As a lead generation expert, you need to fuel the top of your organization’s sales funnel with quality leads.
These quality leads would not reach the bottom of the sales funnel independently. Therefore, you require an impactful lead nurture strategy for your business to nurture prospects that hold immense potential to convert into customers.
Instead of directly jumping on the bandwagon of setting up the lead nurture campaign for your business, the most crucial step is to align your marketing and sales teams for rich collaboration and synchronization. It will serve as the reliable foundation of an effective lead nurturing strategy.
In the following blog, we will be discussing B2B lead nurturing and all its vital aspects in detail. Let’s get deep into the details.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing involves the strict observation and monitoring of the behavior and interest of your prospects at every single stage of your lead generation funnel. Listening and observing your prospects is necessary to provide an engaging response and essential solutions to ensure trust and strengthen a relationship with prospects. B2B Lead nurturing allows you to convert your B2B prospects or visitor into loyal and consistent customers.
When it comes to B2B lead nurturing, you must acknowledge that your prospects are more informed and tech-canny individuals. They are exploring the best solutions or services everywhere in the online world. Encountering a prospect means a golden chance for you to listen to their requirements and respond according to their stage in the purchase journey via different mediums.
What is Lead Qualification?
Lead qualification is the process of exploring whether a prospect’s demographics and interests match your desired customer profile. If yes, it means a particular lead holds a high probability of converting into a successful sale and, most importantly, has a high potential of being a loyal and consistent customer.
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring means allocating a numeric value to your leads based on the particular data or information. Typically, a score assigned based on the prospect’s behavior, interests, and demographics signifies a qualified lead.
Consider an example of the B2B lead nurturing process. A random consumer’s email address is one of the demographic attributes assigned against a lower score than those registered with their business profiles.
What are Lead Nurturing Campaigns?
Lead nurturing campaigns are the bedrock to incorporating strategy in the lead nurture funnel. It also involves laying out the content strategy for your potential customer, necessary to ensure sales and conversions.
Using lead nurturing campaigns, you can categorize different prospects according to their interest and demographics to interact with each prospect personally, like personalized B2B emails, reports, or whitepapers. It boosts your campaigns’ overall impact and effectiveness and thus increases conversions and RoI.
Let’s discuss different lead nurturing campaigns considered essential for any B2B Lead generation or nurturing process.
Types of lead nurturing campaigns
- Educational or Informative – Educational campaign is intended for the prospects at the initial phase of the lead nurture funnel. The content or approach in this campaign is centered around educating and informing them.
- Products or Services – These campaigns are intended to shed light on the primary aspects of the products or services in which your lead shows eagerness to know more.
- Promotional Campaigns – It allows you to push your high-scoring leads to the floor of the conversion funnel. It includes discounts, limited-time offers, coupons, etc.
- Events or Webinars – This campaign includes webinars or in-person interactions.
- Re-engagement Campaigns – These campaigns sound like a reminder to the leads who left the sale funnel in between. Sending cart abandonment email is one of the B2B lead nurturing email examples to re-engage your deserted prospects.
- Authority building campaigns – Your potential clients need peace of mind while investing their money in offerings. Authority building email campaigns that include the case studies, white papers about your business model, and links to your most trending content pages serve this purpose well. It ensures they are dealing with an authentic and trusted client.
- Welcoming or opening campaign – The first expression is the last expression. The aim of sending welcome or opening emails is to make the onboarding phase more accessible and interactive for your customers. They must not feel unsupervised or unattended during their initial interaction with your business. Make sure your welcome emails are knowledgeable, clear, concise, and add value to their curiosity.
Core Elements of B2B Lead Nurturing Campaigns
Below are some core aspects that you must acknowledge before laying out your B2B lead nurturing campaign.
1. Understand your buyer’s persona:
Every prospect who will interact with your business has some problems and needs a solution to those problems. What is your problem statement? It is one of the most important questions you must ask your virtual prospects, which will improve your understanding of the prospects.
2. Personalization:
For any B2B lead nurturing process, personalization is the magic wand. Sending personalized emails, mentioning your prospects with their names, and communicating in a friendly but professional tone makes them feel more relatable and connected to your brand. Do not approach your prospects like algorithms or data for the sake of automation.
3. Train, inform, and educate your prospects:
One of the most mandatory steps in the lead nurture funnel is to educate your prospects according to the contemporary state of their journey. It is also known as the content marketing funnel or sales funnel and can be categorized into three phases:
- Awareness phase – Include blogs and articles related to your prospects and interests. Educate your leads with the latest trends in their niche.
- Consideration phase – Send invitations to your leads about events, including webinars or product demos.
- Decision phase – Share successful case studies of your existing clients, white papers, and reviews in this final step.
If you don’t know where to start and choose content for your prospects, outline the content and pages of your website they interact with the most. Read the opinions they share or post on social media platforms.
Find their pain points and respond with the relevant solution.
4. Re-engagement:
Push notification is one of the remarkable tactics for better engagement and re-engagement. By asking your prospects for feedback, giving them limited-time discount offers to create a sense of urgency, you convert them into customers. Besides, you can also re-engage the prospects by providing interactive CTAs on your web portal or social media platforms.
5. Refrain from spamming:
Sending a series of emails every day would not only annoy your potential customers but showcase your brand as a sales-hungry entity. As a result, you might end up listed as spam or unsubscribed by the prospects.
Categorical division of your email list by more bright attributes would help you send more relevant and necessary content to your prospects which is more likely to grab their attention. These attributes can be, for example:
- Designation
- Age
- Region
- Interests
6. Do not delay
Do not wait for your leads to reveal their purchase intention to nurture them. You can start nurturing prospects as soon as they make the first contact with your business from any medium, even if that means opening your blog post.
7. Use content marketing to address the prospect’s pain points
Nowadays, customers are equally informed and active as marketers. They dodge anything that sounds or appears like an advertisement or promotional campaign. This is where content marketing joins the stage. A successful content marketing campaign is articulated in understanding your prospects’ pain points and producing content that revolves around their pain points.
Content marketing allows you to build authority and generate leads by engaging your prospects more efficiently.
How to Nurture Leads More Effectively?
You have to make your lead nurturing process more effective to convert more prospects into customers. If you approach the lead nurturing program irrationally, your prospects may desert you at any stage of the B2B sales funnel.
We have compiled six B2B lead nurturing best practices you must adapt to strengthen your relationship with the prospects and convert them into customers.
1. Provide educational or informative content
Your prospects deem your products or services as potential solutions to their problems. Prove your authority and optimism by providing relevant and high-quality educational content such as how-to blogs, purchase guides, product comparisons, recommendations, and hacks they can use to eliminate hurdles.
Prove that you understand their problems or conflicts well and offer them a solution, so your prospects start investing their trust in your brand.
2. Think outside the box
As we have mentioned earlier, spamming the mailbox of your prospects means annoying them as they receive such emails from different brands every day. But despite being controversial and considered annoying or old-fashioned, email marketing remains a vital ingredient of digital marketing. It allows businesses to interact with their customers in a more personalized fashion.
Apart from emails, use different ways to keep your prospects engaged while providing relevant information. You can create articles, podcasts, or how-to guides and send push notifications for the latest content updates. Instead of endlessly sending these notifications, follow your prospect’s journey or any actions they take to push the right content at the right time.
3. Leveraging AI and Data Analytics
The marketing domain is rapidly evolving. The conventional drip emails strategy you’re using might not be as effective as before. You need to adapt AI-driven methodologies and data analytics to improve your lead nurturing process and make an attempt on the right lead at the right time.
Think outside the box to send your message in a more effective way to your prospects. You need to go through different B2B lead nurturing email examples and use industry-leading marketing automation tools to help you improve the lead generation and nurturing process.
4. Push the right content at the right time
The primary objective of lead nurturing is to build trusted relationships with your prospects, so you must approach your customers in their language. Identify the prospect’s stage in your lead nurture funnel to determine which type of content they want to consume. You want to keep them engaged until they turn into customers.
Personalize your marketing campaigns. Make your prospects feel they are not interacting with the robot or algorithms. Your lead nurture campaigns must outstand from the rest of the businesses and incorporate personalization.
5. Personalize approach according to the prospect’s journey
Determine why your customers visited your site in the first place. What are they looking for? Personalize the entire UX by acknowledging what they look for on your site. Is it a specific product, category, update, or service? Did they come here to read about your policies?
Feed them through personalized content, and turn your prospects into email or newsletter subscribers and, finally, into loyal and consistent customers.
6. Use your CRMs effectively
CRMs allow you to gather and manage customer information and interact with your customers in a more impactful way. Use this utility to personalize your messages so they can feel you more connected and welcomed. Give them a vibe that only you can understand and solve their problems or conflicts. You can use tones of leads automation tools to help you scale your nurturing process.
FAQs – B2B Lead Nurturing
What is nurturing a lead?
Lead nurturing involves the strict observation and monitoring of the behavior and needs of your prospects at every single stage of your sales funnel. Listening and observing your prospects is necessary to provide them with an engaging response with essential solutions to ensure trust and strengthen a relationship with prospects.
What is lead nurturing in CRM?
Lead nurturing in CRM is the process that involves reaching out to your prospects, increasing dominance of your business, pushing prospects to the sales pipeline, integrating social media platforms, and collecting data for the future.
What are the best practices for lead nurturing?
B2B lead nurturing best practices involves:
- Set objectives
- Categorize your leads
- Personalization
- Push relevant content
- Do more than just sending Emails
- Be mindful of trends
- Measure success and improve your marketing campaigns
What are the three critical elements of creating a lead nurturing strategy?
The three most vital and mandatory elements of creating an effective lead nurturing strategy include:
- Understand Buyer’s Persona
- Effective lead generation strategy
- Relevant Content
Conclusion
B2B lead nurturing is a time-consuming, complex, and mundane process. But it is highly effective if you want to generate and nurture leads on a massive scale.
By making a few innovative changes to your content strategy, incorporating lead scoring and lead qualification along with the core, as mentioned earlier strategies, you can gradually be able to achieve a promising conversion rate.
Prospects turn into customers if you nurture them. The process starts right away when you show them your product or brand’s existence. Don’t delay in cracking this golden opportunity. Make the right attempt and continue nurturing your leads at each step of their journey with your business.
