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7 Top B2B Lead Nurturing Tactics to Turn More Prospects Into Customers

By thought-horizon | Sep 8, 2019

Diverse business types require diverse ways to connect with buyers. What works amazingly well for a pharmaceutical company may not yield significant results for a B2B SaaS brand. B2B is different. You need to reach where your ideal customers are and nurture the leads effectively. 

You need to progress prospects through the stages of problem identification to quantifying the opportunity of offering services to help to evaluation/pricing and close. It’s a long process and the best way to progress a prospect is with content. Creating content that fits all stages of the buyers’ journey and is tailored to the buyer persona is the place to start. This is not easy to do. You need to break it out and create an editorial calendar that uses multiple forms of content (brochures, white papers, webinars, video, etc) and dovetails all the topics and content into your webpage or individual landing pages. Then you can use the following tactics to bring prospects at the various stages in the buyers’ journey to this content.

1. Targeted Content

When it comes to nurturing leads on social media, a one-size-fits-all approach does not really work. You need to strategically nurture your leads using targeted content that improves your social selling strategy significantly. 

Nurturing leads with targeted content can increase sales opportunities by over 20%. 

It’s simple: understand your buyers’ personas and their content needs. Identify the type of content they share and engage with. Create an assortment of targeted content designed to nurture each persona based on their interests, goals, objectives, and marketing triggers. Get help from an automation tool that enables you to identify, segment, and target each persona as you scale your social selling strategy. 

2. Think Beyond One Channel

Emails were once one of the most amazing tools to nurture leads. You could simply excel at this by setting up a simple email drip campaign, sending an exhaustive number of generic emails trying to hit the target blindly. 

4 out of 5 marketers find that their email open rate does not exceed 20%. Additionally, 79% of these inbound marketing leads don’t convert. While it can be a clear case of ineffective lead nurturing, it is also apparent why you need to break the boundaries of the inbox. 

Savvy marketers today are turning towards multi-channel lead nurturing strategies. They combine the benefits of marketing automation, email marketing, direct sales outreach, social media, paid targeting, dynamic website content, and a whole lot more to build robust multi-channel lead nurturing strategies. 

3. Be In Touch

While the buyer’s journey for every product and service can be pretty different, prospects receive 10 touches on an average from the time they enter the top of the funnel until they are closed. However, many sales pros fail to maintain the numbers, causing the whole system to collapse. 

The most successful lead nurturing strategies deliver content that helps prospects through the buyers’ journey by addressing common questions and concerns. Combine your tactics with other options, such as social media, blog posts, whitepapers, interactive calculators, or even direct mail to nurture leads. 

4. Personalized Emails and Messages

A touch of personalization can help you multiply your revenue in comparison to the impersonalized ones. Multiple research proves that personalized emails produce significantly better results than generic email blasts. Combining the power of the right message with personalization and behavioral triggers can translate your message well to the right people at the right time. You can also send triggered emails that encourage one to download your content, calls to action on your website, or something that they can engage with. 

5. Follow-Ups

The odds of a lead translating into a sale, or getting onto the qualified list, are 21 times higher when contacted within five minutes versus when done in 30 minutes – that’s how beneficial immediate follow-ups are. However, most organizations fail at that. 

Automated lead nurturing can help you in the same way by letting you reach out to multiple groups of people. That said, a timely follow-up email or a phone call is still one of the most useful ways to convert that inbound lead into a qualified one.

6. Align Sales and Marketing

Teamwork pays off, and lead nurturing is no exception. When marketing and sales teams share the responsibility, organizations are able to reap significant benefits. In order for both sales and marketing to nurture the leads, both the teams need to be synchronized to identify the position of a lead in a sales funnel and when they need to be transitioned through the funnel. While creating a lead nurturing strategy, recognize the triggers and how can you use them strategically. Find out the areas that can serve for transition, and implement them as workflow. 

7. Lead Scoring

Sales experts across the globe cite lead scoring based on content and engagement as the most effective tactic for lead nurturing. One can identify the opportunity in each lead and assign a numeric value to them according to browsing behavior, conversion events, and social media interactions. This data can be fed into the automation platforms. Resulting scores will help sales pros to identify valuable leads that are worth following upon. Not only does this tactic help you analyze the customer behavior, but also help you bid on the most rewarding leads. 

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