B2B lead nurturing is one of the foundational parts of a successful lead generation workflow. It turns your boring and long sales process into an effective way of connecting with your leads and turning them into life-long customers.
What is lead nurturing?
A sales cycle is a long process. Even experienced marketers struggle with it sometimes, trying to get the right prospects to move down the funnel at the right time.
Lead nurturing is the process that helps in solving this problem. It acts as an effective marketing tool that bridges the communication gap between the brand and target prospects. It does so with rigorous lead profiling and delivering relevant content that caters to the audience’s pain points.
For most B2B businesses, first-time visitors to your websites are not usually ready to make a purchase. Rather, they’re looking for information as they seek to understand what your product or service offers and if it’ll help solve their problem. It’s likely they represent the committee to make the purchase decision. While they may not be ready to purchase immediately, they will eventually.
What Constitutes a Lead Nurturing Strategy?
Lead nurturing involves cross-channel communication, combining marketing automation and content marketing. A good lead nurturing strategy will have the following key elements:
- Lead scoring - Here, you focus on identifying when and how you should address each buyer with relevant communication and in a timely manner. Lead scoring takes lead fit, interest behavior and buying stage and time into account.
- Multi-channel Distribution – You need to interconnect your channels to ensure sustaining contact with leads across the board. This is vital if only to widen your potential audience and diversify ways to reach and maintain contact with your leads.
- Content Marketing – This involves creating marketing messages valuable and relevant to your prospects and customers. This content may be in audio, a blog post, or video format.
- Re-targeting – Don’t relax once a purchase is settled. Continue the nurture campaign through re-targeting and display ads that are personalised to specific customer segments help to create a consistent experience and gain their loyalty.
- Web – Your website provides a perfect platform to capture new email addresses as well as start and continue conversations.
- Direct mail – Email marketing campaigns to further personalize your marketing campaign while also injecting a personal touch.
- Social – Your lead nurturing strategy is incomplete without incorporating social media marketing. Run social campaigns to engage leads.
- Marketing automation – This technology lets you automate and streamline marketing efforts on various channels to drive more sales and improve efficiency.
It can allow you to create consistent contact and connection with customers and prospects as well as make sure that your marketing content is personalized enough to be relevant to your audiences.
This leads to better customer relationships, increased conversions, improved brand awareness, and authority, as well as increase customer loyalty.
Automation has been an invaluable tool is helping to enhance lead nurturing strategies that help businesses meet potential customers along their buyer’s journey and encourage customers to continue a relationship after a transaction that can lead to future business.
What are leads and what is lead nurturing?
Leads can come from anymore – business cards collected at trade shows, business contact information collected through website visits, past customers, and even email lists purchased from marketing research companies.
Lead nurturing techniques can vary based on the business and specific marketing goals, but there are some best practices that can help you create a solid list of engaging lead nurturing methods.
SeeResponse is your go-to outbound marketing agency and HubSpot partner for B2B marketing, lead generation and lead nurturing.
