Measured Results > Lead Nurturing
Lead Nurturing for Qualified B2B Lead Generation
Testimonials
“Always looking to create more creative and efficient campaigns, Direct Objective measures everything and works with us step-by-step to reach our marketing goals. They increased our Web presence, which gave the company a prominent profile and secured new leads for us.”Jaspal Rangi, Monsoon Corporate Design
Inbound Marketing Campaigns
Lead nurturing is the ability to turn a friendly chat from a prospect into a big sale six months down the road. It is taking a contact that downloads your whitepaper/catalogue and going on a journey to the sale finish line. The process of B2B lead generation is not always lined with immediate results. Like gardening, sometimes prospects need the right long-term treatment to turn them into qualified leads.
The first step when coming up with a clearly defined lead nurturing strategy is analysis. Every lead should be evaluated into a kind of scorecard, with the goal of segmenting them into different groups with different techniques. These groups are not static: they will constantly need to be reevaluated as leads move from lukewarm to hot.
A few ideas when creating your lead nurturing scorecard:
- What is the estimated time period?
- What is their level of interest?
- What is their financial situation, and how is it trending?
- How large a client could this be?
- Why isn’t the prospect ready now?
Once you’ve evaluated all your contacts from your B2B lead generation efforts, it’s time to figure out how qualified these leads are. Create a number of groups, and try to categorize each lead into a group, based on their ease of sale. Don’t get too attached to each segmentation: your prospects will be constantly shifting in between them as you reevaluate things.
Once you’ve created those segments, you will start to nurture each group in the way that is most appropriate for the characteristic of this group. Each will have its own unique strategy, based on that group’s specific needs. Thus, over time it will be much easier to turn those prospects into qualified leads.
Popular lead nurturing tactics may include social media marketing,bulk email campaigns,webinars,white papers, and other resources that might keep your name in the back of your prospect’s mind.
Keep educating them about your company, but don’t focus on pitching your company. Like a mature marriage with a long courtship, the B2B lead generation and lead-nurturing processes should be a matter of mutual interest. Building that mutual interest is the key.
