The definitive guide to B2B lead nurturing

Congratulations. You’ve just finished a successful lead generation campaign and the flow of prospects into your sales funnel is thick and fast. You’re converting a good chunk of those into paying customers, but some of those leads are hanging around in the sales funnel and don’t want to budge. What’s a marketing superstar to do?

This guide will walk you through all things B2B lead nurturing. We’ll explain the concept of B2B lead nurturing and reveal the best strategies to maximize wins for your marketing team. We’ll share key B2B lead nurturing best practices and highlight some examples of lead nurturing done well.

B2B lead nurturing, defined

B2B lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your current and future customers (leads) at each stage of their buying 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 usually involves 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 strategy focuses on keeping the brand top-of-mind for leads to establish trust and build credibility.

It’s all about delivering relevant and valuable 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 emails and informative webinars.

B2B lead nurturing best practices involve continuous engagement and content tailored to the lead’s specific needs. It’s all about providing value and genuine assistance rather than ramming sales pitches down their throat. Nurturing leads effectively allows you to increase your conversion rates, build loyalty among your customer base, and drive reliable long-term revenue growth.

2 major reasons why B2B lead nurturing is crucial

96% of visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy. Let that sink in. Basically, everyone that lands on your site is a warm lead – they might like the look of you, but they’re not prepared to make any commitments just yet. That makes a stellar B2B lead nurturing strategy absolutely vital for your marketing efforts. There’s a host of benefits to lead generation, 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. Effective lead nurturing allows you to sustain the interest and engagement of your potential customers over time. Nurturing leads over these longer cycles give you many opportunities to showcase the value of your brand and address the pain points of your customers, helping you to cultivate a much deeper relationship between you and your leads.

2. You’ll stand out from the crowd

Good B2B lead nurturing also helps to differentiate your brand in a crowded space. In a world where the overwhelming majority of potential customers 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 experiences and robust solutions to their problems then you have a chance to become the biggest fish in your pond.

Demystifying the B2B lead nurturing process

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. 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 the content 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.

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 works best when leads are engaged across multiple channels in a consistent, integrated fashion.

Qualify leads and hand them to sales

Leads are scored based on their level of engagement with your content, their behavior and their readiness to buy. Qualifying leads and prioritizing them for sales ensures that your resources are focused on the best opportunities. Once they’re ready to buy you can pass leads on to the sales team to close the deal.

8 Steps to create a winning B2B lead nurturing campaign

Crafting a sensational B2B lead nurturing campaign doesn’t have to be rocket science, but there are some key steps you need to take to ensure success.

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.

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.

Develop buyer personas

Create detailed profiles of your target customers 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.

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.

Learn how to shape up your email nurture campaigns

Looking for inspo? See these great email marketing examples

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 the success of your campaign. Consider automating your marketing efforts to really supercharge your lead nurturing game.

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.

Explore the secrets to better lead scoring models

Analyse and optimize

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

Align marketing and sales

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 your sales and marketing efforts and drive incredible results.

Do these 4 things and crush B2B lead nurturing

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stellar B2B lead nurturing at a glance

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 twice as much time on a Turtl Doc as they do on a website.

Informa Connect runs 800 events a year for life-science audiences, but the wholesale cancellation of physical events in 2021 meant they had to get creative. They pivoted towards sponsored content for their leads, using Turtl Docs to produce topic-based interactive ebooks that could replace the revenue they lost from event cancellations.

Rather than losing out to the coronavirus pandemic, Informa Connect generated 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. Read the case study for the full story.