Closing deals in the pandemic isn’t easy. Experts suggest that marketers should first target best-fitting leads to purchase your solutions or services. However, those best-fit prospects might not be ready to buy, and this could potentially lengthen your sales cycle. How can you tighten things up to help move them along the funnel? 

Only 27% of your B2B leads are sales ready, meaning that 73% of them should go into a Lead Nurture program. How do marketers plug this massive lead leakage? It’s time to adopt these 6 lead nurturing best practices.

Lead nurturing is a “killer method” to generate sales-qualified leads. When done right, it enables B2B marketers to:

• Address prospects’ pain points throughout the buying journey.
• Provide necessary information to prospects
• Increase brand awareness.
• Cultivate a strong relationship and understanding of your business’ value. 
• Convert them into sales-ready leads.

But B2B marketers often struggle to implement successful lead nurturing programs. 65% of B2B marketers confirmed they don’t have established lead nurturing strategies.

In this article, you’ll find the best lead nurturing practices that are helping marketers execute profitable lead nurturing campaigns and achieve a higher ROI.

6 Practices to Create Strong Lead Nurturing Campaigns

1 – Build a full-proof plan

For strong lead nurturing campaigns, you need a well laid-out plan, something that helps  you to understand proper management of each lead in the buying journey. To design the right plan for the lead nurturing process, you need to:

• Identify target audience segments, based on their behavior, preferences, and purchase intent.
• Rank targeted leads (this is funnel management) according to how close they are to making a purchase decision.
• Supply regular content to prospects that keeps them engaged until they are ready for sales followup

2 – Leverage Personalized Content

When it comes to nurturing leads, delivering personalized content is important. You can improve buyers’ engagement, fill the bottom of your sales funnel with high-qualified leads, and increase conversion rates.

Creating personalized content requires you to understand your unique buyers, then design content based on their characteristics, such as interest, goals, objectives, and marketing triggers.

3 – Multichannel Nurturing

With multichannel lead nurturing, B2B marketers can engage targeted prospects across multiple channels such as email, social media, and website throughout the sales funnel. Search engine marketing, programmatic display to social media, Google AdWords, and advertisement on social channels are some multi-channel techniques to perform lead nurturing programs and engage targeted prospects.

4 – Score Your Leads

Lead scoring is a significant element of the lead nurturing process that helps you to know whether leads are sales-ready or need further nourishment.

To build a robust lead scoring strategy, your sales and marketing teams should work collectively and assign numeric values to each lead for their actions, such as browsing behaviors, conversion events, or social media interactions.

These numerical values reflect how well a lead matches your company’s ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), and how many times they are intersecting with your content and brand. 

5 – Create Sales and Marketing Alignment

If your sales and marketing data aren’t connected, it might happen that your sales reps will reach a prospect someday only to find out that s/he has already opted out of communication. This may affect your brand’s reputation and is clearly a wastage of both customers’ and sales rep’s time. 

To ensure a seamless transition, sales and marketing should align around set common expectations, responsibilities, and goals. Both teams should hold each other responsible for converting leads and effectively nurturing prospects into customers.

6 – Use of Marketing Automation Platforms

Marketing automation platforms can rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to automate lead segmentation, lead scoring, assigning rank , and predictively sending emails. By doing so, these automated platforms help you nurture leads and develop flexible, adaptive communication. You can educate and convert your initial lukewarm leads into hot, sales-ready prospects at scale.

Leverage Lead Nurturing Strategy

Once you feel comfortable with your strong lead nurturing operations, use this strategy to increase your sales-qualified leads and yield higher ROI. 

Want to learn more about lead generation and lead nurturing? Continue with these articles:
AI for B2B Lead Generation: 3 Ways to Start