Doing lead nurturing for B2B helps you drive the customer to purchase and turn your leads into conversions. Let’s find out together how.
If in the B2C market the decision to purchase a product or service is, in some cases, dictated by impulse, we cannot say the same for the B2B market where decision-making processes are significantly longer and more complex.
What seemingly, however, may seem like a “threat” to the marketing strategies of companies and brands operating in this market, in reality, can turn into a great business opportunity ne if effective lead nurturing.
But what is lead nurturingand how can we apply this strategy to our B2B business? Let’s find out together by continuing to read the article.
Lead nurturing: what is it and why can it prove successful for your business?
Acquiring leads is only the first step: turning them into prospects and later into customers involves building a real relationship. Technically, this is called lead nurturing, practically means “cultivating and nurturing” one’s contacts in order to lead them naturally to the choice and purchase of a product/service.
The term “lead nurturing” thus goes to delineate all those strategies, first, and activities later aimed at creating such a relationship bysending useful content and creating messages, relevant, but above all, personalized based on the real interests and behavior of potential customers in order to accompany them in the buying process.
While the sale of a product/service still remains the ultimate goal of a lead nurturing strategy, this is certainly not the focus that fuels it: underlying it, as anticipated, is the creation of a valuable relationship with the potential customer.
Numbers and statistics prove it: on average, about 50 percent of leads however interested in a product or service do not purchase it by the time they release contact data and information , and according to research published by Forrester Research, a good lead nurturing strategy can convert 50 percent of contacts, reducing their acquisition cost by one-third.
Unique and valuable experiences: the importance of profiling
If the acquisition of a contact is the first step, it is their qualification that is the real added value of a lead nurturing strategy, which, to be effective, cannot disregard contact profiling and segmentation activities.
- Attract: capture the attention of potential customers with potentially interesting content through blogs, social, ADS campaigns.
- Convert: Encourage potential leads to leave key contact information such as first name, last name, email or phone contact in exchange for downloadable resources or benefits.
- Close: turns the contact into a customer by sending personalized offers and business activities
- Delight: cultivate the relationship with the customer and strengthen it over time in order to turn the customer into a true brand ambassador.
At each stage, from attraction to conversion and retention, contact qualification can take place, collecting valuable information from time to time for personalizing the customer experience.
In this context, profiling forms become particularly relevant: while much of the information about the behaviors and interests of our potential customers can indeed be gathered through data analysis, in other cases it is appropriate to request it directly.
From those for collecting biographical and contact information to actual surveys, forms can be displayed on different channels and contextualized to make the collection of information always relevant to the browsing context.
6 steps to implementing a winning lead nurturing strategy
- Implement lead generation activities: acquire traffic and new potential customers. ADS campaigns, SEO and social activities can be useful for attracting new visitors, while a good lead magnet could enable you to collect contact data right away.
- Profile your contacts and strategically use the information they release. Provide additional forms or surveys to collect data about your users and provide them in return with content that aligns with their needs or wants.
- Evaluate the lead scoring of your users. Through the use of marketing automation platforms such as Blendee, it is possible to assign values to different user behaviors in order to ring them up with targeted activities.
- Invest in personalized and valuable content such as videos, ebooks, guides.
- Personalize your users’ customer experience starting right from the content. Text content, banners, CTAs: Blendee’s artificial intelligence algorithms are able to autonomously choose, based on the analysis of the behavior of similar users, the messages and articles most likely to convert for the specific segment.
- Ring your users with email marketing activities. With Blendee’s advanced features, you can set up triggers that allow you to send personalized emails for content and timing based on different actions taken by the user throughout the customer journey.
