It is one thing to generate and collect leads; it’s another thing entirely to invest in the time and resources to turn those leads into lasting connections. Connections that become clients that become partnerships. That is the heart of lead nurturing.
What Is B2B Lead Nurturing?
At a basic level, lead nurturing for B2B encompasses the process of building a relationship with a prospective buyer or client at each stage of the sales funnel. It’s a combination of short-term and long-term strategies segmented and personalized to the buyer’s needs and concerns to establish brand recognition and trust.
A lead nurturing system should include the ability to:
- Segment leads into focused categories
- Structure content to progressively build knowledge
- Track interactions, behaviors, and touchpoints
- Coordinate messaging across multiple marketing channels
Laid out like that, it can be a little overwhelming, but it can easily broken down into smaller, more manageable steps. And the benefits make the investment worth the while. In 2022, Marketo found that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. The Annuitas Group found that nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. And lead nurturing emails had 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone emails.
7 Types of Lead Nurturing Campaigns
Most lead nurturing messaging campaigns fall under one of several categories:
- Welcome: To guide new customers through the onboarding process
- Educational: To inform prospects of your services or offerings with the goal of stirring interest
- Engagement: To drive interactions around an event
- Promotional: To highlight specific features of your products/services relevant to the recipient
- Sales: To promote discounts, special pricing, sales, etc., to create a sense of urgency
- Re-engagement: To elicit the attention of leads who have fallen off along the sales journey
- Authority: To demonstrate trust via customer stories, testimonials, thought leadership, etc.
Common Mistakes in B2B Lead Nurturing
For as effective as lead nurturing is, it can also fall flat and wind up a huge waste of time and resources if you’re not aware of the common pitfalls:
- Generic messaging — Not all of your leads are in the same role, industry, or stage of the sales funnel. Non-personalized, irrelevant content is less likely to result in the engagement and relationship-building you’re wanting to see.
- Over-focusing on sales — No one wants to be bombarded with “buy now” messaging, especially early on in the process. Prematurely putting pressure on prospective clients will like break trust and be a major turnoff.
- Post-sale disappearance — Turning a lead into a client isn’t the end; it’s the beginning of a new stage in the customer relationship. Maintaining engagement and communication after the sale is vital to long-term success.
- Side-stepping questions — Leads and stakeholders want to know that they are being heard, which means when they have questions or concerns, you need to address them. This is where the personalized messaging comes in again.
- Single-channel nurturing — Never put all your eggs in one basket, and never dump all your relationship-building hopes into one marketing channel. Messaging needs to be spread across multiple channels, from email to social to display.
6 Effective Lead Nurturing Strategies for B2B
Implement Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is one of the best ways to make lead nurturing more manageable. By ranking leads and prospects based on engagement and fit, you can better understand where each person is in the buyer’s journey and prioritize follow-up accordingly. The structure of your scoring system will depend on your campaign goals and KPIs, but the objective is the same: identify which leads are most ready for sales outreach. The higher the score, the sooner your sales team should follow up.
Continually Profile and Segment
If you take nothing else away from this article, remember the word: personalization. It’s the crux of all lead nurturing campaigns, and the more data you have on your leads, the more you should use it to shape content and messaging. You can do that by looking at behavior or incorporating a question or poll into your messaging. The more you know, the better you can personalize to their needs and interests.
Create Targeted Content
Using all those defined segments, you can strategically tailor the content and messaging you deliver to each lead. This makes the recipients feel seen and heard and more likely to be receptive to your information and your brand. Combine this with email flow automation to make it easier for you to deliver tailored content to the right people at the right time.
Make It Multichannel
We mentioned this above in the pitfalls section, but it’s worth reiterating. While we usually think of lead nurturing in terms of email marketing, there are a lot of different opportunities across marketing channels that you can leverage. This can include social media, dynamic content on your website or landing pages, sponsored retargeting posts, and direct outreach from your sales team.
Provide Value
Throughout the relationship with clients and partners, you want to try to offer unique, valuable content, not just the same old messaging over and over. Especially at the top of your sales funnel, free content and resources not locked behind a paywall can build brand awareness and connection.
Continuously Evaluate
As with any aspect of marketing, you need to check in often on your campaigns to ensure you’re getting the results you want. At least every few months when you’re building your strategies, you should assess your metrics and key performance indicators to see what is working, which channels are effective, and what needs to be set aside.
It Comes Back to Relationship Building
Lead nurturing campaigns might seem complicated to implement, but not implementing them is almost guaranteed to leave money on the table. And more than that, in the B2B market, you’re missing out on building important relationships that can transform your business goals. If you’re interested in learning more, you can always contact our marketing experts at EdwardsSchoen, and we’d be happy to discuss how we can build out lead nurturing campaigns for you that truly deliver.
