Companies that excel at lead nurturing process generate 50% more sales-ready leads. Many companies are widely familiar with lead generation activities, identifying new business prospects and kick-starting their buyer journey. But, to achieve the ultimate results, your sales and marketing teams need to understand and embrace the continued process of lead nurturing.
For B2B marketing success, this lead nurturing has become extremely significant as it allows your brand to stand out as one of the significant market leaders while converting your prospects into loyal customers. Hence, if you’re not using lead nurturing in your b2b marketing campaigns currently, then it’s the time to consider it. In this blog, you can discover what lead nurture means to business, and why it matters most in b2b marketing!
What is Lead Nurturing?
In simple words, lead nurturing is all about developing and maintaining trustworthy business relationships with the customers at every stage of the sales funnel. It mainly focuses on listening to the needs of prospects and providing them with the information that they need at different stages of their buyer journey.
The ultimate goal of lead nurturing is to improve the probability of closing a deal and to shorten the time taken to secure new customers. This process strengthens the bond with the leads who are currently unwilling to buy from you but could be an ideal customer in the longer run. The process of nurturing sales leads can spread your brand message to the prospects, educate them about your products and services, and build trust to spend on it.
Why Lead Nurturing is Important?
According to recent surveys, only 2% of the customers purchase at the initial meeting. The remaining 98% of the prospects need some appropriate information through the sales funnel before they turn into your clients. This is the reason why it is important to nurture the lead. It will help you turn more leads into sales and expand those sales’ reach.
For most of the b2b companies, lead nurturing provides the ideal solution to transform your current lead quality. In addition to that, it helps prospects to understand how your product is relevant to their business while ensuring they meet all required criteria to effectively use your services. Furthermore, lead nurturing fuels your pipeline with the highest quality leads while helping your marketing and sales teams quickly identify new opportunities and build a strong relationship with the potential buyers.
Let’s look at the Most Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics
The key to effective lead nurturing is to identify people who are interested in your products and services. Hence, communicating with your customers and prospects can help you to understand their needs and requirements. Here are some of the best ways to do this.
Create Targeted Content
Nurturing leads with the targeted content can produce increased sales opportunities with more than 20% of the actual sales. Hence, targeting your leads with the relevant content can accelerate their buyer journey.
However, most of the B2B marketers struggle with producing relevant content. According to the Forrester Research report – 33% of B2B marketers finding it as a challenge to produce the relevant and targeted content while nurturing the leads. Hence, to produce the right content to the right audience at the right time, first, you need to understand your target audience. After identifying this audience, you need to create content that engages the audience based on their interests and needs.
Do Follow Up On-Time
Follow up is one of the most effective lead nurturing tactics to convert your leads into loyal customers. If you do follow up to a lead, once they entered into sales funnel rather than contacting them after 30 minutes, then there will be more chances to convert them into a qualified lead. The benefits of responding quickly to your clients are obvious, but this can take a bit of manual effort along with human intervention.
Although automated lead nurturing can rapidly and easily help you meet large numbers of prospects, the most effective way to turn your leads into sales-qualified leads is via a follow-up phone call or personal email. Moreover, a prompt, well-researched warm lead call is far more valuable than spending your time on outbound telemarketing. To make most out of the sales opportunity, make sure to know about the interests of your prospects and how they have connected with your business online.
Don’t Limit Lead Nurturing to Email
Most of the B2B marketers say email is their most effective marketing channel to generate maximum ROI. Although email is undeniably a powerful channel for B2B marketers, it is necessary to ensure that your campaign is integrated with more than just email. Many lead nurturing approaches consist of setting up an email drip campaign that sends emails to prospects regularly.
The most successful lead nurturing tactics include a combination of channels with wide-variety of marketing automation techniques, email marketing, social networking, remarketing and sales outreach. Setting up the campaign require a bit more effort as the both sales and marketing teams need to collaborate to execute it effectively.
Utilize Multiple Touchpoints
On an average, prospects must get twelve marketing touches from the moment they are introduced to the top of the funnel before they are converted. As such, there really should be 12 or more touchpoints in every lead nurturing campaign.
Ideally, to nurture your prospects into consumers, you can engage with your prospects across a variety of different types of content, such as email, social media posts, blog articles, whitepapers, interactive surveys and even direct mail. In the buyer journey, the content you send should be matched to their point while answering common questions and concerns at that particular level.
Align Sales & Marketing Teams
Whenever sales and marketing teams align with each other and share the responsibility of lead nurturing, then businesses can see a significant increase in terms of conversion rates. The most important thing to consider is that both the sales and marketing teams should be on the same page when it comes to the identification of a sales qualified lead.
Ideally, both the sales and marketing teams should work together when it comes to opening an email or interacting with a social post, and assign a score to each. By ensuring both teams working together in this way, you can close more deals for the campaign.
Personalization
Personalization is an essential tool to run an efficient programme of lead nurturing. It’s also not too hard to implement, particularly in the campaign’s email portion. Personalized emails can produce up to six times of income when it comes to non-personalized emails.
Emails can be customised in a variety of ways. For example, when a visitor clicks a connection in your inbox, visits a certain page on your site, or installs a piece of gated content, you can set up triggers to send emails. Sending a customized email when a prospect is deeply active with your brand may also be useful.
Wrapping Up
Regardless of how you choose to roll out your lead nurturing campaign, one thing is must be consider: it’s not an option, it is essential for your business. Furthermore, it can help you to close even more sales and generates maximum revenue for your business.
A good customer data platform like Data Marketers Group can help you with your lead nurturing strategies in a hassle-free way. By providing high-quality and cleansed data, Data Marketers Group helps you to identify customer trends and behaviours, and make the most of the data available to you.