As a business owner, even if you've managed to get your marketing up and running, there’s still limited time in the day you can devote to maintaining it. You can use the time saving tips I've already laid out in the last two blog posts, but any way that you can use HubSpot and inbound marketing more efficiently, the better off you’ll be. One of the best ways you can do this by automating lead nurturing.

Once your content creation and social sharing are in place, you’ll be generating leads for your company from your inbound marketing strategy. The problem is finding the time to follow up with everyone. In a perfect world, you’d have the time and resources to follow up with each contact. After all, someone decided that out of every website on the internet, they wanted to visit yours. Then they decided to give your their information so you could reach out to them, and so that they could download something they found useful. They may not want your product (yet), but they at least looked to you for help or insights.

But with your time already stretched to the max, finding the extra hours to keep in touch with every visitor or contact is unrealistic. With lead nurturing, you can automate this process! Using HubSpot, you can send timed emails after someone has filled out a form on your site. This is a great way to add more value to their experience by sharing useful materials, and to keep yourself in contact.

Best of all from your perspective as a busy business owner: it's automatic, and it helps you to prioritize who to continue to reach out to. You may only have time for one call to a prospect today, so you want to make sure you pick the contact most likely to want your service or product. The good news is that, with lead-nurturing, you don’t have to guess which contacts are worth following up with. You can see who’s warmest and reach out to them first.

Some best practices for lead nurturing:

-Make sure you send out content about different topics to see if any one gets more interest than the others. This will tell you more about where your contact is in their journey.

- Send out another offer to see if they will fill out another form. This will also tell you more about what problems you can help solve before you reach out in person. Try using smart forms to make sure you aren’t asking the same question twice!

-Don’t confuse lead nurturing for a consultative sales process. Generally, people still aren’t going to sell themselves. They’ll do more research online before they reach out to someone, but ultimately, people want to buy from other people.

After the lead-nurturing process, you will still need to reach out to people or hand them off to your sales team (if you have one) to keep the ball rolling. But automating the lead nurturing process can help you stay in contact with prospects and build interest. This simplifies the sales process, saves you time, and provides a positive experience for your potential customers.