Date
15th November 2024
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 contact and your own resources to ensure your business is front of mind when it's buying time.
But it’s also 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 primarily focus on helping your prospects - building your brand up in their head as a great source of information. Plus, it should be an ongoing strategy for your existing clients too.
In this blog we'll examine:
- Benefits of B2B lead nurturing
- 9 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.
And, as a marketer, your lead nurturing strategy will help you better understand your prospects. It should help you discover how your leads are a suitable fit for your products and solutions, and crucially, whether they are in an active buying cycle before your sales department works its magic.
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.
In theory, B2B lead nurturing strategies move your marketing qualified leads (MQLs) down through your marketing funnel to become sales accepted leads (SALs). However, there's a lot more to it than that.
In our experience, successful B2B lead nurturing goes hand in hand with quality B2B lead generation campaigns.
Lead nurturing requires a strategic plan with lots of testing and tweaking along the way. Each interaction with your brand should be aimed at helping your leads learn more about your business.
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
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.
Now you know what lead nurturing is, and the benefits, let's explore 9 B2B lead nurturing strategies and best practices for 2025. You'll be turning your MQLs into sales accepted leads (SALs) before you know it!
B2B Lead Nurturing Best Practices 2025
Strategy #1: Follow-Up and Nurture Flow
B2B lead nurturing is time-sensitive, so if you want to make an impact, don't hesitate in sending new leads a follow-up that's relevant to their needs.
Let's say you generated your leads via a reputable content syndication platform, and your new prospects engaged with a piece of educational content from your brand.
Even if you think the piece of content your new leads downloaded was out of this world, if you don't contact them quickly, they might not associate the content they read with your brand.
Deciding on when and how to follow up will depend on:
- How your leads were generated or how they entered your CRM.
- What information you already have on them: for example, their name, job title, company size, location, etc. How can you use this information to follow up in a more personalized or relevant way?
- How familiar with your brand, products and services are they already?
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 touch-points.
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.
B2B Lead Nurturing Strategy #2: Progressive Profiling
Personalization is crucial for lead nurturing programs. And personalization requires lots of data about your leads.
Progressively profiling your prospects (try saying that three times) is a great way to learn more about them from each interaction - without asking too many questions at once.
Asking just one question in an email or LinkedIn follow-up, or making notes based on their behavior, is a great way to get to know more about your prospects – what they're interested in and what they need from your business.
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. For example profiling questions 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
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.
Progressively profiling goes hand in hand with contact scoring, so let's explore how to score your contacts in more detail.
B2B Lead Nurturing Strategy #3: 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.
As a very basic example, you might assign:
- 1 point for opening or clicking a link in an email.
- 2 points for providing a further piece of contact information – such as their job title.
- 5 points for downloading a resource or watching a video.
- 10 points for joining a webinar.
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 Strategy #4: Strategic Messaging
We're back to personalization again: it really is one of the most crucial elements of lead nurturing.
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.
Once you're in the process of progressively profiling your leads, you can tailor the messaging and content you send them.
Your message should be as tailored to your contact as possible. With more information on your contacts and more insight into how they are interacting with your brand, you'll be able to get more strategic with your messaging.
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 was the lead 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.
Which brings us to...
B2B Lead Nurturing Strategy #5: Multi-Channel Nurturing
With B2B lead nurturing you'll most likely contact your leads via email.
Contacting leads by phone, especially in the top of the funnel, just isn't done anymore: self-serve research is preferred by modern B2B buyers, so an almost-cold call is likely to put them off. Reserve that first phone call for your Sales team.
However, don't limit yourself to email: with many potential digital touchpoints to engage leads, you can still adopt a multi-channel lead nurturing strategy. For example, you can follow up with a lead on LinkedIn – sending them an interesting piece of content, or encouraging your Sales team to interact with their posts. (We've found that last one to be so good for brand awareness - everyone loves social media engagement, after all!)
You could also invite them to join a webinar or product demo, or send them a personalized video using Loom for example, from one of your Sales team members.
Or you could engage with them via 3rd party media, such as Headley Media's content libraries. More on that in Strategy #9!
Your multi-channel nurturing strategy will depend on a few factors: the product or service you are marketing, the value of each potential new prospect to your business, and how they became a lead in the first place.
For example, if their first interaction with you was via LinkedIn, it makes sense for the first steps in your nurturing journey to be via LinkedIn as well. If they engaged with your brand via a content syndication agency, you can engage them further with more content through that same website.
Whatever multi-channel nurturing strategy you adopt, you will want to make sure you focus on valuable and educational content first before talking about your products and services directly.
An Example of B2B Lead Nurturing
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.
B2B Lead Nurturing Strategy #6: Aligning With Your Sales Team
An essential B2B lead nurturing strategy is to align with your Sales team.
It may sound simple, but so many Sales and Marketing teams are not aligned, which can cause problems.
Your Sales team is the closest to your existing clients, so use their expertise and insights as much as you can.
When shaping your lead nurturing strategy, a great way to align with your Sales team is to join their calls for client listening or ask them to record their calls so you can learn more about your existing clients' pain points.
Once you have a list of common questions your clients and prospects ask during Sales calls, you could create a lead nurturing strategy based on that.
A follow-up email could be as simple as a quick question and answer, with no required action - just your business sharing helpful information with your leads and helping keep your brand in mind.
B2B Lead Nurturing Strategy #7: Offering Something Unique
Don't bombard your prospects with the 'same old' content.
Focus your lead nurturing strategies on giving valuable content away freely and adding value to your prospects' research.
It might feel like you need to gate every piece of content you share with your prospects to gain further intelligence, but that isn't the case.
When your leads are at the very top of the funnel, an ungated resource can help them get to know your business better without any unnecessary barriers.
For example, our annual Complete Guide to B2B Technology Lead Generation is one of our key pieces of content, but it's also ungated. The guide provides information and insights into what we do best; high-quality lead generation, and gives technology companies advice on how to generate high-quality leads for themselves. Plus, it even includes a checklist to use when evaluating lead generation suppliers.
We decided to un-gate the eBook because we want as many people as possible to see it and to get value from it. In this instance, it's more important for us to share the guide freely than it is to make people 'pay' for the guide with their personal details.
In contrast, if they are further down the funnel and you want to ask your prospects a key question that will help you determine whether they are ready to be passed on to your Sales team, a gated, high-quality resource could be beneficial.
B2B Lead Nurturing Strategy #8: Continual Evaluation
As with any element of your B2B marketing strategy, it's important to continually evaluate your lead nurturing strategy. We recommend reviewing every quarter while you're getting started, and then moving to a six-monthly review once your lead nurturing strategy is established.
Use these questions to help you evaluate how your lead nurturing is working:
- What metrics can you analyze within your nurture flow? For example, email open and click-through rates, where leads drop off or disengage, how many emails people typically interact with within your nurture flow, what emails are performing well and why.
- What communications are getting the most engagement?
- What channels are working? What channels aren't working?
- What pieces of content are performing?
- And finally, are there any trends in the behavior of your leads?
B2B Lead Nurturing Strategy #9: Content Syndication
Content syndication is a classic method of lead generation, but it's also a fantastic way to nurture your leads.
As we mentioned above, good content syndication platforms are hugely valuable resources for B2B buyers who are researching business solutions. By sharing your whitepapers, eBooks, case studies and videos via a content syndication agency, you can nurture existing leads as well as generating new ones.
Here's a brief summary of how content syndication works:
- First, you choose a trustworthy, reputable agency (like us!).
- You choose the content libraries you want to appear on, based on your target audience (we have six respected B2B technology brands).
- You send your most valuable content to be uploaded as gated asset(s).
- Your content is downloaded by readers of the content library, who give their business details in exchange for the download.
- You receive a weekly list of new leads.
In a typical Nurture Track content syndication campaign, your leads would see at least two pieces of your content and explicitly consent to hear from you.
But even without this enhancement, content syndication adds another digital channel for your leads to become familiar with your brand, which makes it an ideal demand generation strategy, too - but that's another blog!
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.
Choosing a lead generation agency can be challenging in an industry clouded by smoke, mirrors and promises of AI wizardry.
That's why we published our Quality Lead Generation Checklist: to make sure B2B tech businesses know the right questions to ask to differentiate between the good lead generation agencies and the less reputable ones.
Ready to start nurturing your leads? Download our FREE B2B lead nurturing toolkit today!
eBook: Enhance Your Lead Generation With the Buyer's Journey
The buyer's journey model can help you consider the best content for your B2B lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns. Why? Because understanding where your potential prospects are on their path to becoming a customer will help you create content syndication and nurturing campaigns that resonate.
Our eBook shares the different stages of the buyer's journey and what content is best to share at each stage. Plus, you'll discover the key questions to consider to help you select a piece that cuts through the noise and resonates with your target audience.
