What is lead nurturing?

“Buyers do not want to be sold to, they want to be heard.”
– Corinne Sklar, Global CMO, Bluewolf

Business to Business lead nurturing is the process of cultivating and looking after your leads with relevant communications until they’re ready to buy. This involves answering their questions, listening to their pain points and providing useful resources and information to increase brand awareness, build trust and keep your company top of mind.

In B2B marketing, lead nurturing is about establishing positive relationships between businesses and brands. Customers must feel that the brand is investing in them all the way through the sales funnel. Let’s look at some of the tools that form the backbone of well-crafted lead nurturing campaigns.

Your website

Driving traffic to your website can be via your social media channels, word of mouth and marketing strategies. Once your leads land there, it’s important to keep them engaged with easy navigation and relevant content that appeals to their interests – a strong content strategy will help to boost your website rankings.

SEO

Allowing your customers to find you via an online search is one of the most effective ways to generate leads that are a good fit you’re your business. Choose keywords and include them across your emails, social media and website and optimise meta descriptions and your website for mobile. Build links and boost your domain authority by publishing good quality content that will attract links from other websites.

Marketing automation

Brands automate marketing, most typically email comms, across channels to ensure consistency of message and provide the right message at the right time. According to a recent report, 57% of B2B companies say that marketing automation has been very beneficial for their company. [B2Bmarketing.net and Circle Research]. Another report found that 80% of marketers who use automation software drive up to 451% more leads [VB Insight].

A lead nurturing email automation campaign takes customers on a journey based on their interactions. Using data, analytics and user behaviour research, emails can be
personalised, highly relevant and engaging. Automation can be used to drive long-term engagement – 55% of marketers say that email campaigns drive increased ROI.

Content marketing

The curation of relevant, engaging content provides the customer with useful information or entertainment that keeps your brand top of mind. Ideally, aim to create a cross-channel experience for your customers by way of articles, blogs, emails, videos, podcasts, webinars, white papers, social media campaigns, direct mail and more. The content form is not as important as making sure that your messaging is meaningful and relevant for your audience.

Lead scoring

Good lead nurturing also includes lead scoring – a system that identifies where the customer is on their buying journey by assigning points for each action they take. Visiting your website would receive a different score to requesting a free quote, for example. A well-established lead scoring system has the potential to lead to high conversion rates.
More on lead scoring.

As customers progress through your lead generation funnel, attention spans begin to wane and it’s important that your brand voice stays loud and clear. Establish a lead scoring system, build content that matches your personas, invest in a marketing automation system to continue to develop your brand. Any data collected during a lead nurturing programme can be fed back into lead scoring to increase ROI and inform future campaigns.

Are you considering trying Lead Nurturing for the first time, or maybe it’s time to take your current lead generation and management efforts to the next level? Why not contact us for a no obligation discussion on how MarketOne’s tried and tested frameworks have helped businesses scale at speed and drive measurable impact.