what you need to know about lead nurture campaigns, including the benefits, types, and features of an effective nurture strategy.

What Does Lead Nurturing Look Like for Ag Businesses?

Nurture marketing campaigns are about developing relationships between existing leads and your brand. Emphasis on existing leads.

Rather than generating new leads, nurture campaigns create a conversation with someone who has already engaged with your company. You encourage people to recognize and trust your brand through these conversations, so they’ll keep turning to you for agricultural solutions.

Nurturing is the core tenet of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing emphasizes offering value to your audience instead of pursuing them with high-pressure sales tactics. It also strives to be specific to your audience or even to individuals. In short, it’s less sales-like and more personal.

Of course, the long-term goal is to convert nurtured leads into customers. Nurture campaigns gently advance leads through the sales pipeline in a non-urgent way. Since the focus here is on cultivating trusting relationships, these campaigns aim to send the right information to the right contacts at the right time. Show your leads how your brand can accommodate what they are looking for.

Does your buyer persona seek specific content, a particular product, or general support? Engage these leads with relevant, personalized information from different marketing channels. These could be automated marketing emails, social media posts, retargeting ads, and dynamic web pages. Remember that it often takes 8-10 points of exposure before someone feels comfortable making a purchase. Each touchpoint should highlight your product or service benefits, educate readers, and offer promotions to convert leads into customers.

Types of Nurture Campaigns for Agribusinesses; The Customer Journey.

An email nurture campaign for agribusinesses is divided into categories according to what your target audience and potential customers want to do, plus their current place in the buyer’s journey.

As your audience moves through the buyer’s journey, they go from vaguely interested prospects to loyal customers.

Here’s how the buyer’s journey typically looks for an agribusiness:

Awareness Stage: Leads identify a problem and seek to understand it better.

Consideration Stage: Leads research on how best to solve their problem.

Decision Stage: Leads select a course of action based on their research.

Various campaigns address what customers want to accomplish in the awareness, consideration, and decision stage. Once a buyer completes their journey, you can move them back to the awareness stage for another service that provides additional value.

Here’s an example of a nurture campaign during the awareness stage. A person visits your agribusiness website, browses your grain market posts, and fills out your subscription form. This generates a new lead alert. Ten days later, an email with a webinar about grain marketing is sent. The lead watches the webinar, which prompts another email directing them to a webpage offering a downloadable white paper on grain markets.

As you can see, there are no specific calls to action or a sense of urgency. It’s about creating a dialogue. You increase your brand awareness, establish expertise, and become a resource for leads while slowly moving them towards conversion.

Keeping this in mind, you’ll need to set goals for your campaigns first. These goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely). Then, consider how these objectives can help move leads through the buyer’s journey and how each stage impacts them.

Best Practices for Nurture Campaigns

Remember, nurture campaigns are designed with the lead in mind. To ensure their needs are kept front and center, use the following best practices as you create your strategy.

Provide Valuable Content at Every Stage Each stage of the buyer’s journey is another opportunity to tailor the right content to the right people at the right time. For example:

Awareness Stage: Send videos, blog posts, social posts, newsletters, and infographics

Consideration Stage: Share webinars, podcasts, ebooks, whitepapers, and case studies

Decision Stage: Offer product or service demos or free trials

On average, leads receive 10 marketing touches from when they first learn about your company to when they convert to a customer. Therefore, communicate with leads multiple times by leveraging the different types of content outlined above.

Targeted Content & Personalization

Nurturing your leads with content that is unique and relevant to them yields 72% higher conversion rates. Use dynamic content to show information or products specifically designed to appeal to their interests, behaviors, goals, and demographics. Also, leverage personalization tokens within the content, like their first name.

Keep It Brief- Social posts are short content by nature but keep your emails brief. Focus only on one relevant topic per email, and include only the information that will be most enticing to your leads.

Timely Follow-Ups- Approximately 96% of your website visitors are not ready to make a purchase. So, to keep your brand top of mind, follow up quickly and consistently.

Lead Scoring- Determine which leads are most qualified for sales and, thus, deserve your immediate attention. Then, you can rate them based on their demographics, behaviors, and interests.

Marketing & Sales Alignment- Ensure a smooth handoff between marketing and sales so that leads don’t fall through the cracks. According to Forrester Research, companies that are excellent at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales leads.

HubSpot for Agribusiness Sales and Marketing

Lead nurturing will take your ag marketing strategy to the next level. You can expect higher conversion rates, faster sales cycles, and a more confident sales team. HubSpot can help.

HubSpot seamlessly integrates your marketing processes while working silently in the background to deliver friendly messages that engage your leads. You can save time and effort by creating marketing automation workflows within HubSpot to send nurturing emails on your behalf.

Discover How Anthem Ag Supports Agribusiness Clients With: