[MUSIC] The nurture marketing strategy is being used by more and more organizations today because of its sales focus. Its purpose is to provide an individual with relevant content designed to move them from suspect to prospect to customer. Comparing nurture to engagement, the nurture strategy is building a sales relationship with an individual. Our goal is to identify where they are at in the product purchase lifecycle and nurture them with relevant content designed to move them towards purchase. It results in a two-way, database driven, real-time marketing relationship with each individual visiting your web and social assets. Because we are always tracking the individual, the nurture marketing strategy produces total trackability allowing you to develop profitability, lifetime value, and ROI metrics. This makes your social program and integral part of your marketing mix because it returns the same bottom line metrics as your other marketing programs. The nurture marketing strategy is based on answering two important questions. The first is, who are you? To develop effective content, you need to know who each individual is and what they are seeking. Because nurture marketing is a database driven strategy, you'll continually grow in your knowledge base of each individual to better serve them. The second question is, where are you in the product purchase lifecycle? For most products and services, your prospects will have moved through a number of stages from prospect to customer. These stages may take days, weeks, months, or even years to complete. This is an example of a typical product purchase lifecycle. Your prospects start on the left with an awareness of a need, and they move to purchase at the other end of the cycle. Depending on the types of products and services you sell, your organization might have cycles with only a couple of stages while others may have more. You need to examine your organization's lifecycle to determine what is best for you. We will also show you examples of the product lifecycles from actual companies later in this MOOC. The nurture marketing strategy starts with a specific target market and our knowledge of the product purchase lifecycle. What you want to do is create different content relevant to each step in the product purchase lifecycle. In creating your content, you'll incorporate the images, graphics, and text which best resonate with each target market you want to develop. For example, if you are targeting senior managers and engineers, you will produce two different content elements for each step in the product purchase lifecycle. The power of nurture marketing is we don't just deploy the relevant content on our social assets. Rather, we place them behind a registration wall often called a landing page. We then advertise the content on social, web, and traditional media. An individual responds by going to our landing page. They answer a series of questions and give us their email address. This data is stored in our data warehouse. When they submit their registration, we then send them an email containing the link to the content they are seeking. Why not just give it to them on the landing page? Because we want to ensure the email is accurate, as it is our link between our nurture program and our sales and marketing system. In terms of our two questions, we answer the product lifecycle question when the individual makes their content choice. Each content element is unique to a step in the lifecycle, so we know where you are by what you choose. The who question is answered in two ways. Often companies use different graphics, images, and content designed to resonate with a specific target market. Selecting that content tells the organization who you are. In addition, the questions they answer also provide additional information on who they are and what they are seeking. This information becomes the knowledge base to start the relationship. At this point in the nurture strategy, one of two things happen. One is good, the other bad. On the bad side, many companies get your registration information, and then feel they have the right to bombard you with daily emails about their products and services. The result is you likely add them to your spam filter to avoid these nuisance emails and thereby end the relationship. The good side of the nurture marketing strategy is much more powerful and effective. After you register to get the first content, the company not only databases your information but also puts in an electronic cookie on your computer. This cookie tells the company's web and social system who you are and where you are at in the product purchase lifecycle. Each time you visit these sites from now on the company will be able to enhance its knowledge by observing your activities. The company also matches your information to their database system to see if you are a customer. If you are, this information is also added to our tracking cookie. Now the fun happens. Rather than barraging you with offers, the company can watch as you use their web, social sites, and private virtual communities. When your behavior indicates you have moved to the next step in the product purchase lifecycle, real-time marketing systems will determine the next step in the relationship. They may engage you in real time as you are on their sites or later. These systems can send you a text message, email, video, audio, or whatever content is now relevant. Nurture marketing allows your organization to engage prospects and customers in real time and moves your relationship from pushing messages at them to responding to them. It makes you a partner as they move from prospect to customer. [MUSIC]
