Lead Nurturing Campaigns: How to Drive Results Through Targeted Engagement

Summary

Synopsis:

What B2B lead nurturing is, and how targeted nurturing drives conversions
Strategies and best practices for effective lead nurturing
How to design and implement your lead nurturing campaign while leveraging automation
How to measure and optimize lead nurturing results

Generating and converting leads is not only a common growth strategy at B2B companies but also a key performance metric for many sales and marketing leaders.

Yet, optimizing the lead management process for efficiency and effectiveness is a two-fold challenge at many companies. First, there is a common over prioritization on the top and bottom of the sales funnel, leaving the middle nurturing phase that often defines the quality of outcomes from campaigns becoming neglected.

Successful, full-funnel lead nurturing can generate up to 50% more sales-qualified leads at a 33% lower cost, higher conversions, and margins.

The second challenge faced by B2B companies is the length of the sales cycle. Without proper structures and processes, long cycles can result in lead churn as a result of misalignment between sales and marketing teams, as well as gaps in qualification and engagement.

Inadequate qualification can result in your sales team nurturing leads who may not convert, resulting in a lower conversion rate. Therefore, developing the right lead nurturing strategy for your organization is critical.

WHAT IS LEAD NURTURING?

The objective of a lead nurturing strategy is to cultivate and strengthen relationships with leads until they are ready to convert into clients. Effective lead nurturing starts with understanding the needs of prospective buyers, as well as their position in the sales funnel.

This lead intelligence can then be leveraged to customize the nurturing each prospect receives, including the type of content shared, marketing channels used, and the direct contact deployed by sales teams once leads are qualified. Effective lead nurturing can help to build brand awareness and loyalty even before the lead is ready to buy.

The role of lead nurturing in the sales funnel

While an objective of lead nurturing is to support conversions, this is not its principal goal. As a result, lead nurturing has multiple benefits within the sales funnel, contributing to a better buyer experience and journey overall.

Building trust: Consistent nurturing helps demonstrate to your leads that you are aligned with their pain points and not just looking to make a sale. Open sharing of relevant knowledge to educate, inform, and empower the leads also helps to build trust with your brand.
Projecting the brand as a thought leader: Creating and sharing relevant and topical content with prospects, including whitepapers, videos, and webinars, helps boost your brand authority, securing your expertise as a prominent thought leader in your industry.
Elevating your sales strategy: Combining lead nurturing strategies with efficient lead qualification enables your sales teams to focus on leads that have both interest and intent. Targeted nurturing also helps improve the conversion outcomes of your sales strategy.
Amplifying growth and ROI: The cost of lead acquisition and conversion when combined with effective lead nurturing is significantly lower than other paid strategies and makes it a critical growth driver at a higher marketing ROI.

Key lead nurturing strategies

Lead nurturing strategies must be supported with well-thought-out processes to create and build meaningful relationships with prospective clients. But, you first need to build a framework of foundational strategies that will allow you to run lead nurturing workflows more efficiently.

1. Build ideal client profiles (ICP) and categorize your leads

Define your audience based on ideal client profiles. These are a snapshot of the prospective clients you want to reach and include details like job, title, and industry, as well as their goals and pain points. ICPs should be combined with buyer personas for greater accuracy.

Buyer personas include additional information focused on the individual rather than the account in general. As a result, key differentiators between the two concepts include values and beliefs, personal attributes, aspirations (often in line with job role), and common objections, to name but a few.

guide

Discover how to build B2B buyer personas in our guide

2. Lead segmentation and scoring

Market segmentation

Once you have created your ICPs, group leads generated into specific market segments based on shared data points such as industry, company size, and needs. A balanced segmentation strategy will help you better understand the characteristics and behavioral attributes of your potential clients, allowing you to implement accurate targeting.

Customized and relevant lead nurturing will drive more quality engagement and accelerate your sales cycle. Below are some B2B market segmentation attributes to consider:

guide

Read our definitive guide for a full breakdown of B2B market segmentation

Lead scoring

As your leads progress through the sales funnel stages, the lead nurturing strategies should evolve to meet their changing needs and interests. This tracking is guided by lead scoring to determine the position of leads in your sales funnel.

Essentially, lead scoring is a system wherein each lead is scored on a scale of 0-100 based on their engagement. Activities such as website visits (including specific pages), content downloads, demo sign-ups, and queries to your sales team are ranked on a predetermined scale, with specific actions holding a greater weighting. For example, requesting a demo should rank higher than a simple website visit.

Some CRMs have this as an inbuilt functionality, while with others, you may need to add a lead qualification stack. Next, you need to define the milestone scores that enable you to categorize leads as marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and then later sales-qualified leads (SQLs).

In short, lead scoring enables your teams to identify and focus the appropriate strategies on leads as they progress through their buyer’s journey.

guide

Learn more about lead qualification and management here

3. Setting up your B2B sales funnel

Implementing a B2B sales funnel remains one of the most effective growth strategies for businesses, or any model that is the closest to an accurate representation of your buyer's journey. The B2B sales funnel tracks strategies that attract relevant leads at the top of the funnel (TOFU) awareness stage, nurture them through the middle of the funnel (MOFU) stage, and finally move them to the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), where the lead makes a purchase decision.

TOFU or the awareness stage:

The top of the funnel or awareness stage is focused on attracting relevant leads with informative content that addresses common buyer concerns at the start of their journey. The content is also used to build trust, brand salience, and authority. This is also the stage where you use free gated content, subscriptions, and event participation to access the prospect's contact information.

MOFU or the consideration stage:

By the time the prospects reach the middle of your funnel, they are aware of your brand and your products and services and are considering offers from multiple brands to evaluate which one best aligns with their needs. Hence, the MOFU content should focus on addressing common purchase barriers while highlighting the benefits of your solution and cementing your brand authority.

BOFU or the decision stage:

Even when a lead has reached the BOFU or decision stage, this does not mean that they are ready to buy. Indeed, a concerted sales push here could lead to lead churn. Instead of pushing for a sale, focus on nurturing these leads with social proof, free demos, and special discounts. The idea at this stage is to use nurturing to convert product interest into qualified purchase intent.

4. Crafting content for each buyer’s journey stage

An effective lead nurturing campaign starts with content mapping; a process for identifying the content that is most appropriate for your lead at any given time. As the leads progress down the sales funnel, you will need different content types to engage, inform, and nurture them.

Source: Hubspot

The awareness stage

At the awareness stage of the client journey, your prospects are becoming aware of their problem and trying to understand its details. Content at this stage helps your leads learn more about your brand and understand how their issue can be addressed and resolved.

Typical content types at this stage include:

Blogs
Downloadable gated content
Infographics
Landing pages

Podcasts
How to videos
Social media pages

Ensure you are distributing your content across multiple channels, from your website and social platforms, to online platforms frequented by your audience.

The consideration stage

At the consideration stage, prospects understand their problem(s) and are actively seeking solutions. This stage begins with the leads being qualified as MQLs and ends when lead scoring qualifies them as SQLs. At the start of this stage, your prospective client is actively evaluating solutions from different businesses, while by the end, they are narrowing down their options as a prelude to making the final decision.

Here are some content types and channels you can use to nurture your leads in the consideration stage:

Email campaigns
Whitepapers
Case studies
Ebooks

Live videos
Webinars
One sheet: Overview
Interactive content

This is the stage to establish your brand authority by sharing whitepapers, case studies, and client testimonials. Automated email campaigns and drip email campaigns that sequentially reinforce your brand as the best solution are good nurturing strategies for this stage. Create a brand email newsletter and use it to build brand authority and the value your solution provides.

An e-book that showcases your expertise and provides your prospects with valuable insights establishes your brand's credibility and value. You can also offer free trials to your SQLs and couple that with active engagement from your sales team.

Decision stage

At the decision stage, your prospect is making a final evaluation between 2-3 options, even though they may be displaying purchase intent. This is the stage to highlight your brand and business as the ideal solution. At this stage, your sales team should be working exclusively with sales-qualified leads (SQLs), and as such, it is critical to track lead engagement accurately to determine the right strategy.

Here are some content types relevant to the decision stage:

Competitive analysis
Client testimonials
One-pagers with product benefits and features
Client case studies

Pitch deck content
Proposal
Demos and trials

Decision stage nurturing also focuses on building trust and assuring prospects that they are making the right decision. Here are some examples of decision-stage nurturing strategies that drive conversion:

Product/service demos: How you create and present the demo will go a long way toward building the lead's trust with your brand and product.

Free Trials: These trials allow prospects to try before buying and experience your product while learning autonomously. Trials also help build the client's confidence in your product and brand.

In the decision stage, sales will make an offer to the prospect and enter negotiations. Offering clients free upgrades as part of the deal at this stage, for example, can be more effective than simply negotiating the price. The idea here is to enhance the offer's value without impacting margins.

Best practices for effective lead nurturing

A strategy is only as good as its implementation, so keeping a few best practices in mind when creating your lead nurturing framework is essential. These best practices fall into three segments: internal alignment, content best practices, and operational best practices.

Aligning sales and marketing

Lead nurturing must be a collaborative effort between your marketing and sales teams to be effective. Aligning the teams on goals and implementation is, therefore, critical for delivering the desired outcomes from your nurturing strategy. According to a 2021 Forrester study, companies with good alignment between sales and marketing witnessed a 20% annual growth rate, while businesses with a weak alignment experienced a 4% revenue decline.

Alignment starts with a clear role definition for each team, setting common goals and KPIs, and creating a detailed lead nurturing procedure. Some key points to remember include:

Sales and marketing have different roles and responsibilities, but they should align on the common goal of generating revenue.
Transparency is essential for aligning strategies and goals, as well as lead management processes.
Breaking down silos to enable sharing of data insights and collaboration between sales and marketing teams helps to create efficient and targeted lead-nurturing campaigns.

guide

Read our article for 10 sales and marketing alignment best practices

High-value content

In addition to producing content for each stage of the sales funnel, it is important to tailor content to the specific preferences of your prospects. After all, each prospect is likely to consume content differently depending on a number of factors, such as format, length, and topic.

This also extends to the marketing channels you distribute your content on, as some leads will consume content on your website while others may prefer receiving it on their social feeds. Hence, the first best practice in crafting nurturing content is to ensure your strategies leverage a range of content types and channels that match the preferences of your prospects.

Here are four best practices for creating high-value content:

Use prospect language: While the tone of your content should be consistent, featuring vernacular and terms that your prospects use is another way of helping your content to resonate.

Align content with your lead’s role: In order for your content to be valuable and relevant, you should consider targeting the specific interests of buyer personas in the topics you cover. For example, decision-makers may be more interested in how to drive ROI or scalability.

On the other hand, influencers and users are more likely to consume content that details functionality, customization, and ease of integration with existing tech stacks. Ensure that your content library supports this range of content to enable targeted lead nurturing.

Create hub and spoke content: Consider building your content library around a hub and spoke framework. The former takes a holistic and broader view of a topic, while the latter addresses detailed aspects of the topic and connects it to the buyer's journey.

Interlinking content with this structure not only enables Google to evaluate the topical depth available on your website but also supports a seamless experience that encourages users to spend more time consuming your content—therefore supporting lead nurturing.

Align content with buyer’s journey stages: Ensure you create content for every stage of the lead's journey through your sales funnel. Focus on creating high-value educational content that informs your leads at every stage and helps them resolve their pain points.

guide

Discover how to create and leverage high-performance content

Measuring and optimizing lead nurturing results

Continually measuring and optimizing key success metrics is an integral element of lead management and lead nurturing as a result.

Key metrics

To make your lead nurturing strategies efficient and deliver consistent business growth, track and optimize the following six metrics:

1. Conversion rates: The conversion rate is the percentage of leads that become paying clients. As such, conversion rates are an ideal metric for measuring the success of your lead nurturing strategies. You can also assess your conversion rates on a more granular level by focusing on SQL and MQL conversion rates, which will help identify gaps in your lead scoring and nurturing efforts.

2. Cost per acquisition (CPA): This metric calculates the total expenditure for converting a lead to a client (also known as client acquisition cost or CAC). Tracking your CPA helps guide the optimization of campaigns and budget allocation, especially in combination with other metrics that highlight the performance of each strategy.

3. Lead quality: Lead qualification is an automated process and its effectiveness pivots around how well you define the lead qualification milestones. Hence, lead quality is actually a measure of your lead scoring management. If your funnel is packed with low-quality leads, the problem could lie upstream in attracting the wrong audience or in your lead qualification metrics.
A significantly higher SQL conversion compared to that for MQL leads is another qualification process issue. High-quality and properly qualified leads help raise conversion rates and business growth.

4. Lead velocity: This denotes the speed at which your leads move through the sales funnel. A higher velocity naturally translates into a shorter sales cycle, lower CPA, and more conversions. As a result, lead velocity can be indicative of the success of multiple strategies, as well as buyer intent.

5. Sales cycle length: The sales cycle length measures the length of time taken to convert leads into clients. Sales cycles are much longer in B2B marketing due to the number of decision-makers within most B2B buying committees. Typical B2B sales cycles can run from three to six months, depending on the product and cost. Similar to lead velocity, analyzing this metric can help you optimize campaigns and boost conversions.

6. Customer lifetime value (CLTV): CLTV encompasses the total revenue a client brings to your business over the entire length of their association. A higher CLTV should be a top priority for most organizations, with a consistent focus on retention.

7. Open rate: Email open rates are the percentage of your emails that are opened by your leads. The open rate is related to the subject line and preheader and the lead’s level of trust with your brand.

8. CTR: The click-through rate records the percentage of leads performing a desired action in the email. The action could be clicking a hyperlink or a CTA button. The CTR measures the prospect's engagement with your content.

9. Social Metrics: It is important to measure audience engagement with content that you post on social platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook. Likes, shares and comments are an indication of engagement, and comments are an opportunity to start building a one-on-one relationship and drive the leads to your website for additional nurturing.

Testing and optimizing

Measuring a limited range of performance metrics will allow you insights into the strategies and initiatives that are driving success and those that require adjustments. However, to identify the right optimizations to make to maximize the impact on sales, it is important to test different variables and elements across all strategies, including your lead nurturing. This can take the form of A/B testing different subject lines, content layouts, content types, and call-to-action CTAs to see how it impacts your performance.

By combining testing with key metrics, you will be better able to identify the sections of your strategy that need recalibrating or reworking entirely. For instance, if your conversion rates are consistently low, you may need to revisit your ICP and ensure you are targeting the right audience. Low open rates, on the other hand, are indicative of edits needed for your email marketing.

Establishing a consistent cadence of testing and optimizing enables you to align your campaigns and initiatives with your audience and goals for higher conversions and revenue.

How to design and implement a lead nurturing campaign

Lead nurturing campaigns are a powerful strategy for building relationships with potential clients. However, for campaigns to effectively attract, educate, nurture, and convert relevant leads, they need to be developed with the right approach.

Setting your campaign goals

Start by building your B2B lead nurturing campaign on a solid foundation of clear goals. When setting goals, consider dividing them into two types: quantitative and qualitative goals.

Quantitative goals: These goals are measured numerically and include metrics like conversion rates, ACP, and sales cycle length.
Qualitative Goals: These are subjective goals that aim to measure the aspects of your lead nurturing campaign that require interpretation. This can include elements such as brand authority, awareness, or specific demographic and psychographic elements of your ICP ( as well as alignment goals between your teams).

Mapping out the lead nurturing flow

Mapping the lead nurturing flow requires you to identify the path taken by the lead to move from awareness to evaluation and on to conversion and then align relevant content to the workflow. The nurturing flow and content mapping are unique to every business and vary across industries, ICPs, and sales cycles.

A notional nurturing flow for your B2B lead could run as follows:

1. Visited company website

2. Downloaded whitepaper

3. Navigated to the Product/Service pages

4. Converted on email call-to-action

5. Clicked through to on-site case study

6. Reached out to the sales team for a demo

7. Offer and negotiation stage

8. Converted to a client

There can be multiple conversion pathways, and you can analyze data to identify the most frequent pathways over time. Generally, the most common and the shortest pathways are the most profitable.

guide

Map out your campaigns with our 6-month nurturing playbook

Leveraging automation for lead nurturing

B2B lead management and nurturing is a complex and lengthy cycle that can require a significant investment of time and resources if done manually. Automating the routine and basic analytics tasks can help to solve this issue. Here are four key benefits of automation:

Drives efficiency: Automating repetitive tasks like email campaigns (for specific email touches) and complex tasks like lead scoring enables your teams to focus on higher value and strategic tasks, such as personalization.
Data-driven decisions: By tracking your prospect’s behavioral data, you can make informed decisions on the most effective nurturing strategy for each lead.
Focused targeting: By automating your lead scoring, you can identify and prioritize high-quality prospects more likely to convert.
Increase sales: An efficient and effective lead nurturing strategy powered by automation is more likely to accelerate the progression of leads down the sales funnel, resulting in higher revenue.

Here are four lead management automation tools to consider:

AWeber: Automate your email marketing while accessing a wide selection of templates for different use cases and funnel stages. The easy-to-use and intuitive UI enables you to drag and drop elements. Free analytics are also included.
Pipedrive: Pipedrive is a sales automation tool for monitoring your marketing process and nurturing leads. You can automate routine tasks to make your sales and marketing teams more productive. Like Salesforce, it allows you to map out and monitor complex workflows.
Salesforce Pardot: Salesforce is advanced marketing automation best suited for larger companies. It is AI-enabled for automation and analytics and customizes complex workflows, rules, and metrics
HubSpot: One of the most acclaimed all-in-one solutions for SMEs. HubSpot’s main benefit is offering an all-in-one solution, including marketing, sales, analytics, service, and operations.

Case studies: successful lead nurturing examples

Here are two INFUSE examples of businesses that witnessed revenue and ROI growth by implementing lead nurturing campaigns:

INFUSE generates and nurtures double-touch leads for ZEISS IQS

The company:

ZEISS IQS is a division of the ZEISS Group, a global leader in optics and optoelectronics. The IQS division manufactures quality assurance products using metrology (the scientific study of measurement). Its products find applications in the automotive, aerospace, medical, and electronics industries, where precision inspection of components is essential for delivering high-quality products.

The challenge:

The objective of the ZEISS IQS marketing team was to generate more marketing qualified leads in 2021 and 2022 for its metrology solutions. Another challenge was the need for a proactive provider and an expert partner in demand generation who could develop a new campaign with multiple touchpoints to generate qualified leads.

The strategy:

Working on a short lead time, the Client Success team at INFUSE built a lead generation framework with six clearly defined email touchpoints for nurturing the leads. ZEISS IQS was then able to share their relevant materials and custom-create a few content assets to align with the lead nurturing structure.

This saved the company precious time. The lead nurturing campaign also incorporated buyer intent data to assess sales readiness, as well as tracking all cases of two lead touches with the content assets distributed on syndicated platforms.

The outcome:

The initial lead nurturing campaign in 2021 generated 160 high-quality sales leads that met the company’s target criteria. Based on the success of the first partnership, an additional two campaigns were recently launched with INFUSE, generating 646 leads for the company.

INFUSE generates high-quality leads across 7 industries for West Monroe

The company:

West Monroe is a digital services company that partners with businesses across industries to deliver quantifiable financial value. The company’s diverse and multidisciplinary teams blend management consulting, digital design, and product engineering to transition companies from traditional ways of working to digital operating models. The company’s 2,200 employees are connected by 13 core values that drive its culture of focusing on client wins.

The challenge:

With accounts spread across seven core industry verticals, West Monroe required a large content library to generate and nurture leads at scale from its account list while accelerating the buyer journey toward purchase. West Monroe reached out to INFUSE to engage its audience at scale, a turn-key ABM programming solution, for targeting the buying committees across its account list.

The strategy:

The Client Success team at INFUSE helped West Monroe launch five lead generation and nurturing programs targeting the Banking, Consumer and Industrial Products, and High-Tech and software industries. Each program was paired with omnichannel content syndication and lead nurturing campaigns fueled by custom-tailored content developed by the INFUSE creative team and a content map supplied by West Monroe.

The outcome:

With the success of the initial five programs in 2021, West Monroe decided to expand to 17 programs with INFUSE in 2022, targeting all its core industry verticals. So far, over 700 qualified leads have been generated for the company, and with full visibility of every touch by leads, West Monroe was able to prioritize the most sales-ready opportunities for a meeting with its representatives.

CONCLUSION

B2B lead nurturing helps generate relevant leads, qualify them, increase conversion, and yield revenue and ROI growth.

There is no single lead nurturing technique that works for every prospect. Therefore, consistently measuring, analyzing, and optimizing your B2B lead nurturing strategies is a must. Market demands and buyer expectations are dynamic, and your lead nurturing strategies should evolve to align with the changing demands.

Partnering with a demand generation service provider can help streamline lead nurturing campaigns and drive business goals such as revenue, ROI, client retention, and growth.

MAXIMIZE YOUR CAMPAIGN OUTCOMES WITH PERSONALIZED LEAD NURTURING STRATEGIES

Our INFUSE demand experts are experienced in crafting highly-personalized omnichannel nurture streams specifically designed to drive quality engagement and conversions with your target audience, no matter how niche

CONTACT THE TEAM TO LEARN MORE: [email protected]

FAQs

What is lead nurturing, and why is it important in marketing?

Lead nurturing is the process of building and sustaining relationships with leads to build lasting interest and motivate their progression down the sales funnel toward conversion. A successful lead nurturing program focuses on understanding prospects' needs and pain points and building trust with your brand. Lead nurturing can also aid lead qualification and identify high-value leads that are most likely to convert.

As a result, lead nurturing is a crucial strategy that positively impacts performance outcomes like revenue growth, ROI, and client lifetime value.

How can I create a successful lead nurturing campaign?

Start by identifying your campaign goals and defining your nurturing workflows. Align your sales and marketing teams and create content that aligns with your ICP and each sales funnel stage. Automation tools can also be leveraged to facilitate lead qualification and the nurturing of leads that exhibit interest in specific products or solutions and purchase intent.

What are the best practices for nurturing leads effectively?

Align sales and marketing with shared goals and KPIs in addition to creating high-value educational content that builds trust with your company by establishing expertise. Create different content types, including articles, blogs, whitepapers, videos, and webinars.

Distribute your content through multiple channels, including your website, email campaigns, and social platforms, to best suit the specific preferences of your leads.

What role does marketing automation play in lead nurturing?

Automating routine nurturing tasks like emails and lead scoring can drive efficiency and allow your sales and marketing teams to focus on high-value strategic tasks such as personalization. Automation enables data-driven decisions and focused targeting of leads by helping to manage lead nurturing workflows at scale.