With today’s stricture on tighter budgets and increased scrutiny by buyers, fostering interest in your brand for growth is highly challenging.
In the midst of this competition, trending and messaging have been used well by businesses in order to make their offering of interest by making memorable brand experiences. As good as this may sound for lead nurturing, there is more to this strategy in reality than it appears.
The article considers some of the strategies that will be implemented in the improvement of lead nurturing initiatives in the B2B world. We first consider the acquisition of demand intelligence in developing interest in your services.
Secondly, we will discuss some key insights into how to refine and future-proof your lead-nurturing efforts so that your strategies today are still going to remain effective years from now.
Gather and Evaluate Demand Intelligence
At the heart of any effectively performing lead nurturing is intelligence. In this case, intelligence refers to insight into the behavior of your leads, their demographic, firmographic, and technographic attributes, and insight into your industry. This is the information that will feed the execution of effective demand strategies.
In the following sections, we delve into the nitty-gritty details of the demand intelligence process at CamRojud to actively engage qualified leads matching your ICP and buyer personas. We also describe various data collection methods contributing to successful lead nurturing.
Collect and Integrate Data
There is a need to establish channels of acquisition for lead nurturing data and pool together existing information. That means a deep analysis of the present state of your tech stack, starting with your client relationship management system.
Now, analyze the pipeline data from a lead nurturing perspective-what touchpoints they engage with, what pain points/challenges are surfaced. The compilation of this data creates a composite view of the ever-changing set of challenges leads go through within the sales cycle and defines what type of content resonates best with them. When you are done, continue with the next step.
Remember, though, at this stage you’re dealing with a hypothesis of what drives demand for your organization. That hypothesis needs to be tested in order to hone and guide future nurturing efforts.
Run a Pilot Campaign Based On Your First Demand Intelligence Data.
Having generated your first demand intelligence data set, the next action is to fire up a test campaign to see whether you have indeed pinpointed where the moving target of your leads’ focus is and how to address them best.
Next, therefore, is to create a test campaign targeted at an ICP or buyer persona; determine a timeline to monitor and measure for engagement, conversions, and ROI-preferably quarterly.
At this stage, you would be free to experiment with various assets, messaging strategies, and channels to find out which one pulls. You will base future campaigns aimed at cultivating those leads on the insights that arise from this testing.
Draw Conclusions and Determine Best Practices for Future Campaigns.
After running your test campaign, develop a demand intelligence report with the following key elements:
- Lead Engagement Touchpoints: Outline the themes, assets, and messaging that resonated best with leads.
Funnel Analysis: Concentrate on at what stage in the sales funnel the prospects joined your funnel, faced challenges, or stopped engaging with your brand, and where they left the funnel-subscribed, lost interest to a salesperson, etc. - Performance KPIs: Spell out key performance indicators from conversion rates, cost per lead, lead qualification, that is MQL/ marketing qualified account (MQA) and SQL/sales qualified account (SQA), and Sales Bookings.
- Demand intelligence information should be extended to the stakeholders involved in marketing, sales, and client success at this stage. It helps capture a variety of insights from every department with which the demand intelligence can be further polished to create better strategies in lead nurturing for the forthcoming times.
Once deep insight into your leads is gained and good nurturing practices are observed, the next step will be to move on to the next level of personalizing nurturing flows for great results.
Design different and personalized paths to lead nurturing with Demand Intelligence.
Now, armed with demand intelligence that was derived from your pilot, go forth and develop complex and customized nurturing flows for your Ideal Client Profiles.
How to Strategize Your Lead Nurturing Flows
You probably tested driving a specific ICP as part of your campaign. With this, you can now create more personalized nurturing flows for other ICPs, or you can keep optimizing for your primary buyer persona and create separate tracks based on pain points, industry size, or technographics.
If you are into account-based marketing, then once try adopting the account-based experience methodology. This is an extension of account-focused outreach and lead nurturing by adapting best practices from user and client experience-UX and CX, respectively.
Whichever direction you take, here is how you effectively plan flows for lead nurturing:
- Mapping Evolving Focus: Pin pain points and identify evolving focus for each ICP or buyer persona, creating multiple touchpoints for engaging them.
- Identify Accountability in Monitoring Engagement: Identify who shall be responsible for monitoring the engagement into lead nurturing to ascertain continuous interest in the brand. This could be done by the re-evaluation of messaging to meet the several demands of the leads.
- Incorporate UX and CX Best Practices: Add more value to your lead nurturing with smooth and user-friendly brand experiences through incorporating UX and CX best practices. Follow an ABX approach where necessary or beneficial.
Follow these steps in order to plan and run lead nurturing flows that contribute to the overall marketing strategy performance.
Lead Nurturing Performance Analysis
When your lead nurturing flows start to kick in, performance monitoring is quintessential in effective engagement with your potential clients and getting the expected outcomes. Since lead nurturing requires significant effort from your team and resources in your organization, it is important that one monitors performance as part of refinement and optimization efforts.
Below are some ways you can track the efficiency of your lead nurturing flows:
- Establish Cross-departmental KPIs and Accountability: Establish a set of KPIs-easy to track engagement and ROI, though not so complicated as to burden the reporting process. It is suggested to start with five KPIs and always sharpen them for future campaign optimization regarding lead nurturing. Sample KPIs will be CPL, conversion rate per touch, marketing-influenced revenue, sales bookings, and CLTV.
- Sales Feedback: Each tidbit of information can be gathered from the sales team because they are in contact with nurtured leads, which can be of more value for feedback on how marketing materials create interest and start conversations in sales. Mid-campaign meetings with the sales teams are useful to likely make adjustments and strategize the next campaign.
- Implement lead scoring and lead qualification processes: Embed the process of lead scoring in lead nurturing flows to identify whether or not the process develops qualified leads. The practice will also support prioritization through prospect outreach by both sales and marketing teams. Combine this with lead qualification practices, such as defining what constitutes leads to be considered MQL or SQL, to further track the conversion of nurtured leads to qualified prospects of the company.
How to Optimize and Pivot Lead Nurturing Flows
Knowing when to optimize your lead nurturing activities brings you closer to doing more with less – with less time, fewer resources, and less frustration. Refining your nurturing strategy involves building up better relevance to your target audience.
One would ideally take the end of a cycle-a quarter-to consider optimizations or possible pivots in a lead-nurturing campaign. But if having reserve budgets is an issue, then tweaking the currently running program to achieve maximum return on investment and not spending marketing dollars unnecessarily will be one good idea.
What that means here is to be able to stay ahead of the curve to gauge early signs of success or failure with respect to your nurturing. Because it is a very cross-functional effort in lead nurturing, any kind of optimization or pivoting needs to be done in concert with other teams inside the organization to make sure it gets executed properly.
Indicators of optimizations or pivots include the following:
- Ignored Touchpoints: More than a few touchpoints are regularly ignored.
- Shift in Focus: When prospect customers identify various pain points than the ones covered in your nurture flows.
- Disengagement in Sales Contact: If leads start disengaging upon contact by a salesperson.
Although there could be many others, these foundational indicators you’re targeting the wrong leads with your lead-nurturing flows, or their messaging isn’t aligned with the needs of the leads you’re targeting. Sometimes it might just need a “quick fix” optimization, maybe just re-messaging the touchpoints themselves.
However, if you keep hearing crickets chirp from your leads, it would make more sense to do a pivot and build a totally new lead-nurturing strategy.
Here’s how to pivot your lead nurturing effectively:
- Prioritize and Pause: Choose a lead nurturing workflow that direly needs attention and pause the flow. Deep study the engagement problems, and only relaunch the flow when all identified problems have been fixed. Repeat the process until all sub-performing nurtures are fixed.
- Close Performance Tracking: Closely monitor the performance for the first three touchpoints to see if engagement has improved.
- Evaluate and Adjust: If the engagement has not gone up yet, revisit initial touchpoints. Refresh their messaging and the pain points they address to better resonate with your audience.
- Apply Adjustments: When the performance of the first three touchpoints becomes satisfactory, extend those adjustments to the rest of the touchpoints accordingly.
- Monitor and Optimise: Follow your pivoted campaign and gather insights from sales on how leads are responding. Keep those insights in mind as you go about optimising and building new campaigns.
Future-Proof Your Lead Nurturing
To future-proof your lead nurturing strategy, regularly capture demand intelligence, measure campaign performance and tap into the continuous shifts in market and buyer trends.
Lead nurturing is all about relationship-building through relevance, and being tuned in to the changing landscape makes your brand timely and valuable.
Stay Ahead: Thought Leadership for Anticipating Changing Demands. With a pulse on the thought leaders within your industry, you’ll be able to predict shifting demands of your buyers and understand themes to help drive the creation of your lead-nurturing assets and touchpoints.
In the B2B vertical, LinkedIn is an imperative channel to stay tuned with thought leaders and conversations relevant for your industry that might shape its future. Using social listening tools, monitoring hashtags, and following influential C-suite leadership from your competitors and large corporations in your industry will go a long way in future-proofing lead nurturing efforts. Get your team members-marketing and sales-actively involved in these online discussions.
Use Intent Data for Timely Insights into Lead Behavior
If used properly and in context, intent data will track the moving buyer needs and their interest in addressing challenges that can be directly related to your brand and its offering.
But once more, intent data does not suggest that they are ready to buy. It shows interest and should mean that possible buyers who show intent should be cultivated further with touchpoints, moving them further along the interest in your offerings.
Look at intent data as one means of prioritizing the nurturing effort on prospects who, with proper nurturing, would move more quickly toward a sales conversation than others.
Use Surveys And Deep Knowledge Of Your Buyers
Surveys within your base are a great way of predicting what kind of problems your buyers could have in the future, and at the same time, you are capable of capturing what their current challenges are.
Surveys can be a real influencer of marketing and sales efforts alike. In terms of lead nurturing, questions related to media consumption preferences, future goals, and industry pain points are going to help you understand potential themes for your touchpoints and also inform the voice behind your messaging.
Key Takeaways to Remember:
- Gather and utilize demand intelligence to make your lead nurturing truly informative, based on deep demand intelligence that will include intent data, along with sales outreach for future campaigns.
- Personalization at Scale with Distinct Nurturing Flows per ICP: Integrate best practices in user experience, including UX, CX, and ABX, to tune-in lead nurturing flows for each ICP or buyer persona. Engage your buyers through unique touchpoints that make them sit up and take notice by involving themselves with you.
- Future-proof your lead nurturing with informed demand intelligence: Keep tabs on the thought leaders in the industry, and set up social listening to understand the evolving needs of leads. This will provide valuable insight for future lead nurturing-to make sure it’s relevant and makes an impact.
Would you like to read more about “Effective Strategies to Improve Lead Nurturing For B2B” related articles? If so, we invite you to take a look at our other tech topics before you leave!
