Did you know companies with superior lead nurturing capabilities generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost?
A whopping 80% of new leads never make it to the finish line; that is, they don’t translate into sales. On the flip side, nurtured leads produce about a 20% increase in sales opportunities than non-nurtured sales.
The right kind of engagement from the company’s end helps customers find answers to their queries before buying a product or service. Lead nurturing is a B2B marketing strategy that helps companies establish relationships with customers and help them make informed purchase decisions.
Lead nurturing helps to engage potential clients through personalised content meant for every stage of their buying journey. In this scenario, an effective lead nurturing strategy can be highly beneficial in converting leads to customers.
Why Is Lead Nurturing Important?
You are likelier to remember a brand whose advertisements you frequently see. Lead nurturing gives you an edge over other brands that sell the same products or offer similar services. Think of it as giving your potential customers a backstage pass to a concert, a VIP treatment that builds trust and increases their chances of becoming your brand’s loyal fans (and buyers).
Unlike lead generation, which casts a wide net to catch potential leads, lead nurturing does the magic of engaging and developing relationships with prospective buyers to earn their loyalty.
Lead nurturing increases brand awareness, boosts engagement and improves customer retention. It is an excellent way to forge strong connections and build relationships with potential customers by winning their trust. As a result, you unlock the door to a world of sales opportunities.
Nurtured leads don’t just dip their toes in the conversion pool — they cannonball in, making 47% larger purchases than their non-nurtured peers.
Developing a Lead Nurturing Framework
There is no one-size-fits-all when tailoring lead networking strategies for the audience. Brands need to understand their customers well. For this, they must conduct thorough data analysis to understand their customers’ needs and preferences better. Other factors like customer interests and demographics also play an instrumental role.
Identify your target audience
Gather information about their age, geographical location, gender, income levels, and other factors considered essential in the B2B scenarios. Getting the hang of the activities they are interested in can also help curate social media posts that appeal to them.
You must ensure the posts intended for the target audience align with their buying journey. For this, it is essential to track their buying habits and patterns.
Brands also need to check from time to time whether their lead nurturing framework is working. Therefore, it is important to set short goals and check their attainment at certain durations based on several KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
Create engaging content
What kind of content will keep your target audience engaged?
Different stages of the buyer journey require specific strategic approaches. You’ll have to determine which will work the best at every stage.
Types of content for lead nurturing
The kind of content you will require for lead nurturing is specific to every stage of the buying journey. Here’s how.
Prospective buyers tend to browse websites at the top of Google SERPs while looking for certain products or services online. What makes this happen? The answer is SEO. Search engine-optimised content is embedded with target keywords, which causes the content to rank higher in the SERPs, thereby increasing visibility.
You can also choose to introduce your brand or product through social media content. Such content should be informative and rich in data.
For buyers midway through their buying journey, it will be beneficial to provide them with content like white papers, e-books, on-demand webinars and thought leadership articles that can help them assess the worth of a product they plan to purchase.
When a potential buyer is towards the end of their journey and is almost about to make a decision, interactive and customer-generated content such as sign-up pages offering a free trial, FAQs, live demos, and testimonials can be beneficial.
Craft compelling email campaigns
What can help you build relationships with your potential clients better than a personalised nurture campaign through emails? Lead nurturing emails have four to ten times the response rate than standalone emails — it’s like the difference between a polite golf clap and a standing ovation.
Identify your target audience and understand their needs, pain points and interests. Once you have the data, analyse the user's behaviour and curate a personalised email. Including a CTA in the body of the email encourages the user to consider taking action.
Implement multi-channel nurturing
Customers/target audiences are spread across multiple platforms. When looking forward to knowing about your brand, they will likely look for information on your website, social media, search engines, and third-party review websites.
Therefore, brands must ensure their availability across platforms. For this, they must prepare content for nurture marketing that can be showcased on social media or make podcasts and YouTube videos featuring their products. A higher online presence increases the chances of the audience engaging with and remembering your brand.
Leverage marketing automation
Imagine a B2B company that automatically sends personalised emails to potential clients who downloaded a whitepaper, providing further relevant resources and guiding them through the sales funnel. This is an example of market automation.
This lead generation strategy includes sending follow-up emails or even content based on where the user is in the buyer journey. Marketing automation imparts the most relevant information at the right stage of the purchase journey.
Measure and Analyse the Effectiveness of Your Lead Nurturing Campaign
While curating innovative lead nurturing strategies is important, tracking the performance of the ones already being used is also pertinent. Campaign analytics involving KPIs must be used to determine the performance of the strategies in nurturing the leads.
You can also resort to Google Analytics or Hubspot CRM to assess the behaviour of your target audience and determine the areas that need improvement. By tailoring your lead nurturing strategies, you can customise and optimise them to effectively cater to the needs and preferences of your potential customers.
Common B2B Lead Nurturing Challenges
The B2B lead nurturing maze can pose several challenges. And the first step to dealing with these obstacles is identifying them.
Timing and frequency of communication
Infrequent communication may cause your target audience to stray from your brand. Customers also feel undervalued when companies respond to their queries after a delay.
Replying promptly to the concerns and requests of your clients and prospective customers increases engagement and builds credibility. Therefore, you must communicate regularly to ensure your potential client recognises your brand.
Incomplete or inaccurate lead data
An error in data analysis can cause the entire lead nurturing effort to fail. You may deliver content to your potential customer that they do not require at that stage of their buyer journey.
Incorrect data analysis also affects other strategies like automated marketing processes. Therefore, correct data analysis is important to understand what you offer your customer at which time.
Best Practices for B2B Lead Nurturing
Now that we have covered almost everything about lead nurturing, let us look at the best practices that will help achieve the most effective results.
Aligning sales and marketing efforts
You need to understand your customers well — what they are looking for, their pain points, at which stage of the buyer journey they are, and so on. The nurturing strategies must be aligned with the requirements of your potential buyers. Success lies in converting your leads into clients.
Creating a seamless user experience
Your target audience should be able to come across your marketing strategies easily. If they have to put in extra effort to look for a case study or a demo video, they will likely switch to another similar product serving the same purpose.
Personalisation and customisation
Adding a personalised touch to the marketing elements increase the users' engagement. For instance, if you are a SaaS company specialising in workflow optimisation tools, sending your client a personalised demo video explaining how your latest launch can solve their business productivity challenges can add a personal touch to the marketing.
Most importantly, the lead nurturing strategies should be able to gain the potential buyer’s trust.
Struggling to keep your lead nurturing boat afloat? Yarn Owls is here to help!
For any B2B business to flourish, generating leads and keeping them engaged is important so they soon convert to clients. The right kind of lead nurturing tactics can help a company maximise its sales, achieve greater ROI, and develop strong relationships with its customers over time.
Our content writing and digital marketing services can help you through your journey and attain the most desirable results through effective lead conversion. Contact Yarn Owls to learn how we can help you unleash your digital potential!
FAQs
1. What is B2B lead nurturing?
B2B lead nurturing refers to identifying the requirements of potential customers at every stage of their purchase journey and coming up with effective solutions for them.
2. What are the benefits of B2B lead nurturing?
B2B lead nurturing not only helps to create brand awareness but also shortens the sales process. It increases the chances of a lead converting to a client, increases the return on investment, and reduces marketing costs.
3. What are the key elements of creating a lead nurturing strategy?
The key elements of creating a lead nurturing strategy are:
Understanding the persona of the prospective buyers
The content of the lead nurturing campaigns
Time at which you approach the buyer
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