Is your lead nurturing strategy evolving to keep up with buyer behavior? According to the Oracle Marketing Cloud, 68% of B2B marketers say that increasing sales and conversion rates is the primary objective, yet only 20% consider their lead nurturing efforts highly successful. Like anything else in the world of inbound marketing, the tactics that produce success are constantly evolving. DemandGen Report's 2016 Lead Nurturing Benchmark Survey explores what successful B2B marketers are doing to increase sales and conversion rates.
Personalization is the key to inbound marketing success and many of the tactics identified in the Lead Nurturing Benchmark survey reflect that. Here are 3 innovative ways to improve lead nurturing results.
Successful B2B marketers use marketing automation technology to segment their leads and provide personalized content that helps move them to a purchase. The DemandGen Report Survey found that the top areas for segmentation were as follows:
The first two are easy to understand - clearly a CEO from a technology company will have different needs than an HR executive from a manufacturing company.
With good marketing automation software, you can personalize lead nurturing even further by creating content based on the type of content that generated the lead in the first place. The more you align nurturing with the specific needs and demographics of the lead, the more effective you will be.
How do you get this information to segment? Demographic information comes from lead generation forms and behavioral segmentation comes from cues from your marketing automation software.
The classic lead generation formula is to offer a piece of premium content like an eBook or a webinar registration in exchange for contact and demographic information from the potential lead. While you need to have some level of content gating to get a lead's email address, more B2B sellers are asking for less information in their lead generation processes.
The most common strategy for gating content in the Lead Nurturing Benchmark Survey was, "we gate selectively, based on our progressive profiling strategy", identified by 48% of respondents. Progressive profiling is the process of asking for minimal information on the initial lead generation form and asking for new information as the lead downloads successive lead nurturing content.
Here's how progressive profiling might work:
In the third content download, the last question goes away and the next question in the progressive profiling strategy replaces it.
You might even have a step in your lead nurturing strategy where you offer a completely ungated piece of content to establish trust with the lead. Clearly you need good marketing automation software like HubSpot to execute on this tactic.
Rather than sending out a pre-defined sequence of emails and hoping for the best, the top-level B2B sellers use behavioral cues to shape their lead nurturing strategy. Here are a few ways that you can use behavioral cues in your lead nurturing strategy:
These are just a few examples of how you can use buyer behavior to formulate appropriate responses in your lead nurturing strategy.
The reality is that most people who come to your website and download a piece of content are not ready to buy - depending on the source, 75% to 90% of website visitors aren't ready to buy. Lead nurturing is a way to help these people educate themselves on how to solve their problems and position your company as a trusted advisor that can help them. By adapting your lead nurturing strategy to personalize the experience, you will increase conversion rates and shorten sales cycles.