7 simple steps to successful B2B lead nurturing
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with contacts that you want to become your customers. The focus is on education and regular dialogue, a mix of thought leadership and your company product updates, to show value, build trust and remain front-of-mind when that contact is ready to make a purchase.
Like many brands we/I talk to, your fantastic content has attracted lots of incredible contacts at the top of the funnel. But they just sit there. They don’t ask for a callback or free trial, and you have no idea what stage of the buying cycle they are at.
So, what’s next?
Once you have captured an individual's attention, through an ad, a whitepaper download, etc, you need to nurture the contact towards a sale by providing them with a stream of relevant and varied interesting content and experiences at every stage of the journey.
Top tip: People want different kinds of information, depending on where they are in the buying cycle. Therefore, it’s important to have a variety of content and call to actions.
Email is my go-to base strategy for lead nurturing (Hubspot has tonnes of ace templates you can steal). Several research studies indicate that email marketing continues to be the most effective tactic. To easily engage all levels of the funnel, in each email/step of my lead nurturing campaign, I include a mix of best practice guidance and ‘buy now’ content for those that are ready.
Did you know? Over two thirds (67%) of B2B marketers say they see at least a 10% increase in sales opportunities through lead nurturing, with 15% seeing opportunities increase by 30% or more. (DemandGen Report, 2014)
7 simple steps to successful lead nurturing
1. Identify and segment your audience
First of all, it's important to identify whom we want to target so that the messaging and journey are relevant to them. This seems obvious... This group of contacts has shown an interest in Artificial Intelligence. But, are they all from similar sectors and likely to be interested in the additional content you are planning to send to them? Does it address their particular pain points? Really hone in on whom your business wants to target, make the offering relevant to that audience, and therefore the content you need to create for it to be relevant and engaging.
For example, I used to manage an FS and Banking newsletter, specifically targeted at senior credit risk specialists - these contacts had similar needs and therefore engagement rates were at 70% and we saw six-figure revenue values. If your data isn’t segmented, engagements are likely to be low and unsubscribes higher and you may get the impression that lead nurturing doesn’t work.
Top tip: It's essential to make sure your data is in order. When preparing a database, I check for several key things including:
First name and last name capitalisation for personalisation (you can do this easily in Excel - details here)... Personalising by first name alone is enough to increase engagements - every little helps.
Job title and company name for reporting
Ensure the sector is defined for highly-segmented nurturing
The right flags and documentation for GDPR compliance, plus the data are stored in a secure way.
2. Build your targeted content in a variety of formats
Keep to one topic each lead nurturing campaign based on a proposition your business is keen to sell. For example, Artificial Intelligence and how it can be used to improve credit scoring. The people likely to be interested in receiving this are those that are in my identified target list and have downloaded AI content recently - through a media partner, a form on the website, or from the last newsletter.
Top tip: I collate these engagements in a list and check it with sales and product management. This enables them to flag contacts they don’t want to target - such as those currently in active conversation.
Mix up your media forms. Whitepapers aren’t for everyone. Try using animation or infographics to quickly get a message across in a visual way. I tend to use shorter, image-heavy, and easily scannable content for the beginning of a lead nurturing campaign so that I can hook people in. Infographics are great - people love a stat and something visually appealing.
Towards the end of the email-based campaign, I focus on the face-to-face human interaction formats such as a webinar and/or an event (covered in step 5). I tend to have around five steps in a lead nurturing campaign - 4 at a minimum, more than 7 is perhaps too much.
Did you know? According to Gartner Research, lead nurturing can potentially save 80% of your direct mail budget and bring a 10% or greater increase in revenue over 6-9 months.
Pre-covid, I found success in sending direct mail with personal notes to key contacts - it’s much cheaper and gets cut through compared to a ‘spam’ approach and sending to everyone.
3. Repeat messages and reshare content on multiple channels
For two reasons: It can take a while to create great content. So to maximise its use and reach, promote it on all your channels. What’s more, your target audience doesn’t follow a linear journey. People jump across channels and devices, hopping from your newsletter, to social, to your website missing steps out of your perfectly coordinated journey. So you need the maximum chances of them actually seeing your content.
4. Plan timely follow-up
I prepare the content in advance to ensure a smooth, timely executed campaign - it’s important to keep your audience engaged by not leaving it too long. For lead nurturing, I tend to leave 2-3 day gaps between email sends.
5. Nurture contacts towards a human interaction
The last point in a sequence of lead nurturing emails is some sort of face-to-face human interaction, ideally an event or webinar. By this last point, a contact will have engaged with multiple pieces, becoming a warm lead. This makes them more likely to attend the event (which will have taken a lot of you and your team’s time to prepare for).
It also makes it easier to have a “sales” conversation with them about their needs and your offering. This is particularly effective if your audience doesn’t like strong sales pitches (who does?) and if your team isn’t sales-led and feels more comfortable with a conversation. Your sales team will be armed with insight on what content they’re most interested in too.
6. Implement lead scoring
In the simplest form, you can capture the number of engagements (or clicks) for each individual contact to see who is most engaged and in the majority of cases, most likely to be interested in a sales conversation.
For a more sophisticated approach, you can grade certain content/engagement forms such as a whitepaper download versus attending an event differently (events and product-led content being higher) - and then tally up the total score to give a more accurate view of their commitment to your business and therefore propensity to buy.
7. Personalise follow up
Before the campaign
It’s always best to bring sales on board from the start so that they can feedback on content, support on targeting and manage their workload and planned holidays, for prompt follow-up. Otherwise, all that effort and momentum will just stop and you will likely need to run another program to re-warm these leads. Or worse, lose a sale to a competitor.
Top tips: By scheduling sales and marketing meetings before, during and after the lead nurturing campaign, you can seal the dates, poke people for actions and feedback at scheduled times.
Follow-up post-campaign
Not everyone will want to discuss their challenges at the event and so follow-up is essential. A phone call works best, followed by an email. Marketing can support their sales team’s with creating and reviewing emails and providing supporting collateral - case studies and such - to ensure it hits the mark.
Top tip: Follow-up emails are best when sent via Outlook, not through a marketing mailing platform as it doesn’t look personal and often these emails get trapped in spam filters - this is the worst point to get stuck!
A recap on the benefits of lead nurturing
Prevent lead burn-out, which can happen when going straight in for the sales kill instead of warming a contact
Build trust with the contact - using best practice guidance showcases your knowledge and adds value as the contact learns from you
Drive contacts back to your website where they can find more information that aids decision making, such as case studies, product demos, and more
Provide a regular dialogue with your contact to remain front of mind
Make it easy for them to get in touch with you when they need you
For advanced best practice marketing tips get in touch.