Demand generation example. Enter: Lead nurturing and lead scoring

You know that gating content isn’t the way B2B buyers want to engage with you today, but you need a way to educate your ideal customers and speed up the buying process. 

Enter: Lead nurturing. Not to be mistaken for lead gen, lead nurturing aims to educate prospects through the sales funnel. 

This is even more important for high average order value products like you find in Fintech, SaaS, and data businesses. 

The truth is:

• Without proper lead nurturing, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. 

• On average a person consumes 11.4 pieces of content before making a purchase decision.

• Nurtured leads are 50% more sales-ready.

We’ve talked about what demand generation is, tips for writing demand generating content, and more in recent blogs. 

In this blog, we want to do a deep dive into a demand gen tactic: lead nurturing (and lead scoring) - to show how this technique increases sales conversion.

Let’s start with the basics…

What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is a key tactic to build relationships with contacts with the end game of converting them to customers. 

It’s not about forcing them into your funnel. But rather, coming from a place of being helpful, sharing value up-front, and helping customers to solve their pain points. 

There are a few different ways to go about this. You can provide all information upfront with a kind of ‘self-serve’ form of nurture programme. 

Or, you can drip feed insights. 

This is done through regular communication either via email or social channels that provide a mix of thought leadership and your product-led content, to show value, build trust and remain front-of-mind when that contact is ready to make a purchase.

Why is lead nurturing so hot for demand generation?

People don’t like feeling sold to so this educational, nurturing approach is incredibly successful…

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)

This is because it’s:

• Always-on - It’s an ever-present communication strategy to help raise brand awareness and keep you top of mind.

• Always-adding value - Sharing free tips and tricks to solve your ideal customer problems result in a positive experience for them.

• Always delivering results - Because of these two points, conversion rates are higher so ROI excels 🚀

Checklist: Lead nurturing must-haves for demand generation

✅ Ideal customer (ICP) focus - You need to know *exactly* who you want to target. Building your ideal customer profile (ICP) - including company profile, job title, job description and pain points helps to fine-tune your product/service messaging.

✅ Topic focus - Hone in on a particular hot topic of interest and dedicate your entire lead nurturing programme to delve into this in detail. You need a mix of collateral to back this up: a guide, blogs, webinar, case studies and product brochure.

✅ Appeal to the entire sales funnel - With lead nurturing, it’s important to cover a mix messages and call to actions that appeal to different stages of the buying cycle because you never know when someone is ready to buy. 

✅ Go multi-channel - Email and LinkedIn are our preferred options for lead nurturing due to the results. They are preferred comms channels, and are easy to measure engagement, easy to use, and cost effective to execute. 

✅ Engagement follow-ups - Once you’ve captured a series of engagements over time, follow-up is often where lead nurturing campaigns can fall down. Often, this is because of a lack of sight of engagements or not knowing what to say in the follow up (more on this later).

Demand generation in action: How can you execute a lead nurturing campaign?

My go-to channel for lead nurturing is email. Hubspot has tons of ace templates you can steal here. But I also post this content on LinkedIn to increase reach and nurture those on social media.

Back to email…

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.

A simple four-step email process you can implement today

Let’s use an example. Say an individual has filled in a form to download a guide from your website. 

This engagement suggests the individual is doing research and is at the start of a sales journey. With this in mind, in your email follow-up, we recommended providing additional thought leadership and subtly including sales messages - just in case they are ready to buy but without scaring them off.

Let’s say the starting point is filling out a form to download a guide from your website - here’s what a nurture journey could look like:

At each stage, the individual is encouraged to speak to the salesperson - either for guidance or to book a demo. And we recommend including a link to the previously shared piece of content to increase readership (in case they missed it the first time).

We would recommend sending the entire sequence, even if they don’t open a previous email and therefore the copy should be worded to cover so that it's relevant, regardless of whether they open.

KPIs/success measures

To ensure every marketing campaign is effective, it's important to track KPIs. Here, you can measure these key outcomes:

• Engagements: Email clicks (you want to aim for at least 10% click-throughs)

• Sales action: Demos/consultations booked

• Closed won opportunities: Revenue

These KPIs can help you to refine your communications so that they do increase engagements and purchases. We always recommend testing everything and tracking performance for this very reason.

📕Read more: 7 simple steps to successful lead nurturing

Good examples of content to include for demand generation

As we’ve touched on, you don’t know when someone is ready to buy. So to appeal to all stages of the sales funnel, we recommend including pieces that cover each of these levels:

The top of the funnel (ToF) - those at the beginning of the sales journey, they are researching and benefit from guidance

• Blogs/checklists/infographics

• Additional guides

• Educational videos

The middle of the funnel (MoF) - those that have an awareness of your business, likely read your other guidance, and may be on the fence about purchasing so need convincing with additional guidance

• Additional guides/blogs

• Case studies

The bottom of the funnel (BoF) - those that are primed for purchase and need that extra nudge/reminder to tip them towards sales conversion

• Product Q&A

• Fact sheets

• Brochure

• Demo recording

📕 Further reading: Full-funnel marketing: What is it and how does it drive B2B demand generation?

How lead scoring supports demand generation

With lead scoring, essentially, you can *score* your contacts based on engagement.

Basic approach - Using email, 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.

More advance approach - With 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. 

This helps identify Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and opportunities more primed for sales conversion.

The benefits?

👍 It boosts sales team’s efficiency since the leads are pre-qualified

👍 It enables you to analyse the quality of leads and understand ICPs better

👍 It’s a methodology both sales and marketing can share (shared effort, KPIs etc)

As an interesting side note, don’t forget to nurture your existing customers too. Most marketers focus on new customer acquisition, but there is gold to be mined from driving education, cross-sell, and referral nurture communications to existing customers. 

Key takeaway

At every interaction point, a lead nurturing programme can support demand generation.

For example, a contact could download a guide, request a demo, or even have had a sales conversation but didn’t convert. 

Rather than jump straight in with a sales message that can burn-out a potential customer, the aim of lead nurturing is to encourage them toward a sale with helpful content.

If you need a hand with creating lead nurturing campaigns, get in touch. We’d love to share what we’ve learned 💡