B2B Lead Nurturing: Prerequisites And Strategies to Acquire More Customers

You went to a family dinner for the first time. The host will not rush you into the dining room instantly, right? They'll welcome you, take you on a house tour, get you into the conversation, introduce you to other guests, and then they'll move on to appetizers but not directly to dinner.

The host nurtures you and makes you familiar with the environment by engaging with you. And once you become familiar, you can enjoy dinner and laugh with others.

Your leads are just like your guest. They aren't familiar with your business yet (not entirely), so they won't buy from you. You need to engage with them, help them understand your product/services, and showcase how you solve their problem. 

This process is known as lead nurturing, and this article contains the ins and out of nurturing leads using different tactics.

Here’s an overview of the contents

• What is lead nurturing?

• Why do you need to nurture your leads?

• Prerequisite for lead nurturing

• How nurturing B2B leads to paying customers

• 3 insider tips to improve your lead nurturing strategies

• Conclusion

What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is about maintaining effective and constant communication with the leads throughout the buying journey to convert them into paying customers. 

It creates ongoing automated communication with potential buyers and leads them toward conversions.

Why do you need to nurture your leads?

B2B buying cycle is long due to the involvement of many internal & external stakeholders, budget approval, and a highly demanding sales and implementation process. 

Hence, you cannot expect the CMO and executives to buy your product/services in one click. This is where lead nurturing comes in. 

Leads need to trust you to get to know you to make rational decisions. And your role is to build that brand credibility and trustworthiness to convert them by offering a solution.

Plus, the more you nurture leads, the shorter the sales cycle. Thus, driving more revenue in the short run.

In a nutshell, lead nurturing help:

• Build trust among your target prospects.

• Eliminate friction in the sales funnel.

• Improve the propensity to buy.

• Shortens the B2B buying cycle.

Prerequisite for lead nurturing

To develop an effective lead nurturing strategy, you must tick all these three prerequisites:

1. Identify the funnel stages

You've heard that one size fits all doesn't apply because every lead is unique and has different pain points they're trying to solve. In such a case, do you think everyone will care about the blog posts you share with them? Definitely not.

So, you need to identify their stage, i.e., at the top of the funnel, middle, or bottom. Or are they in the awareness, consideration, or decision-making stage?

Once you have an idea about the stage of each lead, you can create a nurturing campaign curated specifically for those leads.

2. Lead scoring

Lead scoring is a methodology to assign a value to each lead based on their interaction, behavior, and propensity to buy. The criteria to determine the lead score can vary from organization to organization.

There are three aspects of lead scoring:

• Lead fit: It is about determining whether or not a lead for your buyer persona is based on information they shared with you via surveys, forms, registration process, etc.

• Lead interest: Here, you measure the lead's level of interest in your product/services. How attractive do you look to them?

• Lead behavior: Tracking the behavior means whether they want to be educated or have high buying intent. 

For instance, someone checking out your blog posts and webinars are still in the awareness stage, while those who checked out your case studies, pricing pages, or comparison pages reflect high intent to buy.

By giving each lead a score, the sales team can focus on more valuable leads, which show a high propensity to buy and close more sales and less time selling.

3. Segment your leads

Both stage identification and lead scoring take you one step closer to segmenting your leads and creative nurturing campaigns that fit that particular segment. 

Besides these tactics, you can also use different data points to segment leads, such as 

• Company size

• Tools they're currently using

• Geographical location

• Their target audience

Once you have this data, you can develop strategies for nurturing your leads.

How nurturing B2B leads to paying customers

In this section, I'll cover four different ways to nurture your leads:

1. Align the content format with each buyer's stage

Content marketing is effective when done right. Once you understand lead stages, you can identify different content you can create to resolve their pain points. And you can even distribute these content formats using different channels such as social media, emails, etc.

Each stage requires a different content format that resonates with the reader and offers value in the most consumable manner.

Here, in a nutshell, different content formats for each stage in the conversion funnel:

Another important thing to nurture lead via content effectively is to strike a balance between being informative and promotional.

💭 Here the concept of the 4-1-1 rule comes into play, popularised by Joe Pulizzi, Founder, and CEO of the Content Marketing Institute. 

The rule says four posts should entertain or educate, one post should be a soft sell, like adding a review, and one post should be a hard sell, like a free demo. This rule emphasizes the balance between giving leads what they want while avoiding being too salesy and also achieving the goals of your lead nurturing campaign.

2. Develop an email campaign sequence

69% of marketers use email marketing as their preferred channel to nurture leads which is no surprise given that it is the most direct and personal channel to engage with the leads and move them from one stage to another.

Combined with automation, email marketing opens up a whole world of nurturing opportunities using which you can target the right lead at the right time with the right content email. 

This is how email automation can help you:

• Set up email sequences once by defining the actions to trigger an email.

• Save time and effort as you don't need to send emails manually.

• As these emails are triggered based on the recipient's action, the emails are highly targeted and are sent at the right time.

To give you an overview, here are some of the email sequences that must be a part of your lead nurturing program:

3. Integrate nurturing into your overall marketing strategy

Lead nurturing cannot and should not happen in a vacuum. 

It should be a part of your overall marketing strategy, and each touchpoint needs to be covered through different channels (social media, emails), tactics (organic, paid ads), and content assets. (blog posts, webinars)

For an effective lead nurturing strategy, you must consider how different channels, tactics, and assets work harmoniously to cover all the touchpoints. 

Covering all these touchpoints is only half the battle. The other half is to find the right cadence and timing for effective lead nurturing. Their right Vikings and cadence get influenced by the length of your conversions process, communication channel use, and lead scoring.

Here is a hypothetical example of how you can use different channels to nurture a lead:

A person downloaded an ebook from your website, and your lead scoring criteria deem this person as a high-quality lead, and the burying cycle is 1 month, so a lead nurturing strategy might look like this:

Day 1: Thank You email + Other relevant resources.

Day 5: Email offering new content related to the first download and subsequent website activity

Day 15: Social campaign on email deliverability best practices

Day 24: Personal email from sales rep offering a product demo

Day 30: Personalised ad on Facebook

4. Setup retargeting ad campaigns

Apart from organic channels, retargeting ads can be a game-changer if done right. These ad campaigns can help nurture and convert those on the brink of converting. 

Social channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to run highly personalized and targeted ads that cater to a specific audience chosen by you.

These ads help your brand be present while leads engage with content on their favorite channel, and you can remain on top of their mind if they're willing to make a decision.

3 insider tips to improve your lead nurturing strategies

These are a few tips that apply to all the tactics discussed above and help you ensure that your lead nurturing program is going in the right direction:

Personalize every interaction

A lead who downloaded an ebook and others who checked out your comparison page need to be nurtured differently as they are at different stages and have different pain points, preferences, lifestyles, and other factors. 

That's why each interaction must be personalized to make each interaction more memorable, building and strengthening your brand goodwill.

Be it a follow-up email or retargeting and using the past behavioral data you have on a lead from your analytics or CRM software and creating more targeted content to attract them towards the CTA.

Follow up without too much delay.

Following up at the right interval is vital to keep communication going. At the same time, leads have just interacted with your brand through a webinar, demo call, or any other event. 

But, the research by Drift & CustomerGauge reflects that the sales follow-up is quite slow, taking at least 1 day or longer to reconnect with the lead.

This can lead to missed opportunities to engage and convert leads with the highest buying intent. So, be it via email, social media, or phone call, you must follow up with the right message instantly.

Besides, with automation, live chatbots, and advanced CRM tools, you can set up follow-up sequences and communicate without much delay.

Test and optimize your lead nurturing program

Lead nurturing is an ongoing process that never stops, and that's why testing is critical to maintaining the health and effectiveness of your lead nurturing program. Testing gives you data-driven insights into which strategies are getting the best result by enhancing the customer experience through the funnel. 

Not a single framework works when it comes to testing, as one tactic that works on a particular lead might not work on the other. That's why it's constantly testing and optimizing wherever you can.

There are a whole lot of things you can test, such as

• Timings and number of emails in a particular sequence

• Paid ads copy

• Lead nurturing cadence

• Number of touchpoints

• Frequency of touchpoints

• Different content formats for each stage in the buying journey.

Conclusion

Lead nurturing is the nuts and bolts of success for B2B brands. You can develop a long-term relationship with the leads and drive more sales and cut the cost per lead with the right lead nurturing program.

But, to reap the benefits, you must understand the leads you want to nurture - their pain points, buying intent, and stage, and connect with them by creating a more conversational and personalized experience. You cannot grow if you think of them as just a lead. You have to treat them like a human.