Thinking Through Advanced Lead Nurturing Campaigns

One of my all-time favorite movies as a marketer is Wag the Dog. Before elections, a spin-doctor (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin

Hoffman) join efforts to "fabricate" a war in order to cover-up a presidential sex scandal. De Niro's character has this wonderful line that he repeats often throughout the movie, "They’re nice enough people. They just haven’t thought it through." How often does that describe business? The process of thinking it through, especially as it relates to your lead nurturing target experience, can be daunting. As this is my area of specialty (heuristic psychology and marketing) I wanted to share my strategies for those of you attacking this massive undertaking, either for you own business or a client.

First, A Definition: Are you familiar with heuristics? If you are, you can skip ahead to the next paragraph. Heuristics, in a nutshell is the use of shortcuts and tools like Best Practices or a Rule of Thumb. As it applies to advanced lead nurturing, we need to influence our lead's behavior. Of course, the Internet doesn't give us the luxury of knowing everything that is going on at the user's end of the communication. But, when we use tools like the ones that Hubspot's Enterprise level offering provides we can start to chart patterns of behavior much more intelligently.

Below is one of my favorite heuristic charts ever to demonstrate the details of planning an advanced lead nurturing campaign.
post click marketing heuristic

Note to Agencies: Trying to convince a client of your value when they request lead nurturing, client retention strategies, better qualified leads, yada, yada? Show them this, THEN show them your retainer cost. If they are wise, they will pay it happily.

Note to Businesses: If you think you can task your current marketing team or contractors with this and get optimum results, be prepared to take them off of every other project until they complete this. But, be warned - this is very specialized work that very few marketers do well. (Sorry, peers - it's true.) Only a few very psychology-educated, uber-current marketers or consumer behaviorists will perform to this level of detail.

More on the Process: Refer to the above chart and note the words along the right edge. These are your thinking demarcations.

Context is your big question-mark because you have absolutely zero control over it. And, you have no idea in what personal context your target is using their chosen source (in a loud coffee shop while waiting for someone, late at night when they can't sleep, after a fight with their sister, with a intermittent internet connection.) Never underestimate personal contexts you cannot imagine yet.
Content is what you are delivering and the message you send. It needs to match the wants and expectations of your target or you will lose them.
Conversion in my thought process, this has little to do with attainment %. My concern is testing every possible element on the pages that are meant to deliver the conversion. This is when you will appreciate how important a well designed plan and good automation software can be.

While this could be one of the longer heuristics for online marketing, I wouldn't begin a campaign without it. Any corners you cut will be "ballistic podiatry"!

Credits: Thanks to Scott Brinker for posting this chart and helping make this task manageable for me and now, probably many others.