Following a set of most effective lead nurturing strategies will result in you with a set of qualified leads that are in the pipeline for future prospecting. Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, when competing for customers, every lead counts. Whenever someone gives you their contact information, you need to move them down the sales funnel and turn them into paying customers. So, there needs to be more than just implementing lead generation strategies to generate more lead conversions.
Without a lead nurturing strategy in place, the chance of conversions can be low, and you will lose a lot of your sales potential. Not all leads you generate are sales-ready. Some might be interested in your product or service but still have questions to be answered to move from the awareness stage to making a purchase, where to lead nurturing comes to play.
Lead nurturing can help you develop personalized B2B relationships with customers and prospects at every sales funnel stage. This blog aims to help you understand your lead nurturing strategies and how to create an effective one.
Table of Contents
- What Is Lead Nurturing?
- Essential Online Channel for B2B Lead Nurturing
- Why Lead Nurturing Strategies Are Important
- 7 Lead Nurturing Strategies You Should Implement
- FAQs
- Closing Thoughts
- Related Reads
What Is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is engaging and developing relationships with potential prospects at every stage of the sales funnel. A successful lead nurturing program improves your marketing and communication efforts, improves customer listening, builds trust, and improves brand awareness.
Lead nurturing engages, supports, and builds fruitful relationships with prospective customers by providing them with appropriate and relevant content and information at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Essential Online Channel for B2B Lead Nurturing
There are a lot of media platforms available for marketers to communicate and produce quality content for their quality leads. Email marketing is the best for B2B lead nurturing compared to the other online channels, producing 78% of potential customers. The website reaches 48% of customers, social media reaches 39%, blogs reach 30%, events reach 29%, and searches reach 24%. These online channels help you easily communicate with your target audience.
Why Lead Nurturing Strategies Are Important
Lead nurturing is the way to go if you’re willing to make the most of your resources and up your sales game. A properly curated list of lead nurturing strategies will guide marketers with their prospecting process. Here are some reasons why it is necessary to follow the most worthy lead nurturing strategies is so essential.
1. Brings in New Prospects
Lead nurturing informs prospects who might have shown interest in your product or services to learn more about it. Your landing pages may not try to explain the true impact of your products and services, but lead nurturing allows you to show your potential customers a complete picture of your brand and what you can do for them.
2. Improves Sales
A few years back, Hubspot conducted a survey that showed 69% of marketers said converting leads into customers is their top priority. Sales teams usually focus on selling, which means they miss out on many potential customers who should be targeted. Lead nurturing can turn prospects into high-quality leads.
3. Reduces Customer Acquisition Cost
Lead nurturing is a less-expensive marketing method for attracting customers. It reduces your customer acquisition costs (CAC = total marketing cost/number of sales) by focusing only on prospects who have shown interest in your brand instead of targeting everyone. It increases customer engagement, conversions, and retention and boosts ROI.
4. Builds Brand Trust
A lead should know your brand, how you stand out from your competitors, and how your product or service can offer them a solution. To do so, lead nurturing strategies to enable you to raise brand awareness and shorten your sales funnel. Making your potential customers understand that you value their pain points can help you gain their trust.
Communicating regularly with your prospects and sharing valuable knowledge can let them know that it isn’t just about making a sale but also providing them with the necessary tools and information.
5. Establishes You as a Subject Matter Expert
Providing leads with valuable information targeting their needs can position your brand as an industry expert. Creating thoughtful and relevant content for your prospects can boost your lead nurturing campaign and reputation as it makes prospective clients make a well-informed purchasing decision and can help you trust more.
7 Lead Nurturing Strategies You Should Implement
1. Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best and most effective lead-nurturing strategies. According to a recent Hubspot report, 64% of B2B marketers say their email marketing strategy was effective for meeting business goals in 2021. Drip campaigns, newsletters, and event-based emails are some of the most used methods that can help you nurture your leads.
You can also utilize email automation to run your email marketing campaigns for your subscribers. You can also track your audience engagement through email open and click-through rates (CTR).
2. Social Media Retargeting
Retargeting adverts on social media is a valuable method to engage your audience. Retargeting sends ads to people interested in your brand, such as visiting your website, buying a lower-level product, or downloading gated content.
We know how social media platforms can help your business scale up. When it comes to B2B, you can never miss out on LinkedIn, which is quintessential to engaging your leads. With Google Ads, you can also show them your content when they are browsing a website that uses Adsense.
You can also use retargeting to connect with your site visitors who still need to sign up. Remember, these visitors should have made a purchase decision or contacted you. Think of remarketing to nurture leads by understanding a prospect’s historical interests and preferences.
3. Content Marketing
Your buyers may be at different stages of the buying cycle. Content Marketing is one of the best ways to lead nurturing and improving marketing outcomes. Here, curating content that fits all types of buyers can take time and effort. You must create targeted content for each buying cycle stage to help them make informed decisions.
Creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) can help you better understand their needs and expectations. This information can help you create targeted content that you can utilize to leverage and nurture customers based on their demographics and their position in the buying journey.
Content marketing plays a significant role in lead nurturing. Engaging with prospective clients through various content, such as blogs, newsletters, whitepapers, landing pages, and case studies, shows your leadership. It shortens your sales funnel by moving a prospect to the decision stage.
4. Establish Omnichannel Lead Nurturing
B2B lead nurturing was once limited to just sending emails. But today, your nurturing campaigns should be more comprehensive than just one or two channels. Instead, you must utilize the multiplier effect of different media to create a better impact and improve the chances of sales conversion.
By implementing omnichannel nurturing strategies, you can reach out to your prospects on their preferred platforms at their preferred time. Effective multi-channel lead nurturing tactics involve automation, email marketing campaigns, social media marketing, paid ads targeting and retargeting, dynamic website content, mobile marketing, and direct sales outreach.
5. Timely Follow-Up
Personalization can do wonders for the smooth execution of any lead nurturing strategy. Following up with personalized emails, addressing your prospects, and communicating in a conversational tone can make them feel more connected to you.
Segmenting your contacts by their buying behaviour can help you tailor information to your prospects which will more likely earn their attention.
Preparing your email series in advance is the best way to run a campaign, as it ensures you can steadily release the content to your target audience over a short period. To keep them engaged in a quick lead nurturing campaign, you should send each email around every 2-3 days after the one before.
Aligning with sales, you can plan the execution of your lead nurturing campaign to coincide with when deals are available to follow up. For example, you may want to avoid holidays.
Personalized Communication
Most customers do not want to put their attention on something that is not in sync with who they are, or what they want. This is why even mass communication tries to create personalized content that directly addresses their prospects.
Though it is challenging to curate more relatable content to a mass audience, marketers these days are trying to segregate the audience based on factors like their interests, roles, or locations to reach them. When cold outreach is adopting the tactic of creating more personalized content, don’t you think it is highly crucial for a lead nurturing campaign to do so?
This is quite a sensitive thing, as you are in a position to convert a lead into a prospective customer. In this case, your content should be compelling enough to urge their interest without making them angry. Researching your lead and their pain points can help instill trust in them.
Lead Scoring
When your team is in charge of nurturing a huge set of leads, you might feel short of resources or time to provide more attention to each lead. Prioritizing your leads can help you handle huge data sets, and ensure none are missed out without attending.
Lead scoring is the process of ranking each lead with a numerical value in different categories and estimating their likelihood of conversion. The categories may be anything like the source of the lead contact, their interests, their capacity to make a purchase, their ideal persona, product fit, and a few more.
For example, say you have two different leads on your table, and are confused about which one to pick first. If one of your leads has recently visited your business page, but you find they are already well-equipped with the service you offer, the chances are low for them to make a purchase. Meanwhile, the other leaders may be an actively growing company that is short of the services you provide. You can always consider this higher than the previous one.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What is the definition of lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the marketing approach of building and reinforcing relationships with your potential customers and moving them down the sales funnel. Lead nurturing is essential to engage with potential buyers and provide qualified prospects for sales by focusing on marketing and communication efforts by listening to prospects’ needs and providing the information and answers they need.
2. Why is lead nurturing important?
Implementing a lead nurturing campaign can significantly impact your lead generation efforts. Getting new leads can promote business growth, but nurturing the ones you already have into paying customers can boost your sales.
3. What are the benefits of lead nurturing strategies?
Lead nurturing can help you connect with your audiences, improve brand awareness, reduce customer acquisition costs, close more deals, maximize ROI, enhance customer loyalty and retention, and allow your leads to feel heard.
4. What are the three key elements of creating a lead nurturing strategy?
Contact management, segmentation, and buyers’ journeys are the elements for creating a lead nurturing strategy.
5. What are the five steps to creating a lead nurturing campaign?
Define your target audience.
Set a timeline for your emails.
Set objectives and goals for each email.
Offer valuable content.
Analyze your success.
Final Thoughts
Lead nurturing is time-consuming and challenging, but it’s worth the hard work if you intend to close deals and process appointments on a massive scale. With a few tweaks to your content, lead qualification, sales, and marketing strategy can enable you to achieve your desired conversion. But, if you are a growing organization and leading nurturing requires resources, outsourcing lead nurturing may be your best option if you can’t afford it. In such a case, if you’re looking for lead generation services to facilitate appointment setting feel free to reach out to us!
Related Posts
- Outbound Lead Generation Strategies – 10 Tips
- 8 Best Lead Generation Tips for Effective Conversion
- How to Generate Leads in Sales – 10 Tips
Illustrations by Storyset
