THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO B2B LEAD NURTURING

B2B lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your current and future customers (leads) at each stage of the customer journey, with the aim of guiding them through a sales funnel to convert them into paying customers.

Unlike B2C lead generation, which might prioritize quick transactions, B2B lead generation strategies usually involve longer sales cycles, more complex buyer journeys, and a greater focus on developing high-quality relationships. That means B2B brands need to put more time and effort into looking after their leads. A good B2B lead nurturing program focuses on keeping the brand top-of-mind for leads to build meaningful relationships and establish credibility.

It’s all about delivering relevant content over time, addressing the needs and pain points of your leads with useful information that helps them make informed decisions. This content can (and should) include a variety of different forms, from detailed white papers to inspiring lead nurturing emails and informative webinars.

B2B lead nurturing best practices involve continuous engagement and content marketing tailored to the lead’s specific needs. Lead nurturing builds trust; it’s all about providing value and genuine assistance rather than ramming sales pitches down their throat. Lead nurturing efforts help with increasing your lead conversion rates, developing relationships with new and exisiting customers, and drive reliable long-term revenue growth.

96% of visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy. Let that sink in. Basically, everyone that lands on your site is a prospective buyer – they might like the look of you, but they’re not prepared to make any commitments just yet. That makes sharp B2B lead nurturing tactics absolutely vital for your marketing efforts. Lead nurturing helps in many ways, but these are two of the biggest and most important for B2B marketing.

1. You’ll build deeper, stronger relationships

B2B sales cycles tend to be much longer and more complex than B2C cycles. Successful lead nurturing allows you to sustain the interest and engagement of your potential customers over time. Nurturing leads through marketing campaigns and sales outreach over these longer cycles give you many opportunities to showcase the value of your brand and address the pain points of your target audience, helping you to cultivate a much deeper relationship between you and your leads.

2. You’ll stand out from the crowd

A good B2B lead nurturing strategy also helps to differentiate your brand in a crowded space. In a world where the overwhelming majority of quality leads aren’t ready to buy, the importance of lead nurturing can’t be overstated. All these warm leads might be intimidating, but they’re also a huge opportunity. If you can capture and retain their attention with high-quality content marketing, social media posts, etc., as well as robust solutions to their problems then you have a chance to become the biggest fish in your pond.

You know what it is and you know why it’s important. But how does the lead nurturing process actually work?

Identify and categorize leads

The obvious first step is identifying and categorizing the leads that need to be nurtured. This is usually done across a range of marketing channels, whether that’s email sign-ups, social media audiences, website enquiries or people you meet at events. Then lead segmentation comes into play. Selected leads are then typically segmented into different buyer personas based on their background, needs and behaviors, allowing for a more targeted and personalized communication strategy.

Create content

The next step is the most important one: creating relevant content based on a deeper understanding of what these buyer personas want to consume. Relevant, valuable content that solves their problems is key, and it should come in all the shapes and sizes the leads want and expect. Consider using marketing automation to make scaling content more efficient.

Roll out the campaign

Leads defined and content created, the next phase is the creation and deployment of an effective lead nurturing campaign. This should be designed to deliver the right content to the right leads at the right moment –educating, informing and building trust with them over time. Lead nurturing helps the most when leads are engaged across multiple channels in a consistent, integrated fashion.

Qualify leads and hand them to sales

With lead qualification techniques like behavior scoring, determine which are your sales qualified leads, and which are marketing qualified leads still in the consideration stage. The goal is to create sales ready leads and pass them to the right team at the right time — keeping everyone on the same page.

With the right content platform, it’s simple to spot hot leads – and pass them off to sales at the perfect time. Peoplesafe used Turtl to do just that. Granular engagement insights and Turtl’s Pardot integration helped them build an automated lead scoring system that resulted in 33% more leads handed to sales. 

1. Build a list of leads

Gather up all those leads that are hanging around in your sales funnel and add them to new ones that arrive from your other channels. Segmenting your leads at this stage when you’re first building your database is also a good idea.

2. Define the type of campaign

Now it’s time to think about what you want your lead nurturing campaign to achieve. Do you want to educate your leads, market a product or service, promote an event or welcome new customers? You should also decide which channels you’ll deploy your campaign through, whether that’s email, social media, or adverts.

3. Develop buyer personas

Create detailed profiles of your target audience so you can truly understand what they need. Identifying their pain points, goals and buying behaviors is critical to the success of your lead nurturing campaign.

4. Create valuable content

This is the fun part. Craft exceptional content that informs and delights your leads by providing them with valuable insights and solutions. That could be blog posts, case studies, webinars or ebooks but, whatever formats you use, make sure they’re tailored to your buyer personas.

5. Use the right tools

The right lead generation platform could be the difference between a good campaign and a great one. A good CRM will help you to schedule your content, change things on the fly and track how successful lead nurturing is. Consider automating your marketing efforts to really supercharge your lead nurturing game.

6. Score and qualify your leads

Good lead scoring will have your sales team jumping for joy. Scoring your leads based on key actions such as email opens, content downloads and webinar attendance helps you qualify which leads are the ripest for conversion.

7. Analyse and optimize

Continuously monitor the right lead generation metrics to understand which elements of your campaign are succeeding and which need optimizing.

8. Align sales and marketing teams

Promote close collaboration between teams to ensure that the handover from marketing to sales is seamless for the customer. Shared goals, insights and feedback will help align lead nurturing efforts between teams and drive incredible results.

Succeeding at B2B lead nurturing takes focus, determination and cooperation. Keep these four B2B lead nurturing best practices in mind when designing your lead nurturing strategy.

1. Find your flow

You need to know what you’re offering before you dive into the nitty gritty details of a lead nurturing campaign. What problems do you solve for your customers? What makes your value proposition unique? Why should they choose you? Use the answers to these questions as inspiration for your campaign to take your leads on a coherent journey that convinces them to buy.

2. Show, don’t tell

When it comes to creating compelling content it’s better to work with human nature, not against it. We’re visual creatures so combine your written content with images and infographics. Create interactive content that delights and informs your leads, and make it deeply personalized to demonstrate how well you know them. Leverage data-driven personalization to deliver targeted messages that resonate with your leads and increase their chances of conversion.

3. Keep it consistent

It’s an old adage for a very good reason: consistency really is key. Schedule your outreach to align with target time zones and build a dependable rhythm of communication with potential customers, but don’t do it so often that your email frequency overwhelms your leads.

4. Never stop nurturing

Qualify the lead, send to sales, secure the conversion, and then what? Most brands ease off the gas here but continuing to nurture a converted lead after the sale is a winning recipe. Keep supporting your customers to gain their loyalty and they’ll be coming back for more.

At Turtl we help B2B marketers boost their lead generation and nurturing with a unique content format that captures the attention of customers. Readers spend 34% more time on a Turtl Doc than they do on a website.

Faced with disruption to their tried-and-tested lead gen strategy, Informa Connect had to get creative. They pivoted towards sponsored content for their leads, using Turtl Docs to produce topic-based interactive ebooks.

It's safe to say the shift was a success, with Informa generating over $55,000 from just three high-quality ebooks that caught the hearts and minds of their leads.

These kinds of results depend heavily on granular content analytics. By strategically using form capture inside interactive newsletters alongside engagement metrics, Informa could work with the leads captured to raise revenue generated. 

Effective lead nurturing isn’t a one-and-done effort. It’s about consistent, valuable engagement that keeps your brand top-of-mind and your leads moving forward.

With the right strategy, content, and tools, you’ll build stronger relationships, boost conversions, and deliver measurable revenue impact.

Turtl makes it easy to create content leads will love – and that nudges them through the funnel.