Lead nurturing.
Build valuable and promising relationships with leads and customers. With lead nurturing you provide your leads with the right information at the right time. Read all about an effective lead nurturing strategy on this page!
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is an online marketing methodology where you provide leads with the right information at the right time. This involves tailoring information to the lead's specific needs and stage in the buying process.
Content you share in lead nurturing is primarily educational in nature and designed to increase knowledge. In this way, leads are better able to make the right decisions in the buying process, or buyer journey. As leads progress through this process and approach the decision point, the information - in line with the need - becomes more product-oriented.
Why lead nurturing?
In inbound marketing, we strive for as many meaningful experiences with potential customers as possible.
Lead nurturing actively contributes to this. By feeding leads interesting information over and over again, you build a valuable relationship with them. At the same time, you learn more about them so that we are even better able to support them throughout their buyer journey.
How does lead nurturing work?
Lead nurturing usually takes place via email, but newer channels such as chatbots are also increasingly being used.
Lead nurturing can be done manually, but this process is very labor-intensive and also not scalable. Therefore, marketing automation software, such as HubSpot, is generally used.
Marketing automation allows lead nurturing emails to be personalized, thoughtfully timed and tailored to various factors, such as:
- areas of interest expressed by the lead;
- the lead's behavior on the website or in an email;
- characteristics of the lead, such as the industry he or she works in;
- The stage of the buyer journey the lead is in.
Customer nurturing
The name lead nurturing suggests that the process of nurturing is only for leads, but nothing could be further from the truth!
It should actually be called lead and customer nurturing (but that's a lot less appealing, of course). The nurturing process also offers added value for customers.
Of course, customers have different needs than leads. In B2B companies, those needs often lie in the support and service sphere. Working more effectively and efficiently with the product or service, for example, or solving problems during use.
Why not fulfill this need using customer nurturing? This offers opportunities to increase customer satisfaction. Our advice is to team up with your organization's Service Department. When you execute customer nurturing well, it eases the burden on the Service Department and creates opportunities to turn customers into ambassadors!
Lead nurturing strategy step by step
As you have read above, the ambitions in lead nurturing are high. We want to help leads optimally in the buying process by providing them with information at exactly the right time to help them move forward. So you need a well-thought-out lead nurturing strategy.
Below we give you a pragmatic roadmap where strategy and execution come together.
Go through the following steps in the lead nurturing process:
- Define objectives
- Understanding buyer persona needs
- Content mapping
- Creating content
- Building workflows for lead nurturing
- Measuring and evaluating periodically
- Making adjustments
1. Set objectives
Every strategy starts with setting goals. The most common goal of lead nurturing is to obtain qualified leads. However, a good objective is SMART, measurable and specific in other words. How do you make this goal concrete? And how do you measure whether a lead is qualified?
Here too, marketing automation helps you a hand (or actually several hands).
First, we validate leads on certain criteria to determine to what extent they fit (the objectives of) the organization. Think: industry, company size, role, function, etc. These criteria are different for each company and may even vary from campaign to campaign. A validated lead is called a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).
In addition, we measure the interaction leads have on the website and via email. In this way, we gauge the interest of the lead. For interaction, think of number of website visits, visits to specific pages, downloads, contact requests, clicks in emails, etc.
The combination of validation and interaction determines whether a lead is qualified, ie:
Meeting validation criteria + desired level of interaction = qualified lead
Through lead scoring we are able to measure the degree of qualification. In doing so, we determine a threshold at which a lead is considered "qualified. A qualified lead is called a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).
We recommend looking for targets for lead nurturing in this corner. A certain number of Sales Qualified Leads, within a certain period of time. How many SQLs you need depends on your business goals and conversion rates. Read more about this on our sales funnel page.
2. Understanding buyer persona needs
The quality of content and its ability to actually help buyers is crucial in lead nurturing.
To best help potential customers, you need deep insight into their needs. A buyer persona survey provides this insight.
You can read more on our page on buyer persona research.
Tip:
Supplement a buyer persona research study with a keyword research study! The results of this research provide unique insights into the needs of the target audience and are an excellent complement to the buyer persona research.
3. Content mapping
In this third step of the lead nurturing strategy, we dive into the buyer persona and the keyword research and pick one theme (or topic). This is where we set up a targeted lead nurturing campaign.
The tool used is the content map. It helps you to get content ideas in a pragmatic way. You match these ideas with specific phases of the buyer journey. Next, decide what form your content ideas should take (blog, white paper, checklist, manual, case, etc.).
Tackle content mapping with the help of a small group of experts within your organization. A mix of content experts, sales and marketing works well. Make this group no larger than six people.
4. Create content
If you have thoroughly tackled content mapping, then you have more than enough ideas for the lead nurturing campaign.
Now it's a matter of making the ideas concrete and converting them into a briefing for designers and copywriters. Even if the creation team was present during the content mapping process, it is still a good idea to write out briefings for each idea you want to put into action. That way, you have an understanding for yourself of what the content is about, what the thrust is and what the goal is that you want to achieve.
To enable lead generation and validation, we recommend going for a healthy mix of gated (behind a form) and non-gated (free on the Web) content. 50/50 is a good starting point. Preferably start the lead nurturing campaign with a non-gated content piece.
5. Build lead nurturing workflows.
Now that the content has been created, it's time to build lead nurturing workflows. Align the workflows with the buyer journey. So start at the awareness stage, continue with the consideration stage and end with content for the decision stage.
For clarity and flexibility, we recommend building workflows in a modular fashion as much as possible. This means that you build not one, but several workflows that follow one another. This way you keep the workflows themselves clear and make future adjustments more easily.
The capabilities of lead nurturing workflows depend on your marketing automation software. With HubSpot workflows, you have a wide range of options, think of various triggers and criteria.
In any case, make sure the triggers for sending content match signals that leads give you in their buyer journey. For example, it is a good idea to send content that belongs in the decision stage only when leads give clear signals that they are in that stage.
6. Measure and evaluate periodically
Always build in set moments when you evaluate the results of the lead nurturing campaign. The most important KPIs you monitor are directly derived from your primary objective.
In addition to the number of SQLs within a given time period, you can steer secondarily on the number of leads and MQLs. It is important to get a good picture of the conversion rate from MQL to SQL. When you evaluate this by channel, you get a good idea of the effectiveness of channels (which channels bring valuable leads more often).
Finally, it is very useful to implement a feedback system where Sales gives feedback on the quality of Sales Qualified Leads in a consistent and unambiguous way. If necessary, adjust the SQL criteria to this feedback.
7. Make adjustments
Based on the evaluations, you make adjustments to content or the lead nurturing workflow. Our advice is not to extend existing workflows unless you have a specific reason to do so. The reason is that the results of the workflow are then no longer unambiguous. It then becomes a mix of pre-modification and post-modification results.
When you build your workflows modularly, you are relatively easy to add new workflows or adjust the order of workflows.
Lead nurturing example
Below is a telling example of lead nurturing workflow in HubSpot. Note that this is only a part of the total workflow. The total workflow is too extensive to include in one screenshot, but with this example, the essence of a lead nurturing workflow becomes clear.
Example of a lead nurturing workflow in HubSpot (sensitive information is anonymized)
What you see in the above example is the essence of lead nurturing workflows. When we flatten the process, two things happen in every lead nurturing workflow:
- Checks take place.
With this we check whether contacts (or companies) meet certain criteria. We do this using if/then logic (if x then y). - Actions are performed
If contacts (or companies) meet or do not meet the checks/criteria in the workflow, we perform corresponding actions.
Lead nurturing criteria
Examples of criteria in lead nurturing workflows are:
- Has the contact expressed interest in x, y or z?
- Does the contact meet the right buyer persona?
- Has the contact already read a particular blog article?
- Has the contact already downloaded a particular white paper?
Lead nurturing actions
Examples of associated actions in lead nurturing workflows are:
- Wait 7 days and then send an email.
- Do not send a relevant email at all.
- Add a contact to a vendor.
- Put the contact in another workflow.
- Stop the workflow.
- etc.
Tips & tricks
Request information in phases
Nobody likes endless forms. Even better: your conversion rate drops when you add too many fields.
Our advice is therefore to request information in phases. HubSpot's progressive profiling feature helps with this. With this feature, you use one form that contains all the fields, but you control exactly how many of these fields the lead sees each time he or she fills out the form. In addition, fields whose information is already known are automatically hidden.
Target the right buyer persona
Ask at least one question of your leads to determine which buyer persona you have in front of you. The answer to this question determines which lead nurturing flow the lead enters.
This is how you ensure that the needs of the buyer persona and the information you offer in the nurturing process match.
Adapt lead nurturing process to the buyer persona
In the buyer persona research, you learned a lot about your potential customer's needs and character traits.
Incorporate as many points you learned about the buyer persona into your content, for example: goals, ambitions, pain points, desires, risks, frustrations, etc.
In addition, it is smart to take into account the (average) character traits of your buyer persona. For example, is your buyer persona an introvert who prefers to absorb information on his/her own rather than obtain it through others? Then give him/her as much detailed information as possible through the lead nurturing process and delay the moment of follow-up until enough trust has been built. Extraverts, on the other hand, are more open to engaging in dialogue.
