How do you win loyal customers from anonymous website visits? If you are active in the B2B segment, you need to win over interested parties with regular, value-added communication. When qualifying your leads, it is essential that you provide content that matches their current information needs. The technical term for this is lead nurturing and should be part of professional lead management. In the following, we will show you how to proceed successfully.
What does lead nurturing actually mean?
The term lead nurturing comes from the English "to nurture" and means "to promote" or "to nurture". Lead nurturing can therefore also be described as lead nurturing or lead promotion. The bottom line is to address the customer in a targeted and, above all, interest-based manner.
Because depending on the interest status and the number of interactions, there are different wishes. When leads first make contact with a company, they are usually looking for basic information. The next time they contact the company, they may already be asking for specific products. After that, specific information may be needed.
Good lead management ensures through lead nurturing that the respective needs of the customer are proactively fulfilled by the company. In this way, the customer is gradually guided along his buyer journey to sales maturity. This requires effective, customer-centric lead nurturing by marketing and sales.
Lead generation through qualified B2B addresses
The first step in lead management is to generate suitable leads. In the B2B segment, you can rely on corresponding Contact addresses in databases fall back on. Quality plays an important role here. If the contacts do not correspond to your target group, even the best lead nurturing will not lead to success.
But for an address to become a lead, contact must first be made. And it is precisely with this first contact that effective lead management begins.
Why lead management is crucial for businesses
However, a structured approach is necessary when contacting and working with leads. Effective lead management enables your company to capture leads centrally and qualify them easily. The goal is to achieve the highest possible closing rate. Lead nurturing is a tool available to you for this purpose.
On the one hand, lead management involves direct contact with the sales team. On the other hand, marketing also plays an important role in lead qualification. When introducing or optimising your lead management, the first step should therefore be to think about the buyer journey.
How does the interested party interact with your company? Up to what point does marketing accompany them on their journey, at what point does sales take over? Through these preliminary considerations, you create a structured approach that simplifies lead nurturing but also improves the customer experience.
The right structure for lead nurturing - know your leads
One challenge in lead management is to address each interested party appropriately and precisely. For this reason, one usually works with buyer personas. These show the characteristics, problems and needs of a target group. Based on the buyer persona, you can align your communication and offers accordingly. In this way, you convey the appropriate content to each lead without having to carry out each measure manually.
The contents can be divided into the following four steps of lead nurturing:
- From the first inquiry to the qualified contact
- Blog posts
- Whitepaper
- Guides
- Videos
- Checklists
- From qualified contact to ready-to-buy lead
- Newsletter
- Infographics
- Interactive content
- From ready-to-buy lead to sales option
- Webinars
- case studies
- Brochures
- Ratings and references
- From put option to close
- Demos
- Free test
- Consultations
The advantages of lead nurturing
While it costs time and money to implement successful lead management, it also offers significant benefits. Through lead nurturing you benefit from:
- a better lead quality
- a greater number of leads achieved
- a shortening of the purchasing process
- a sustainable increase in the measurable conversion rate
These points alone should already convince you of lead nurturing and ensure that you focus more on improving leads and lead quality in your company.
