Top 10 B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies to Execute in 2022
Do you often forget the qualified leads that aren’t ready to buy yet? Or live in uncertainty of future sales to happen Many B2B sales and marketing leaders are too short-sighted when it comes to converting leads and undermine the value of B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies. They fail to develop relationships with potential customers and ultimately lose sales.
Anytime you are looking to close a deal with a B2B company, the prospect is making a decision on the behalf of the entire workforce or the company.
There are more choices to be made, more professionals involved in the decision-making process, and hence – longer sales cycles. The typical longer B2B cycles increase the value of B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies.
Additionally, uncertainty is a major challenge in managing a B2B sales cycle. Your best chance at winning is to simply eliminate uncertainty wherever possible. The easiest way to do this is by maintaining the trust and making relationships.
Companies that excel at nurturing leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.
In this article, we aim to help you understand what lead nurturing is, why it is extremely important for your B2B company, and provide you with 10 B2B lead Nurturing Examples to ace conversions and make long-term partnerships.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of listening to the needs of your prospects, who are already in your sales funnel, and taking actions accordingly.
Nurturing by communicating with the prospects to build trust and relationships helps them convert into paying customers.
Most B2B marketers are focused on feeding the top of the sales funnel of their company with leads.
Yet, how do you think these leads push down to the sales funnel?
Definitely not on their own.
This is why every business needs effective B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies in order to procure quality leads that convert into sales.
Why is Lead Nurturing Important in B2B?
Lead Nurturing keeps potential clients engaged all the time. It happens often that a lead might be interested in your product or service, but not ready to buy yet.
They would typically have some questions, and concerns that need to be answered in order to move from the awareness stage to the decision stage. This is where B2B lead Nurturing Tips come into play.
It is a fact that on average, nurtured leads produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.
Here is a graphical representation that shows the importance of B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies for companies.
Image Source – Wordstream
We have mentioned some more reasons why B2B Lead Nurturing Tips should be your priority in the coming times.
1. Increased lifetime value of a client
2. Establishes authority in the industry
3. Shortens sales cycle
4. Reduces customer acquisition cost
5. Increased quality referrals
Top 10 B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies
In B2B only a small percentage of inbound leads are ready to make a purchase, the rest are left on the tab.
To make sure these leads turn into something solid, you ought to learn from these B2B Lead Nurturing Examples.
1. Understand Your Buyer Personas
Well, before you start nurturing your leads, it is important to categorize them and understand each type.
The categorization should be based on what B2B stage they are in. The stage will decide what kind of nurturing your leads require.
Here is how you can break the lead funnel in your B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies:
Image Source – Gripped
The classification will also help you understand unique buyer personas.
There are basically 4 types of leads:
A. Non-Qualified Leads
These are the leads you do not know much about. Apart from email and a name, you do not have any other information on their likes/dislikes, etc.
The best way to nurture these kinds of leads is through emails.
However, it will take time and effort to gauge the level of interest of such leads.
But once they take an action – show interest or unsubscribe – you will know they’re moving up or down the sales funnel.
B. Action Qualified Leads
These are the kind of leads who have taken some kind of action with your business.
They might have visited your website, downloaded a guide, or subscribed to your newsletter.
Use their actions as a guide to determine your next move with such leads.
C. Marketing Qualified Leads
These are the leads who might have shown interest in your business in the past.
If nurtured correctly, these can turn into potential sales in the near future.
D. Sales Qualified leads
Sales-qualified leads are ready to engage with your sales reps.
They are certainly interested in your offerings, you just need to set an appointment and engage more.
Now that you have classified them, you’d better know how to approach and target each kind.
2. Email Nurturing
Email marketing continues to be one of the best B2B lead Nurturing Tips that convert qualified leads into sales.
Lead nurturing emails generate 18 times more revenue as compared to generic broadcast emails. This is because they are targeted, focused, and provide value to the users.
However, email nurturing would work well if you are leveraging automation to its full potential. Automation helps you to be in touch with the leads on a regular basis.
In the beginning, you can use email automation to follow up on leads fast. With time, you can create the drip campaigns that guide your leads through from that first touch to qualification.
3. Personalization
So for any campaign or any lead nurturing strategies to work, the presence of a human element – personalization, is crucial.
Personalization speeds up the decision-making process of a lead. It shows prospects that they are valued and triggers them to complete an action.
However, personalizing your B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies go far beyond just adding the prospects’ first name in emails. It should relate to them, keep them engaged, and gently push them towards a conversation.
With B2B companies, this is much more difficult than it seems due to the longer buying cycles.
Your B2B company can achieve personalization by using data analytics.
Find out the details of who each of your clients is, what their intention is at any particular moment, and where, when, and how they’ve engaged with your company previously.
Having data in hand will help you to personalize your campaigns and convert more leads.
4. Timely Follow-up
Leads get cold very fast, especially in B2B. Hence, making the benefits of immediate follow-up calls or emails seems quite evident.
Timely and well-planned contact with a lead is far more effective than any volume of cold calling or standalone emails.
Today, you don’t have to spend huge money on getting 24*7 teams. You can achieve the discipline through a variety of tools such as CRM, Email automation, and Live chat.
When a lead is contacted immediately, following a user action, the chances of converting that lead into a sales opportunity increase exponentially.
5. Lead Scoring
To use this tactic effectively, let us first understand what lead scoring is.
Not all contacts are equal. So, any action taken by the uses is rated numerically by the B2B companies. The action can be website browsing behaviors, conversion events, or even social media interactions.
For instance, someone likes an ebook on your website and downloads it. After downloading, they sign up for the newsletters as well. The more positive their behavior would be(towards your brand), their score as a lead would go up.
Image Source – Salesforce
The resulting score is used to help you distinguish between the leads and the approach to nurturing them.
Research by Marketing Sherpa suggests 79% of B2B marketers have not established lead scoring yet. They have no idea what they are missing out on.
Use lead scoring to determine which leads should be followed up with directly by a sales rep and which leads need more nurturing.
6. Provide Relevant, Practical, and Targeted Content
Be mindful and do not bombard all your leads with the same content.
Sending a welcome email to a customer in the marketing qualified stage would only have a negative impact.
You need to keep in mind all aspects of a lead segment before producing any type of content.
Sending relevant and practical content keeps your leads warm and gives you the opportunity to solve their problems.
7. Account-based Marketing
Account-based marketing is the new way of getting effective results by working smarter, and not harder.
By targeting a few, strategic accounts instead of generating as many leads as possible, ABM uses personalized campaigns designed to engage each lead.
Image Source – Superoffice
What do you think will happen if you’re putting all your marketing efforts towards clients who aren’t the right fit?
It won’t take long before they realize this and leave. Hence, you shouldn’t.
Instead, your lead nurturing efforts should be laser-focused towards the prospects that are the right fit for your organization.
Strategic implementation of ABM can help you get a higher return on marketing investment and increased revenues.
8. Solve Your Leads’ Problems
Nothing can beat the experience of engaging with leads and gaining insight into their expectations.
There is a reason why they are in a particular stage of your sales funnel. Engaging with them and getting feedback will enable you to solve their problems.
The idea behind solving their problems is to encourage them to keep coming back and foster healthy relationships.
9. Utilize Multi-Channel Lead Nurturing Strategies
When beginner-level marketers ponder upon B2B lead nurturing examples, the first thing that comes to their mind is a drip-email campaign.
Most B2B marketers commit the mistake of using only email marketing to nurture their leads.
Today, B2B marketers need new tactics and technologies that include and go beyond email nurturing.
Image Source – Digital Glue
Multi-channel lead nurturing strategies generally involve a combination of email marketing, social media, paid retargeting, effective website content, automation, and direct sales outreach.
However, to achieve great results, you need to ensure that your sales and marketing teams work in cohesion. Since many strategies are involved, only coordinated efforts can reap benefits.
10. Evaluate your B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies
You would never know if your B2B Lead Nurturing Tips are producing the desired results or not until you evaluate them.
Take regular breaks and evaluate your B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies to see what works most consistently.
The evaluation will also help you to figure out what opportunities you could have overlooked. Once you know them you’d better know how to move leads to solid sales.
Below are certain metrics which only prove the effectiveness of your lead nurturing program but also help you to iteratively improve it.
A. Response rates – Open, Click, or Conversion rates
B. Average engagement points per lead
C. Unsubscribe rates
D. Leads performing certain activities
E. Percentage of marketing qualified, sales qualified leads.
F. Revenue per client
G. Cost per qualified lead
H. Return on Investment
The Key Takeaway
Generating new leads is definitely the most important part of your B2B marketing strategy. However, no leads can convert into solid sales if they are not nurtured. This is where our highly effective B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies come into play.
The above B2B Lead Nurturing Examples can result in a higher conversion rate with the contacts that you already have in your sales funnel. By using some or all of these tactics, you are bound to get amazing results.
However, we understand the whole process of B2B lead nurturing can be exhausting sometimes. Request a free marketing assessment with us to know how you can improve your company’s marketing efforts.