Are you happy with your lead nurture process? If not, don’t worry – you’re not alone. In fact, many businesses struggle to create a successful lead nurture process. But that’s okay – we’re here to help. In this blog post, we’ll outline four steps you can take to improve your lead nurture process. Follow these steps and you’ll be on your way to generating more leads and closing more sales.
Home Service Direct can guarantee is that acquiring more exclusive tree service leads is not better if you haven’t figured out how to nurture your current leads.
The main goal of lead nurturing is to help your potential customers along their buying process/journey. Lead nurturing is not just about making new tree service leads “marketing qualified.” It is about helping the leads progress along the way so that your company can book more tree service jobs.
One of the reasons most tree service companies lose their leads is that they rarely understand the steps they need to follow to make lead nurturing effective. In this detailed guide, we will show you the 4 steps to follow to improve your lead nurture process.
Step by Step Guide on How to Improve Your Leads Nurture Process
1. Build a Buyer’s Journey Map
To build an effective buyer’s journey map, you need to step in your customer’s shoes. Try and be as close as possible to your customer’s experience by observing his/her behaviors.
This puts you in a better position to answer the following questions:
- What are the customer’s problems?
- What are the customer’s fears?
- What does the customer hope to gain by hiring your tree service company?
Only build your customer’s journey map after gaining a solid understanding of the property owners you are planning to work with.
What’s a Customer Journey Map?
If you are new to lead nurturing, this may be a question you are asking yourself right now. Simply defined, a customer journey map tells the story of your client’s experience – that is, from the initial contact, through the engagement process, and into your long-term relationship with the customer.
When creating your customer’s journey map, you will need to identify the questions he/she has at each stage of their buying journey. Examples of questions that customers often ask themselves include:
- How will your tree pruning/tree trimming/tree removal service help my commercial or residential property?
- Does your tree service company guarantee zero damage to my property?
- Is there another tree service company out there that is better?
- Is your company credible?
- Are your tree service procedures affordable?
Once you figure out the questions customers ask themselves, you will be in a position to answer them. You will also be in a position to remind potential customers of the benefits of hiring your tree service company.
Always remember that customers do not want to deal with a company that does not fully understand its solutions. When you understand the questions that customers often ask, you will be creating value by giving your customers useful and relevant information in digestible and bite-sized chunks.
Use Your Customer’s Journey Map to Refocus Your Nurturing Approach
With a customer’s journey map, understanding the fundamental interactions that future potential customers will have with your tree service company should be easy. You will get to know:
- What are their motivations?
- What are the main questions they have about each of your marketing touchpoints?
- What concerns do they have when they talk with peers about tree services?
The goal of customer journey mapping is to get actionable customer insight. With customer insight, you can increase the relevance and clarity of your sales messaging, thus improving your leads’ experience. With a customer journey map, it will be easier for your company to give customers the information they need.
2. Plan the Lead Nurturing Path with a Major Focus on Progression
Your company should invest its efforts, not just into working on creative content that drives lead capture, but also on content that helps with lead progression.
At Home Service Direct, our team has seen tree service companies spend most of their marketing budget on getting property owners to raise their hands and express interest in tree services. These companies rarely spend enough on helping potential customers progress towards ordering tree services.
One of the things these tree service companies forget is that when a potential customer raises his or her hand, it is usually hard to keep the hand up throughout the long buying journey. For this reason, potential customers often need help with carrying the weight of their hands.
For potential customers, the process of buying feels heavy. Customers are always weighing their options and considering numerous factors.
The goal of investing some time into lead nurturing is to reduce the time that potential customers have to bear the weight of buying (or raising their hands to express interest). Lead nurturing helps progress the leads from initial interest towards intent to purchase.
3. Walk the Buying Path with Your Tree Service Leads
In complex sales, the buyer’s journey can be challenging and long. To help the potential customers move from the initial interest to the purchase interest, your main goal should be to nourish the customer along the way, guiding them with a meaningful compass that convinces them to choose your tree service company.
Think of your tree service marketing team as trail guides that need to point out the vital sights along the way – keep in mind that these should be sights that play major roles in the decision-making process. Your company’s marketing team should act like the customer’s coach. The team should be there for the leads throughout their buying journey, not only responding to their needs but also offering guidance relevant to their experience.
Ensure your marketing team is walking at the customer’s pace. They need to slow down and even take a longer route when necessary.
If your marketing team hurries your leads along the way, your tree service company may end up with an exhausted potential customer. An exhausted lead may not feel good about your company and may not want to continue the path to order a tree service.
Most buyers evaluate tree service companies based on “how you sell to me shows how your company will service me.” For this reason, when walking with a potential customer through the buying process, ensure your leads:
- Are familiar with your tree service company and what your team is capable of.
- Trust your company has the necessary expertise in the tree service field.
- Believe that your tree service business understands customer problems and is ready to solve them.
- Like your company enough to order your tree services.
Remember: You Cannot Automate Trust
Trust-building has to be one of the themes of your lead nurturing efforts. By offering valuable information and education to your potential customers upfront, you become a trusted advisor.
Providing valuable information to property owners positions you as an expert in the tree service business. By providing solutions and insights within the realm of your company’s expertise, you become the first company that property owners turn to when a need for tree services arises.
Make developing trust the main point of your tree service marketing program. This should make your business more profitable and less reliant on using price as its sole competition option.
4. Keep Walking the Journey
As surprising as it might seem, research studies show that longer-term leads (future opportunities), often ignored by marketing teams, represent 40% to 70% of potential sales. This indicates that ending the lead nurturing process too soon can force your tree service company to leave jobs on the table.
Even when it feels like you should end the lead nurturing process with a specific lead, consider investing some more time into the buyer’s journey. Some buyers often take longer to make their decision.
Three Lead Generation Stages to Nurture
While your tree service customers may not see your sales funnels, they get an aggregate experience of what they see, hear and feel from your company. Customers generally fit in 3 different stages when it comes to buying cycles.
The lead nurturing experience you give your leads should be different in each funnel stage. Below, we will look at the three different funnel stages and also offer you tips on how to target each stage correctly.
Stage 1: Top of the Funnel
Abbreviated as TOFU, people in the Top of the Funnel stage are generally looking for tips, ideas, and resources that can help them answer questions and also get ideas for the problems they are facing with their trees.
At this stage, you will be attracting relevant visitors. However, these visitors will be unknown to you. Your goal with leads at the TOFU stage should be to assist and provide value to get a conversion – this should help you move these leads from anonymous website visitors to known people – that is, to get their name and contact details.
Stage 2: Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) Stage
At this stage, most of the leads have already taken some conversion steps to express their interest – this could include subscribing or even registering and giving their contact details.
At this stage, your company should focus on determining whether the lead is a good fit for pursuing. You will also need to determine their level of qualification.
During this stage, you will need to learn lead motivation. What’s more, you will need to share content that helps the lead progress from interest and move towards the purchase intent.
Stage 3: Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)
By the time leads reach the Bottom of the Funnel stage, they have already moved through a series of micro-decisions on their buyer’s journey. At this stage, you will be moving these leads to a sales-qualified opportunity.
It is at this point that you should transfer the leads from marketing to the sales department. In this stage, the sales department can easily convert the tree service leads into paying customers.
