- 28 Jan 2020
How to Nurture B2B Leads?
Most people give all their focus and effort in generating leads and lack in following up with them.
They successfully acquire leads but are inefficient in converting their prospects into their recurring customers.
Result: Huge Leakage in their B2B Lead Generation Funnel.
You probably have a strategy for acquiring leads in place but you should look at making one for your lead nurturing phase.
I have been doing b2b lead generation for my clients, through the process I have made a lot of revisions and finally landed on a solid process that is not only generating leads for me but also help to convert them.
Okay, let’s dig in!
1. Lead Segmentation
The first thing you would do is to focus on lead segmentation after you have stacked leads from your outreaching campaign.
You would be wondering-
What lead segmentation is and how it will gonna help in your lead generation campaign?
Well, this is the part where you would get the clarity with your leads.
Lead segmentation involves mapping out your leads according to their
- Demographic
- Persona &
- Behavior
Note these KPIs for building Buyers’ Persona.
The KPIs are your benchmarks and guides for your B2B lead generation campaigns which let you discover where you stand and how you need to optimize your practices to get better results.
Make a list of the KPIs that defines your campaigns well and keep a track of them on a regular basis.
This might look easy but believe me if this step demands your dedicated time then it is totally worth it to invest your crucial time as well as the workforce.
To smoothen up this process you might look forward to using autoresponder tools like Aweber, MailChimp or ConvertKit.
It is so important to get this step right, otherwise no matter how good your content is your conversion rate continues to go down.
2. Create Buyer’s Personas
Lead segmentation would give you a rough idea on how your leads are classified into the KPIs mentioned above.
But to have the actual clarity with your audience targetting, I would suggest you create different buyer’s personas based on the rough lead segmentation.
Creating this would involve deep research of your target market, target audience, their interests, behaviors, buying habits, etc.
Once you have created different buyers personas categorize all your leads into them. Then you would be ready to create personalized content to start your outreaching campaign.
3. Create Personalized Content
Lead Nurturing is all about providing value so let me ask you one thing-
How do you provide value?
Yes, Content.
Creating personalized content was the whole point of lead segmentation & buyer’s personas.
Once you have your leads segmented and buyer’s personas ready you need to create personalized (targetted) content for each and every lead. Whether it is the blog post, social media post, email template, an article, etc.
Your content-based strategy involves creating content based on the Buyer’s Persona. Remember those KPIs? Make sure to roll back and have a look.
Your lead generation campaign would be a week or a month long. So, while building content-strategy for your lead generation campaign you need to prepare content scheduled for the complete duration of the campaign before you even start with it.
4. Content Distribution through Account-Based Marketing(ABM)
Account-based marketing is all about educating your leads in a personalized manner.
When you have created the content based on buyers’ personas your next step would be providing it through outreaching.
In lamen terms, there are three phases where your lead would lie into-
i) Awareness Phase-
This is the audience education phase. Generate awareness and interest through your blog posts redirecting to your website, articles, latest industry trends and statistics.
ii)Consideration Phase-
Your audience is now aware of your product/service and needs more information regarding its applications and how you are gonna make their life easier through your product.
This can be done through product specifications & manuals, demo videos & posts, etc.
iii)Decision Phase-
This is the phase where your lead is hot and wants your offer or service badly.
In this phase, all you need to do is to show them happy faces with product reviews & testimonials, success stories, and more product demo videos.
5. Targeted and Retargeted Ads
Mail outreaching might be the biggest strategy in your process but if you are not reaching your audience through other sources like social media platforms you are leaving a lot at the table.
Check out our resource on how to use Twitter for B2B lead generation.
Start leveraging the huge audience on social media whether organically or inorganically.
What I would suggest is to use both of them apart from your old email outreaching.
Create targetted and retargeted ads for your content. Use your previously created buyers’ personas while targetting your audience.
Leverage Facebook pixel placed on your landing page for creating custom audiences for retargeting.
But make sure your landing page is optimized for your B2B lead generation goals so that it will not contribute to bounce rate.
Targeted and Retargeted ads also help automate your B2B lead generation. They might look expensive but they need less intervention that’s why they come at an expense.
6. Concept of Multiple Touches
And now you have started providing content to your audience through all the possible sources how would you know where your lead stands in your lead generation cycle.
The fact is if you are not clear with this concept you would keep bloating content to your audience with no clarity in mind.
So you might be wondering what this concept really is?
THE RULE OF 7
The rule of seven states that, a consumer or a client needs to interact with your brand or product 7 times before they come up with the decision of doing business with
Most of the successful marketers say their lead generation campaigns need an average of
5 Multiple Touches to convert their leads into customers.
So it is pretty much clear that you don’t need much of a content per lead but you need at least 5 to 7 multiple contents(to ensure 5-7 multiple touches) for your lead to interact with.
7. Lead Scoring
Planning is important whether it is for content strategy, outreaching or content distribution. But if you do not track and adjusts throughout the process your b2b lead generation funnel would feel leaky and you might lose your potential customers.
Lead Scoring is nothing but scoring your leads at some scale which validates of converting them.
Each marketer has his/her lead scoring benchmark that they use in their lead generation process. One simple scoring benchmark could be:
These are the most common things you should remember while putting the strategy of your b2b lead generation campaign in place.
I assume that these points are not at all exhaustive. There are many other things to ensure too. I want your side of the hustle, make sure to comment strategies that have worked for you through your campaigns.
