With advanced marketing analytics, opportunities for deep behavior-triggered lead nurturing abound. There’s so much data available, and so much potential data, you owe it to your visitors to provide them with information that will help them make better decisions. But developing a strategy around all of this data can seem daunting. Where do you start?

You should simply start by getting started. Here are 7 tips to get your advanced lead nurturing efforts off the ground.

Step 1: Have a solid understanding of your sales cycle

Understanding where your lead is in your sales cycle sets the stage for what your workflows will offer. Typically, the sales cycle is as follows:

Attract
Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)
Delight

• Step 2: Decide which persona you’re targeting

. . Before you can create an email or your content offers, you must know to whom you are targeting. Mother Mary shouldn’t be receiving Brother Brad’s emails. It just doesn’t work that way in inbound marketing.

• Step 3: Set goals for the campaign

Most responses are… That’s easy, more leads! Done and done. Let’s try to get a bit more specific. If you’ve taken a leadership course, you may have heard of SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. These apply to inbound marketing, too.

Typical campaign goals are:

• Build trust and thought leadership with people in the early stages of the sales cycle
• Move leads in the Awareness stage to the Consideration stage
• Move leads in the Consideration stage to the Purchase stage
• Re-engage leads that fell to the wayside or were unqualified at an earlier date
• Step 4: Map your content
• To find the logical pathways your lead takes from attract to purchase
• To determine which content pieces will move the lead through the process
• To take inventory of what content you need-to adjust the content for a specific buyer persona
• Step 5: Make the workflow live and start collecting data

It’s alive! And now it’s collecting data. Which I really, really like.

• Step 6: Analyze the results and tweak trigger emails accordingly

How is your campaign doing? Is it meeting those goals we set in Step 3? Let’s analyze the data, and here are the triggers to pay attention to:

• Click-through rate (at least 5 percent)
• Check your conversions for each landing page
• Unsubscribe rate (less than 1 percent)
• Step 7: Adjust & Repeat Accordingly

Marketers have never had as much information about their customers available to them as they have today. The lead generation methods we praised a decade ago seem obsolete; the tides of marketing trends constantly shift. As we move into a new era of marketing–one led by social media and is on the up and up. Since my days as an exclusive inbound marketer, I’ve learned that smart outbound prospecting is possible again–for the first time in years. Lead lists don’t have to be burdens anymore.

Patience and agility will be important as you build a behavior-triggered lead nurturing strategy based on advance marketing analytics. It takes time to develop an accurate picture of any visitor, and you will need to analyze the data regularly for insights into a potential customer’s behavior.

That doesn’t mean you can’t learn something early in the process. You just have to get started before you see any results.

So start, get started now. I mean, right now.. and please, don’t be that guy who shows up way too late to the party.

No one likes that guy.