When it comes to lead nurturing, it’s not impossible to be two places at once.

In fact, you need to be two places at once. Hell, you need to be ten places at once. Because if you’re not omnipresent online, your leads won’t be able to discover you easily. And that’s a lot of missed opportunities.

To cater to your leads at any stage in the sales funnel, you need to employ a multi-channel lead nurturing strategy. That means you need to send your marketing messages to leads using not just one channel [cough cough email cough], but all the channels that are relevant to your leads.

It’s a tall order, but with marketing automation on your side, anything is possible.

Being Everywhere All at Once

The inbound marketing methodology is all about delivering the right info to the right people at the right time. To prod your leads toward a sale, you need to make your message as personal and applicable to them as possible.

Unless your target audience consists of exactly one person, you’ve got some serious tailoring to do.

For years, email marketing has been the king of most lead nurturing strategies. But these days, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach contacts via email. With spam filters, expired contact databases, and plain-old jaded people digital marketers now have to deal with, it’s no wonder email engagement is suffering across the board.

This is why you need multi-channel lead nurturing.

If your leads aren’t responding to your emails, you need to try something else. Or somethings else. Because when you employ several different marketing tools — and sync them all together — not only will you be able to reach more people, you’ll also gain far greater awareness and brand recognition than if you’d stuck to one method alone.

The 5 Pillars of Multi-Channel Lead Nurturing

Multi-channel lead nurturing can employ a variety of tools, but a few — five, to be exact — are absolutely essential for any business taking it seriously.

Here are the five lead nurturing pillars to stand on.

1. Email Marketing

Yes, email marketing is still the first and best way to nudge your leads along the buyer’s journey.

Even within email marketing, though, there are several different ways to nurture leads, depending on where they are in the sales funnel. At the top? Send them an introductory email with links to helpful blog posts or eBooks. Toward the bottom? Give them an exclusive, limited-time offer on a relevant product or service.

Whatever you do, though, don’t rely on email alone. Many of your leads won’t even open your emails, but that doesn’t mean they’re unreceptive to your messaging. Try to reach them via another outlet, like…

2. Social Media Monitoring

People maybe ignoring their emails, but they’re definitely not ignoring their social media accounts. Join the party everyone’s already at, and start networking with contacts via social media.

It’s not enough to simply join Facebook and share a couple of posts. To truly cultivate relationships with your leads, you need to interact with them — one-on-one. Like, comment on, or message leads when appropriate.

And please, never let one of their messages to you go unanswered. Whether good or bad, they cared enough about your company to reach out to you. Don’t drop the ball.

3. Dynamic Website Content

Of course, you should have helpful content on your website. Hopefully, you have a blog that answers common questions and points people toward your products or services.

But to be really effective in helping leads along the buyer’s journey, your content needs to be not just good, but dynamic. That means using marketing automation software to personalize Web content based on your current relationship with a contact. Just sent them an email about your new product? Feature it on your site. Saw that they’ve been browsing your services? Hit them with a retargeting ad.

4. Retargeting Ads

We’ve all seen them: those little boxes on the side of your Facebook that show the exact same product you looked at yesterday.

While retargeting ads can seem intrusive, they can also be extremely effective at getting leads to act. Sometimes, all they need is a little reminder.

You can run retargeting ads on many different platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the all-powerful Google Display Network. Choose what’s right for you, and tread lightly.

5. Mobile Marketing Automation

We’d be remiss to talk about multi-channel lead nurturing and not mention the importance of mobile.

Whatever sites your leads are visiting, more often than not, they’re visiting them on their mobile devices. In fact, more than 60% of all web traffic happens on mobile devices. The transition from desktop to mobile means you need to make sure your content is not only supported by mobile, but looks frickin’ awesome on it.

You should also make use of specific mobile strategies like location-based technology and text message marketing. And don’t underestimate the importance of a regular old phone call. Set up automated emails to notify your sales team whenever a lead is browsing your site so they can follow up with them in a timely manner.

Trust us, this phone call thing pays. According to a study of 32 million phone calls conducted by the call intelligence company Invoca, sales calls that were made after leads interacted online had an average conversion rate of 30-50%. Yeah. Seriously.

Be Omnipresent, But Not Omnicreepy

Omnipresence: being present everywhere at the same time.

Omnicreepiness: being super creepy about being present everywhere at the same time.

When you employ a multi-channel lead nurturing strategy, it’s easy to come across as spammy or impersonal if you do it wrong. You don’t want your leads to think you’re stalking them or not listening to their needs.

To help you avoid omnicreepiness, here are some helpful lead nurturing tips:

• Know what you’re trying to accomplish. When you know a) where your leads are in the buyer’s journey and b) what content or channels would be most useful to them in that stage, you’ll be able to market to them in a more personalized way.
• Listen, then respond. Don’t keep blasting messages to leads without asking what they need — or without listening to their answers. If they tell you you’re doing something wrong (or right), adjust your strategy accordingly.
• Don’t overdo it. Being everywhere at once doesn’t mean talking everywhere at once. You want to be available to your leads at all times, but you don’t want to market to them too much, or they’ll get annoyed with you.
• Don’t repeat what you’ve already done. People hate receiving the exact same content twice. Sending duplicate content to a lead indicates that you’re not aware of their needs. Make sure you’re tracking your leads so this doesn’t happen.
• Use marketing automation software to your advantage. Without it, there’s no way you can be omnipresent online. Make use of email automation, social media monitoring tools, dynamic Web content, and advanced analytics to successfully show up everywhere at once.

Next Steps

In the end, the best lead nurturing strategy is a comprehensive lead nurturing strategy.

And you can’t have a comprehensive lead nurturing strategy without the help of digital marketing.

If you’d like to learn more about how to be omnipresent online, check out our free resources. We have everything you need to know about lead nurturing, from sending personalized emails to engaging with leads on social media to creating dynamic Web content.

If you’ve got any questions, please ask!