Date
9th October 2024
What Is B2B Lead Nurturing?
B2B lead nurturing is a vital part of the lead generation process.
It's the art of guiding your leads through the marketing funnel towards a purchase, using regular email contact and your own resources to ensure your business is at the front of their mind when it's buying time.
But it’s much more than that.
Nurturing your leads helps you build authentic relationships with your customers, and “earn the right to pitch your solution,” says Salesforce.
B2B lead nurturing tactics, such as email marketing and content marketing, will help you to better understand your prospects' needs based on their activity and engagement.
Then you can identify how your technology solutions will solve their business challenges.
But lead nurturing should also actively help your prospects, building your brand up in their head - and it should be an ongoing strategy for your existing clients too.
In this blog we'll examine:
- Benefits of B2B lead nurturing
- 3 key lead nurturing strategies
- Examples of B2B lead nurturing and lead scoring.
What Are the Benefits of B2B Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing programs influence leads and customers by establishing a relationship between your brand and your audience.
Encouraging interactions and sharing useful content through lead nurturing tactics keeps your contacts aware of and engaged with your brand.
It also helps them through their decision-making process toward conversion.
However, as a B2B marketer, you'll know that customers rarely follow a straightforward and linear buyer's journey.
Buyers will do their research first and contact brands when they're ready, so it's important to continually engage with your leads to keep your organization front of mind.
Successful lead nurturing programs rely on providing the right information to your prospects at the right time. They allow you to regularly connect with your customers and potential customers by providing valuable and relevant information.
Maddie Penfold Account Director @ Headley Media
It's also important to keep your current customers engaged with your brand and services through lead nurturing.
The benefits of B2B lead nurturing include:
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Increased brand awareness: Your prospects and existing customers are regularly exposed to your organization's brand through lead nurturing programs. Plus, Demand Gen Report found that only 29% of brands nurture their existing customers beyond the initial investment, which means you'll have a major competitive advantage if you do.
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Increased sales: According to Marketo, businesses that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. Lead nurturing can increase your sales when done right, so it's essential to understand your prospects and how they interact with your brand.
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Increased order value: Invespcro found that nurtured leads make 47% bigger purchases than non-nurtured leads, meaning that when your leads buy from you, they'll buy more.
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Better customer relationships: By nurturing leads even as they become customers, says Oracle, you can continue to improve your relationship with them. For example you can segment them at the point of purchase according to whether they are a 'champion', a 'power user' or an 'executive sponsor', and communicate with them accordingly.
So those are the benefits of B2B lead nurturing. Now let's explore three key strategies to implement ready for 2025.
B2B Lead Nurturing Best Practices
Nurturing your B2B leads is a great way to increase your brand awareness, ready for when your prospects and existing customers are in an active buying cycle.
By providing value upfront to your leads, such as sending them educational-led content over sales-led assets, you'll be increasing your brand awareness for when your prospects are ready to buy.
As a B2B marketer, you know that every B2B buyer's journey is unique, so it's essential to continually provide value to your leads. Lead nurturing done in this way will help you build your brand's reputation as a go-to source for research, information, and education, keeping your organization's solutions front of mind.
#1 - The Power of Personalization
Firstly, let's look at personalization within lead nurturing and why it's so important.
'Personalization' has been steadily growing as one of the most prominent marketing tactics for years now, and with good reason.
As both consumers and marketers, we know it works. Is there anything better than getting a personalized offer on a product you were already considering? Or a blog article direct to your email inbox that you're genuinely interested in? With customized lead nurturing, you can ensure your leads are getting maximum value out of their interactions with you, warming them up towards your brand.
How your leads were generated will help you gauge what information to collect from your lead nurturing.
How your leads have entered your marketing CRM, and what intent data you have on each lead, will determine the levels of personalization you can deliver.
For example, did you run your B2B lead generation campaign via relevant content syndication platforms? Or were they an inbound lead, following you on social media?
If the former, you could send them a welcome email thanking them for downloading your content. The latter is probably better reached through further demand generation strategies, such as social media content and targeted advertising.
Gaining More Intelligence About Your Prospects
When creating personalized lead nurturing programs, audience intelligence is crucial.
One of the best ways to learn more about your prospects from the beginning is to use enhanced audience intelligence strategies when generating your leads, such as profiling and qualifying questions to learn more about each prospect.
You can do this by gating your content. A gated form allows you to add additional questions, helping you personalize your interactions and find out more about your contacts and their pain points.
You can gate your content when you publish it on your website, or when you syndicate it via a 3rd party lead generation agency.
At Headley Media we support our clients in creating the most effective profiling and qualifying questions based on their campaign objectives to help them understand more about their audience before they are delivered as leads.
Learning more about your prospects before you start your lead nurturing campaign will help you create personalized communications based on the enhanced information you have about them. You'll gain a higher level of audience intelligence from the start - which will help you provide more value in your lead nurturing. Chloe Addis Head of Marketing @ Headley Media
On the other hand, if you have leads in your CRM without any intelligence - for example, you only have their name, email address, and company name - you can use lead nurturing to learn more about them.
How can you do that? By setting up a sequence of communications. An email nurture flow that shares educational and informative content can give you a lot of data about which pieces of content your leads are engaging with - and allow you to analyze what individual leads are interested in.
Gated content is a great way to learn more about your prospects directly, via audience intelligence strategies: you can ask them key questions, or for more specific marketing permissions, at the download point.
However, gated content isn't always appropriate to share with leads already in your funnel. If this is the route you're taking, make sure the content you choose is educational, unique, and exclusive, meaning your leads can't get the information anywhere else.
Finally, based on your prospects' behavior, you can send them in different directions within your nurture flow to personalize their content and experience with your brand as you learn more about them.
#2 - Using Automated Nurture Flows
Once you've started learning more about your prospects, you can set up more personalized lead nurture flows. Typically, this is done using your CRM (such as HubSpot) and will be an automated series of communication touchpoints.
With nurture flows, you can segment your leads and then send them more relevant and engaging content based on their activity and the intelligence you've gained about them.
For example, suppose they interact with a specific type of content – such as clicking through to an ungated eBook you have sent them. In that case, you'll then be able to share a follow-up email or a different piece of content relevant to their interaction.
Some of the benefits of sending automated nurture communications, based on your leads' activity and behavior, include:
- Gaining more information on each lead and learning what content resonates with them.
- Shaping your communications to suit their needs.
- Building a better picture of their interests as potential buyers.
- Helping build trust in your brand.
- Facilitating a warmer sales conversation when the time is right.
#3 - Use Lead Scoring
B2B lead scoring, also known as contact scoring, is the process of ranking your prospects based on their levels of engagement and suitability, in line with your nurture program.
You'll most likely set up a contact scoring system that assigns numerical points to each lead based on their activity. You'll then give a numerical value to your leads at different stages of the funnel. For example, 50 'points' may result in your MQLs being passed over to your Sales team.
HubSpot's lead scoring 101 is a great place to start if you're new to lead scoring. The guide shares six different lead scoring models to explore based on your prospects and the data you collect.
It's an excellent strategic approach to ensure your lead nurturing returns solid data and a tangible ROI. It can be time-consuming, but it helps businesses optimize their lead nurturing activities for increased sales.
Questions to ask when setting up your lead scoring include:
- How were your leads generated? Where have your leads come from? How "warm" are they to your brand and your products, services, or solutions?
- How much information do you have about each lead? What additional information can you gain through your lead nurturing activities? What information does your Sales team need?
- How many pieces of content have your leads engaged with? And what forms and types of content are your leads engaging with the most?
- How often are you contacting your leads? And by what methods? (Such as email and phone).
- What does your leads' typical buying cycle look like? And what's your average 'closed-won' timeframe? For example, what's the average time a new lead goes from being a prospect to a new client or customer?
The above list will help you create a contact scoring system for your lead nurturing activities, moving your MQLs through the funnel. Additionally, implementing a contact scoring system will allow you to deliver SQLs to your sales team once your leads are fully nurtured.
Finally, it's essential to ensure your contact scoring system evolves. You should continue to monitor how your prospects move through your marketing funnel and the types of content that resonate with them the most.
B2B Lead Nurturing: An Example
Jayne is a marketing manager at a Fintech saas business called CashLess.
At the beginning of the 2024 financial year she got extra budget for her lead generation and lead nurturing program, which she invested in a Headley Media Nurture Track lead generation campaign with audience intelligence enhancements. She also decided to track her lead nurturing activities through lead scoring, and downloaded HubSpot’s lead scoring calculator.
In previous years, Jayne used lead nurturing tactics, such as an email newsletter and monthly blog, without measuring their effect on leads. Now she measures as many possible points of nurture as possible, including every time they:
- open an email from CashLess – 5 points for the welcome email, 10 points for the newsletter.
- download content from Headley Media – 10 points.
- engage with a social media post – 5 points for a like, 10 points for a comment.
- browse a CashLess webpage – 5 -15 points depending on which page.
Through scoring leads in this way, Jayne estimates that she is passing at least four times as many leads to the Sales team as she was a year ago.
She also uses Headley Media’s Post-Campaign Analysis reports, which are provided by the Headley team after each campaign, to continually enhance her follow-up nurturing strategy.
Creating Your B2B Lead Nurturing Strategy
If you're providing value within your lead nurturing program, you can continue to nurture older leads and your existing customers, even if they aren't in an active buying cycle.
Creating your B2B lead nurturing strategy is all about sharing regular and relevant communications with your leads, to help facilitate warmer sales conversations once your MQLs are nurtured into SQLs.
As we've explored, there are several benefits to B2B lead nurturing, and many tactics you can employ to nurture your B2B leads. However, it's also important to remember that lead nurturing programs are only as good as the quality of your B2B leads.
High-quality lead-generation campaigns should always come first to generate the most relevant prospects.
If you work with a trusted and specialist B2B lead generation supplier, they will be able to guide you through your whole campaign, generating high-quality leads according to your campaign objectives.
When choosing a B2B lead generation agency to work with, they should be able to answer all the key questions within Headley Media's Quality Lead Generation Checklist.
Ready to start nurturing your leads? Download our FREE B2B lead nurturing toolkit today!
The Complete Guide to B2B Technology Lead Generation 2024
Explore everything you need to know about B2B technology lead generation in our complete guide. Within the guide you'll find the latest advice on how to generate B2B leads, as well as best practices for B2B lead nurturing.
