Lead Generating and Nurturing

Is lead generation truly your marketing goal? Is it your aim to increase your client base? There's a difference, and if you don't have a lead nurturing plan in place, you'll just be producing statistics.

Allow me to explain.

Lead nurturing is necessary to keep the marketing dialogue continuing when the potential client is in the purchasing process. The most common B2B marketing misconception is that customers would make a purchase on their first visit to a website.

According to a MarketingSherpa post, 79 percent of un-nurtured prospects [source] will never become customers.

As you may be aware, the B2B buyer's process is lengthy and complex. According to a 2020 research by Gartner [source], companies must totally rethink their marketing tactics because to the fast shift in purchasing dynamics combined with the buyer's online activity.

B2B buyers go through six phases in their decision-making process, according to Gartner [source].

• Identifying the Issue
• Exploration of Potential Solutions
• Creating Requirements
• Choosing a Supplier
• Validation

Creation of consensus

Buyers are increasingly hopping between purchasing phases rather than progressing through them in a straight manner, further complicating B2B marketing. According to Gartner's research, nearly every one of these six phases will be revisited at least once more before a choice is made.

The importance of lead nurturing

With this knowledge, it is obvious that having someone visit your website for the first time (as a consequence of lead generation) will not result in a sales opportunity. To acquire a new client from your marketing efforts, you'll need numerous visits from a B2B buyer who is gathering a range of information (the outcome of lead nurturing).

Consider the following situation for a lead generating effort. You conduct marketing efforts that provide a targeted message to individuals who are in a position to make or influence a purchasing decision.

The aim of marketing campaigns is to elicit a reaction to your marketing message in some way. The most common reaction is for them to go to a website or call your sales department.

Because b2b buyers prefer to self-serve for the overwhelming majority of the information they need to make a purchasing decision, the likelihood that they will contact your sales department is very low. That implies the bulk (if not all) of your marketing efforts should aim to direct people to particular sections of your website (don't send traffic to your home page, ever, ever, ever).

You won't be able to keep in contact with and assist your customers through their purchasing experience if you don't have a lead nurturing plan. If you don't nurture the leads that you've worked so hard to develop, they'll just go away.

Lead nurturing should be an integral part of your marketing strategy.

How to put lead nurturing into practice

The goal of lead nurturing is to ensure that the leads generated by your marketing activities are sales-ready before they are passed on to your company's salespeople. To get leads to the point where they're ready to sell, you'll need to perform some of the following tasks:

• Segmentation: You must provide highly relevant message to your potential customers in order for them to interact with your marketing campaign. The first step in delivering highly relevant message is to segment the individuals in your marketing and/or sales database based on qualities that are relevant to your business. Geographical location, industry, solutions you offer, and perhaps even by product are common segment classifications.
• Content: Any B2B lead nurturing approach is going to rely heavily on content. You'll need content for your business's various solutions or products, material for the various phases of the buying cycle, and content for the various "positions" or "titles" inside your customer's organization that have a say in the decision-making process.
• Website: Your website will play a critical part in your lead nurturing efforts, therefore it must be capable of carrying the load. Make certain that the material is appropriate and that others will want to read it. Make sure your navigation structure is in place so they can locate what they're searching for quickly. Last but not least, check to see whether your site is optimized for mobile devices.

Strategy for lead nurturing

Lead nurturing isn't something that produces benefits right away. It is necessary to create a good lead nurturing program with the long game in mind.

Some of the most successful lead nurturing methods and approaches are listed below.

Alignment of sales and marketing

In general, many companies have a significant challenge in overcoming this obstacle. However, if these two divisions are in sync, your company's outcomes may be spectacular.

Here are several strategies that may be utilized to get both teams on the same page.

Ideal Customer Profile: Bring together your sales and marketing departments to fully define your company's Ideas Customer Profile (ICP). Company revenue, staff count, industry, and location may all be used as identifiers for your ICP.

The identifiers that make sense for your business will be unique to your business. The key here is ensuring your sales and marketing teams are on the same page when it comes to the identifiers you'll use to evaluate prospective prospects.

Determine the path that each of your ICP segments takes as they go through the purchasing cycle. During the decision-making process of your ICP, they usually go through the same phases.

From the "Problem Identification" stage through the "Consensus Creation" stage, we've got you covered. It's critical that you figure out what phases your ICPs go through and what kind of information they're searching for at each one.

Lead Scoring: Create a system for grading your leads' actions. If they go to a particular page on your website, they may earn 5 points.

If they download a document from your website, they could receive 20 points, or if they attend one of your webinars, they might get a whooping 25 points. The idea of a lead score is that the more or higher interest behaviors they exhibit, the more interested they get and the more likely they are to want to speak with one of your salespeople.

Management of leads

What will you do with a lead after you've generated one? If your company is like others, after you create a lead, you immediately submit it to the sales team, who will "follow up" with the lead.

You'll only send over leads who, according to your new lead nurturing program, are in the final phases of their purchasing process and are ready to talk with a sales person.

The remainder of your leads will be "managed" as they go through the purchasing cycle. You'll have a management system in place to offer them with highly relevant information as they go through the purchasing process.

Communication that is proactive

You'll be able to build up proactive marketing messages that are highly relevant to the customer's interests if you can utilize the information you're collecting about the prospects' actions (i.e. the kind of material they're consuming on your website).

Email and retargeted advertising are the two most effective marketing methods for this proactive communication. Consider the following scenario: Jimmy Dean, one of your leads, visits one of your website pages advertising your new product.

Now that you know Jimmy is interested in your new product, you may educate him further by sending him an email with additional information about it, or you can re-target online advertising promoting the product Jimmy is interested in with display ads on other websites Jimmy visits.

Summary

Nurturing leads is simply too essential in today's B2B marketing and sales process to ignore. However, doing it properly requires a significant amount of strategy, content, and website preparation.

If you'd like to learn more about this, please contact us and we'll set up a call to discuss it and see if it's a suitable match for your business.

Thanks to Dale Keipert at Business 2 Community whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.