How to nurture B2B leads? Most novice marketers have this question in mind. This article should help you move your quality prospects toward the bottom of the sales funnel.
You have made a lot of effort in the lengthy, typical B2B sales cycle to land leads in your funnel. These leads must turn into something solid for your sales executives. You don’t want to let these hard-earned leads slip away because of ineffective B2B lead nurturing.
The B2B sales cycle differs greatly from normal sales and marketing ventures. Businesses have a lot on their plate, and competitors are always on the hunt. You need to nurture B2B leads to develop a strong bond with them. You need to understand their needs and show them how your products and services can help them overcome challenges until they are ready to do business with you.
So, how do you nurture B2B leads? People talk a lot about capturing leads, but it is time to get into the lead nurturing process to convert these captured leads into paying customers! This blog guide will discuss tips on how to nurture B2B leads through the buyer’s journey.
In this article:
- What Is B2B lead nurturing?
- Lead Nurturing – How Does it Impact Sales
- How To Nurture B2B Leads – 10 Tips
What Is B2B Lead Nurturing?
Before knowing how to nurture B2B leads you should first know what it means to nurture a lead. Lead nurturing is a well-defined strategy focusing on developing meaningful business relationships with prospective customers. The main objective of B2B lead nurturing is to educate the leads about your brand, and its products and services. This helps the leads get a better idea of how you can be beneficial to their business and assists them in buying decisions.
The B2B lead nurturing involves delivering high-quality, easy-to-digest content and other information through various communication channels during the buying journey. Only when prospective customers know about your services on a deeper level are they able to make decisions in the sales cycle. This is why it is important to develop effective lead-nurturing strategies. Let’s check out some proven techniques to nurture B2B leads.
Lead Nurturing – How Does it Impact Sales
While you may know that every lead is important, you should be careful when taking the lead through the sales process. According to a recent study, 96% of leads who visit your website are not ready to make a purchase yet, and there is a chance that 80% of your new leads will never convert into sales. Therefore knowing how to nurture B2B leads is essential.
Every potential lead is an important resource to a business, hence nurturing is essential to make the most out of it and also to step up your sales game. Even if you cannot expect quick results, you can be assured, with lead nurturing, time is a platform for you to build loyalty and trust, rather than a barrier.
How to Nurture B2B Leads – 10 Tips
These are some of the crucial tips and tactics on how to nurture B2B leads so that the leads can be effectively converted into sales.
1 – Categorize Your Leads
Not all leads are the same in the sales funnel and require their own level of lead nurturing. This is why you first need to break them down into categories, like non-qualified leads, marketing-qualified leads, sales-qualified leads, or sales-accepted leads. This also categorizes your lead in the funnel, such as the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, or bottom of the funnel, which helps prioritize the prospective customers accordingly. So the first thing on how to nurture B2B leads is that you need to work on different lead nurturing strategies for different leads.
2 – Send Data Enrichment Emails
Data enrichment emails are all about gathering more information about your leads. You can send short, interactive surveys to learn about the people on your list. When you get this valuable information, you can send them more relevant content by customizing your messaging according to where they are in the buying journey. Many businesses use this technique to categorize leads and make email lists. You should also focus on this in the initial phases to keep your contact records up to date.
3 – Follow-Up Fast
You need to quickly follow up with the lead as soon as they leave their contact information on your website, form, or social media. According to a LeadSimple study, contacting a lead within 5 minutes is 21x more effective than contacting after 30 minutes. If the prospective customer takes an action that requires a call back from the appointment or sales team, that should happen within a few minutes. If not possible, drop a follow-up email, so the lead doesn’t lose interest, as there’s a lot of competition.
4 – Use Lead Scoring Tactics
Lead scoring is one of the effective ways you should know if you were wondering how to nurture B2B leads. It is a process of ranking prospects by assigning a numeric value to them. This defines which leads should be followed up by an appointment setter, sales rep, or marketing executive. This score is assigned based on the lead’s browsing patterns, social media interactions, conversion events, and contact history. This helps you understand which leads need to be nurtured more. Many marketing automation software can help you with effective lead scoring.
5 – Leverage Targeted Content
So if you want to know how to nurture B2B leads, know that the quality of your content has helped you attract B2B clients, and capture leads. Again, you need top-notch, targeted content, as one size doesn’t fit all. As mentioned in the first technique, you need to categorize the lead. Based on the categories, you can understand the unique buyer personas. The personas will help you develop a wide range of content, like blogs, infographics, videos, and guides based on the interests, challenges, and goals of different B2B clients. You can then target the different lists with engaging content to push them down the sales funnel.
6 – Leverage the Power of Email Automation
One of the best ways to prevent the leads from going cold is using email marketing automation. Surely, the human element is the most crucial part of B2B lead nurturing. But, automation can help you send quick responses when you are busy or unavailable. This helps you keep your leads fresh, and your lead-nurturing ventures don’t go to waste just because you are low on human resources. Also, you can create drip campaigns to send relevant and timely emails to leads until they are ready for a deeper connection.
7 – Choose Multi-Channel Outreach
Gone are the days when B2B lead nurturing ventures were limited to calls and emails. For an efficient campaign, and to get more sales conversion, you should utilize multiple channels and strategies like email marketing, social media, marketing automation, direct sales outreach, paid retargeting, or dynamic web content. This helps boost customer retention rates and brand awareness. However, the outreach should not be overwhelming for the leads. Also, ensure that your sales and marketing teams are well-aligned and are on the same page.
8 – Focus on Every Touchpoint
As mentioned earlier, the B2B sales cycle is lengthy, and the buying journey consists of multiple touchpoints, right from the first contact to the purchase. To nurture your B2B leads perfectly, you should deliver content at every touchpoint to help the leads gain information and valuable insights. You should address common queries and issues throughout the buyer’s journey with different types of content, like whitepapers, blog guides, social media posts, or emails.
9 – Send Personalized Emails
B2B or B2C personalization can do wonders! Your prospective clients should not feel like they are simply a part of the company’s generic drip email campaign. This is why the personalization of emails is important to make the leads feel valued. You can send triggered emails when the lead takes action on your website, and when we say personalization, it is more than just addressing the lead by their name. Send relevant emails related to their action by inserting the right marketing messages.
10 – Nurture After the Purchase
Many businesses ease up on the nurturing process once the client makes a purchase. Well, there are better tactics to practice than this. You should gain the loyalty of your B2B clients post-purchase by showing your support and helping them with any issues related to your products or services. Nurturing existing customers can help you get referrals and more business opportunities. So, be ready with post-purchase content, and emails as well.
FAQs
FAQs
– Email Marketing
– Content Marketing
– Lead Scoring
– Social Media
– Multi-Channel Outreach
1. How is B2B lead nurturing different from B2C?
B2B leads have to be approached wisely and carefully. As they are already a business professional, they might have sound knowledge in business development. In that case, your ideas and approach should be convincing enough to have as your customers.
2. How can you nurture a B2B lead through email?
Email marketing is one of the best ways to keep in touch with your prospects. Your leads might be in any stage of the sales cycle, so sending them highly personalized and engaging emails can help you stay on top of their mind.
Some nurturing tips:
– Send personalized emails to trigger their curiosity.
– Newsletters, case studies, and testimonials can help you gain their trust.
– Reminder emails to provoke them to purchase the ones that are in the cart.
– Recommendation emails, like showing relevant products paired with their interests.
3. How do you increase leads through nurturing?
By retargeting the prospects who have shown interest in your service, you can urge them to strike a deal with your service. There are different strategies you can utilize to increase leads. Some of them are listed below:
– Email Marketing
– Content marketing
– Lead Scoring
– Social Media
– Multi-Channel Outreach
Wrapping Up
Don’t stick to the mantra “more is better.” While lead generation is crucial, lead nurturing is a bigger part of the puzzle. Your efforts are effective if you focus on most of these lead nurturing techniques.
Use personalization and lead scoring to identify quality leads and turn these quality leads into paying customers with lead nurturing. However, this requires time and resources. Experienced sales development representatives can efficiently help you with your lead nurturing ventures.
If you are still stuck on how to nurture B2B leads with limited resources, you can outsource this process. Feel free to get in touch with our experts to find out more about this.
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