It’s not all about leads. The sales process in the B2B landscape has embraced a significant change. A purchase typically involves multiple decision makers, multiple teams and multiple stages. Creating awareness and interest about your products is just the first step of a long process. The bulk of your prospects, while having a fair idea of what their objectives are, are unaware of what your company exactly offers. Only 27% of B2B leads are sales-ready when first generated, according to MarketingSherpa. The remaining 73% constitutes a glaring opportunity and a stairway to success for sales growth. There is a high risk of the leads generated being lost, ignored or scooped up by competitors. It is thus essential for marketers to educate prospects and move them ahead in the sales funnel in order to increase the lead-conversion rate. And this is where lead nurturing comes into the picture.
B2B Lead Nurturing caters to prospective buyers during the early stages of the buying process by providing them with highly relevant educational content. It can help build preference for your products and brand in the minds of prospects long before they are actively engaged and reach the buying stage. It is about building relationships and trust to ensure success at a later stage.
Traditionally, marketers and sales-reps responded to prospect enquiries and their interest in a company’s services and products. But with the advent of online channels and their ever expanding reach, prospects are spending more time online obtaining, researching and analyzing information. On average, customers progress nearly 60% of the way through the purchase decision-making process before engaging a sales rep, according to the Marketing Leadership Council. The companies are hence, although indirectly, meeting their prospects at a much earlier stage than before. There is where companies have to leverage digital marketing and capture leads; with an aim to maximize the conversions.
After you first identify interest and generate leads from different channels and awareness efforts – Social Media, PR, Search Marketing, Content Marketing or Direct connection – the next step to build this buying interest through relevant and valuable education efforts. Online lead nurturing, as a process, can target specific audience sets at different stages of the sales process with a singular aim of moving them forward. Once you set up your lead nurturing process, your campaigns can cater to someone who opts in at any of the early stages. There are 5 key points to optimize your online lead nurturing process.
Audit your current state
Before putting in place a lead nurturing strategy, audit your existing campaigns, current lead generation rates, traffic levels and the corresponding conversion rates. Having a lot of website visitors is great, but they are of value if they do not lead to any conversions. It is also important to evaluate what information you gather as part of your lead generation process. By gaining data like an email address, website, social media handles, etc. you can continue to monitor and engage them.
Establish the target audience
Once you have established your lead generation strategy, you need to create a plan in order to reach the right people at the right stage. Typically, there are different types of prospects with different requirements and objectives, at different stages of the sales process. You have to validate your prospects and identify who needs nurturing. There are different ways in which you can segment your customers – seniority, company size, industry, role, etc. Once you have the types of prospects in the bag, segment them accordingly and map them to their objectives and requirements.
Offer valuable and relevant content
Your objective is not to hit your prospects with one sales pitch after the other. Instead, offer them valuable and relevant information (for example, webinars, eBooks, and whitepapers) that would educate them and drive them to make the buying decisions. There are various ways in which a company can share lead nurturing information. Content Marketing, Social Media, Email Marketing, Mobile, Blog, etc. can enable you to share information different kinds of information depending on the nature of the content. To reach out to specific audience, you can target the prospects specific to the particular sales stage and deliver highly focused content.
Set concise and measurable goals
Once you zero in on the target audience and offer them content, you have to define the consequent actions that you’d want them to take. For example, once you share a white paper with your prospects, you may want them to visit a specific page on your website. After a webinar, you may want them to download a business case, or an ROI calculator that allows them to further investigate your products. It is important to define what you qualify and quantify as a prospect moving ahead in the sales process.
Establish timelines for your campaigns
Your prospects do not want to see a barrage of emails about your products, no matter how relevant and valuable, flooding their inboxes or on their social media profiles. It is always a good idea to have a lead nurturing cycle in place. How long do you want your lead nurturing process to be? How often should you share the content you have decided on? It is important to create a lead nurturing calendar for each campaign and set the timelines.
Analyze and optimize
As you kick off your lead nurturing campaign, you have to monitor its state with respect to the measurable objectives that were set in place before. The results can give you an understanding on what works and what doesn’t in terms of various parameters like prospect segmentation, timelines, types of content or even subject lines for the emails. Evaluate them against your set targets and optimize your campaigns.
Online lead nurturing, if done effectively, can work wonders for your sales process and improve the lead-to-customer conversion rates.