B2B Lead Generation | Lead Nurturing

“Marketers rank lead nurturing highest as under-funded relative to value potential.”
Lead Gen ROI Report 2010, Lenskold Group

In simple English, Marketers believe they will get the biggest bank for the buck from lead nurturing. Unfortunately, few companies do lead nurturing well today. According to Forrester Research, only about 1 in 5 is doing it at all - and far fewer are “best practices.”

Those marketers are right. I’ll not bore you with the details of ROI - we’ve done that in earlier blog articles. In this post we want to give you the basics to help you understand how to do this in your company.

Let’s start with a definition. This is the definition of lead nurturing Find New Customers uses:

“Lead nurturing is the process of sharing relevant content with target buyers, regardless of their timing to buy. The goal is lead nurturing is to earn their trust, so they see your company as a solution to their business problems.”

To do lead nurturing, you first need to collect some good information:

1. Deep and comprehensive buyer personas
   The principle is clear. The better you know someone, the better you can talk to him or her.
2. Highly relevant content mapped to buyer variables
   Seth Godin once said “I don’t want email, I want Me-Mail.” The more you can personalize your content, the more effective it will be.
3. Segment your marketing database
   The more you refine your messaging, the more effective you will be. Group like prospects together by buyer variables - industry, title, etc.
4. A written content map
   Carefully map your content to buyer variables, stage of buying process and questions they need answered. Find and fill the gaps with new content.
5. Make it comprehensive
   Think though your messaging. Have you made it relevant? Is there as sense of urgency?  What do you want them to do? (Call to action.) Do you have a landing page with further information?
6. Design it on white board
   Don’t even think of using marketing automation now. Go to a white board and sketch it out. If it does not ‘run on your white board’, it won’t run in marketing automation.
7. Measure results
   Measuring results lets you prove the value and tune the program.

To learn how Find New Customers might help your company craft strong lead nurturing programs, please visit our Lead Nurturing services.

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