For B2B companies, conversion is a significant part of business growth and is often challenging for various reasons. To name a few, dealing with large enterprises, multiple stakeholders, higher stakes, and constant analysis make B2B more complicated.
Conversion rate means how many leads pass through the funnel and eventually become your customers. B2B companies’ primary focus is to generate the highest conversion rates for their businesses.
This blog will walk you through the most effective strategies to increase conversion rates.
Table of Contents
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of understanding the needs of your prospects at every stage of the sales cycle and providing solutions to them that helps build trust and foster connection. Such nurturing further paves the way to convert them into loyal customers.
Strong lead nurture campaigns help to improve lead quality and result in more receptive and sales-qualified leads that are willing to do business with you.
However, to develop effective B2B lead nurturing strategies, you need to identify your ideal audience and define your buyer persona. After that, you must look into their pain points and needs so that you can develop strategies with relevant content that pushes leads to engage with your business.
Effective B2B Lead Nurturing Strategies to Increase Conversion Rates
According to Marketo, B2B ventures implementing lead nurturing make 50% more sales. On that note, let’s discover the most effective B2B lead nurturing strategies to increase conversions:
1. Categorize your Leads
In lead nurturing, the one-size-fits-all approach never works. It is because not only are your B2B clients unique in their needs and concerns, but they are not all present at different funnel stages. Some might be ready to take action, while others might need a little more convincing.
Lead segmentation is the process when you divide your prospects into different groups based on various parameters and insights you have gathered. The main reason behind the process is to identify quality leads and guide them to the conversion stage.
Using the sales funnel as the guide, you can use the lead data captured in your CRM to segment your leads.
- Non-qualified leads: Firstly, it’s essential to determine which leads are qualified and which are not. Non-qualified leads would be prospects about which you have little information.
- Action-qualified leads: Group these B2B leads by their actions when engaging with your business. Maybe they could have downloaded an e-book or responded to your email. Use the action they took to tailor your next step.
- Marketing-qualified leads: These are the leads who have shown a genuine interest in your product or service. However, they’ve not taken any necessary action to purchase them. You will want to provide them with special discounts or something exclusive.
- Sales-qualified leads: This includes leads showing strong buying signals who might have requested a pricing guide or free demo. These leads should be directed towards the sales department, as they are ready to make the purchase.
2. Give Importance to Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a method to assign a rating to the action taken by the prospect when they provide you with their contact details. Not all action is equal, so decide which would gain a higher point value. For instance, someone who requested a demo is closer to making a purchase and must be given a higher rating. Then, someone who is still lingering on your website will be given a little less high rating.
To that end, the biggest perk of lead scoring is that it helps you rank leads based on interest. It can tell you which leads require more attention and which can be easily convinced.
It is advised that you do not waste time once the lead has taken action. Quickly get on to categorize your leads and give them a score. Doing so will easily let you devise the following action plan before the lead gets cold and you lose out on the opportunity.
3. Deploy Email Automation
Email automation is an excellent B2B lead nurturing strategy that converts leads into promising customers. Around 56% of companies use automation as part of their marketing strategies, and 22% suggest that lead generation is one of the most significant benefits of email automation.
Besides, you can use email campaigns to keep your B2B leads fresh and not let your potential customer out of the sales funnel because your sales or marketing team is hard-pressed.
Automatically generated emails in a drip campaign are the best way to prevent leads from getting cold, educate them, and offer them value. As it is said, personalization is key in marketing, and with drip campaigns, you can decide how many emails to share with a particular prospect and at what rate. These emails can be further customized with the lead’s name and specific references to their actions.
For instance, instead of simply sending a weekly newsletter to subscribers, add them to 3 – 4 mail drips over 6 – 7 weeks. Keep the content short, hyper-personalized, targeted, and conversational. Over time, your drip campaign will bring your clients closer to the end stage of the conversion funnel.
4. Utilize Multiple Channels for Nurturing
While email marketing is an effective channel to nurture leads, it is not enough. B2B customers, like B2C, are also scattered across different communication platforms and prefer to research the product or service they are interested in.
In fact, many B2B prospects look for information about the interested brand on search engines, social media, and third-party review sites. This is why it’s time for you to make an omnichannel B2B lead nurturing strategy. Your focus should be on providing the audience with ample information in every channel they may use and directing them toward your conversion funnel.
Multichannel lead nurturing requires B2B companies to develop targeted content for social media, create YouTube videos or podcasts for their products or services, and organize events or webinars.
Doing so will help you be at the forefront of your audience’s mind while reaching out to the new audience and building a relationship with them.
5. Develop Remarketing Campaigns
Remarketing campaign is a great way to convert leads who have visited your website and spent considerable time exploring but have yet to take action. It is a good B2B lead nurturing strategy to convert those users who have reflected a visible interest in your business.
Using Google Ads and PPC campaigns for retargeting and remarketing, your brand and offer will stay in your prospect’s mind until they are ready to purchase. You will ensure your ads follow people who have visited your website as they explore other channels.
6. Educate your Prospects at Different Stages of the Sales Funnel
One of the most critical ways to drive conversions is to educate prospects on the current stage of their buying journey. You are responsible for providing the correct information at the right stage to drive necessary action.
That said, here’s a little brief about the content type you can provide leads at the three essential stages of the sales funnel:
- Awareness Phase: This phase is about developing awareness of your product, service, and company. The aim is to encourage the leads to look for more information about your brand and direct them to your website. You can share blog posts, e-books, or other educational information here.
- Consideration Phase: At this stage, your focus is to provide prospects with content that addresses their problems and pain points. Make use of emails or invite leads to events such as webinars about new product launches or demos.
- Decision Phase: Towards the end of the funnel, your leads make a decision, and you can ensure that by providing offers, discounts, etc.
7. Constantly Evaluate your Strategies and Learn from the Feedback
Don’t just fall into the cycle of implementing the same B2B lead nurturing strategies. Take periodic breaks and review each strategy to determine its effectiveness.
Marketing automation tools allow your teams to measure and analyze the success and failure of a specific marketing campaign or strategy. They can easily identify conversion rate, engagement, action taken by leads, etc.
This information will help to gauge which lead nurturing strategies and channels yield the better return. To that end, marketing and sales teams can reimplement those and remove or rework the underperforming campaigns.
Doing this will further ensure your B2B company not only deliver value to the customers but also helps to maximize the marketing ROI.
Final Words
For your B2B venture to grow, it is essential to generate quality leads and increase conversions. Above are listed some of the best practices that leading firms are opting for lead nurturing to maximize conversions.
At the center of these strategies are the lead segmentation and sales funnel. Remember to track the leads down the sales funnel, develop targeted content that fits their needs, and use multichannel communication. Also, don’t repeat the same strategy repeatedly if it’s not working.
Keep analyzing your B2B lead nurturing strategies and fine-tuning them to generate higher conversion and subsequently higher revenue.
