Lead Nurturing: What Are Your School’s Follow-Up Efforts?

An effective lead nurturing strategy is critical as, in most cases, your leads are unlikely to decide straight away. A good lead nurturing strategy should engage your audience, educate them and provide content that results in your leads becoming students.

What can you do to nurture your leads?

Firstly, it is important to identify your target audience and then compile buyer/marketing personas which are consistent with your identified target audience. This is a useful exercise which will bring together market research and also data about your existing students to ultimately guide your lead nurturing strategy and highlight different approaches you can implement to attract more students. Demographics, behaviour, aspirations and challenges should all be included in your persona profiles. When you begin to understand your varied buyer personas, you can begin to tailor your content towards them resulting in more engagement as you cater to their individual interests and objectives.

Whilst email marketing can be extremely beneficial, it can often seem generic and lack any form of personalisation. With multi-channel marketing techniques, you not only improve outreach by including content on social media platforms but also diversify the type of content you are putting out, e.g. blog posts, videos, an eBook etc. By using many different techniques, you are more likely to stand out to the leads you already have as well as attracting more potential students. It is also likely that each of your leads will respond differently to different types of content, so it’s important to keep the personas in mind and personalise content to appeal to them.

The focus should always remain on the leads you have attracted through your marketing strategy, therefore, in order to nurture your audience further a follow up is a very simple yet effective way to ensure leads turn into students. A simple call or email can bridge that gap by engaging and delighting your leads, it shows them that you are dedicated to help ease their problems and gives an opportunity for further discussion.

What are the stages of your leads’ journey?

Now we know how to nurture our leads, it is important to identify the specific stages that turns a lead into a student who could potentially promote your school. The initial stage is awareness, this stage begins when the lead notices a problem or limitation of their current situation. During this stage, the main thing you need to focus on is engagement as we know very little about their specific current issues.

After this stage, you should learn more about what they need through their interaction with your website as they are now actively searching for solutions. This consideration stage is where most of the nurturing needs to take place as the lead is looking to us for help, from the information gained at this stage you can start to piece together things that they may need from you.

The final stage is perhaps the most important. The decision stage is ultimately when your contact is ready to decide on a solution to their problem, here you should focus on sending your lead content that is directed and personalised towards them in order to secure them as a student and to highlight the specific services you can provide them with. It is important that in this final stage you really stand out and delight the lead.

To sum up:

• Buyer/marketing personas are an effective tool which aids personalisation, engagement and can attract more leads.
• Multi-channel marketing is a strategy which ensures a higher level of engagement, educates leads and creates a variety of accessible resources to aid the leads’ decision.
• Follow up calls/emails can also be a very beneficial strategy to implement as it opens up the possibility of direct contact with the lead.
• The consideration stage is the point at which most of the nurturing should occur.
• During the decision stage, you should give your lead everything they need to make the right decision.
  
  

  Need help strategising personas and lead nurturing workflows? Our education marketing consultants can help!