'Author: Caroline Watts Many marketers consider content to be primarily used for top-of-funnel lead generation techniques. While it’s absolutely true that content can help you drive the right traffic to your site and introduce your business to prospective customers, it’s also effective at later stages of the funnel. Convert Mid-Funnel Leads. When using marketing automation for lead nurturing, content can (and should) play a major role in nurturing campaigns. Content doesn’t lose its value once a lead becomes a customer. MORE >>

But at the end of the day, we all must stay focused on the fact that we do those things in order to not only generate leads but eventually convert leads to customers. Here are 5 steps for building a lead nurturing system that will help convert your list to qualified sales opportunities and customers. Define your funnel - think about the actions that your prospects typically take as they move through your sales process. For example, the funnel for a software company might be: Download a free report. New leads. Old leads. View the demo. MORE >>

A great addition to Marketo’s Resources has been the Spear Marketing Group white paper, Top 10 Tips for Lead Nurturing Success , written by Howard Sewell. Not only is it a helpful resource when starting your lead nurturing , it also embodies and reinforces so many Marketo best practices. Start with a goal : Setting up a lead nurturing program is not a goal. Some objectives can include: converting raw sales leads into qualified prospects, identifying key decision-makers, turning dormant accounts into active accounts, etc. MORE >>

Well, at Marketo , we’ve built a world-class demand generation machine that has helped us in just 10 months to sign up over 130 customers in more than eight countries, including companies such as Thomson Reuters, Reed Business, and CollabNet. Now, I'm not writing this to promote Marketo, but I think our results are proof that we’re doing something right with our own demand generation and lead management processes. Here’s an outline of the topics I covered: Marketo's demand generation funnel. Our 21 day lead follow-up process. MORE >>

by Jon Miller Last month I participated in a webinar on Adding the Human Touch into Your Lead Nurturing with Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale and the “godfather” of lead nurturing. Q: What marketing metric(s) should I use to capture lead nurturing effectiveness? How do you overcome those who claim they “would have bought the product anyway without nurturing&# ? The bigger your percentage, the better your nurturing is performing. It’s critical to add the human touch to lead nurturing. MORE >>