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Eric is in charge of content and SEO at La Growth Machine. A specialist in Outreach topics for over 8 years, Eric has written for numerous French and English blogs, sharing his experiences, hacks, and other use-cases. A trainer and speaker in his spare time, he is a reference for all topics related to B2B prospecting and automation.

If you’re in the marketing field, then it’s likely that you’re always on the lookout for ways to better your processes and bring new leads in! Although lead funnels can be intricate, it’s often tough to understand where your leads stand in the process. This is where lead nurturing strategies come in!

What is a lead nurturing strategy? Why is it crucial for your business? How do you build an efficient and scalable lead nurturing strategy?

In this post, we’re going to explain that concept and will give you a free step-by-step tutorial to build the best lead nurturing strategy!

What is a lead nurturing strategy?

In B2B, a lead nurturing strategy is a marketing process that helps you to build a relationship with your leads.

This process comes from the idea that a lot of things happen between the moment the lead is identified and the moment you turn it into a client. A lead nurturing strategy is, therefore, a set of actions you take at each stage of your lead’s journey to build up their interest, slowly, before trying to convert them.

What about the lead journey?

In B2B, buying decisions are much longer than in B2C. Also, the relationship between your company, your salesperson, and your future client isn’t the same.

Nowadays, in B2B, decision-making processes are getting more and more individual.

Think about it: they’re just people like you and me. Everyone is different. Some of your leads will rather use LinkedIn, or email (by the way, check out our post to learn how to get leads email addresses from LinkedIn) whereas others will be more active on other social media.

This means that you’ll have to develop a very personalized relationship with your lead, and “feed” them with content that will comfort them in the idea that maybe, you’re the right person to answer their needs!

In consequence, nurtured leads are much better-qualified leads than non-nurtured leads. If you want to convert leads in B2B, you’ll have to invest in creating meaningful relationships, which is one of the main benefits of lead nurturing.

Why should you build a lead nurturing strategy?

Don’t doubt it: creating a lead nurturing strategy will help you any many ways.

Even if it will take you some time, it’s very important to organize your lead generation… and improve it!

In B2B, there’s no better way than lead nurturing to optimize your lead funnel. Here are the main benefits of building up such a process:

  • Stop losing leads
  • Gain more time
  • Get a clearer vision of your whole lead generation process
  • Get more data to iterate
  • Improve customer lifetime
enrich your leads

You’ll stop losing leads

By definition, lead nurturing has the objective of taking care of your leads and developing a better relationship with them.

If you don’t do lead nurturing at all, chances are high that some of your current leads get lost in the funnel. By building up a strategy, you’ll make sure that this doesn’t happen anymore.

You’ll gain more time

When you do lead nurturing, you’re optimizing your whole process for all your leads – even if you’re building a personalized relationship with every one of them.

You work one time, to improve the process for all of them. This means that you’ll save a lot of time building up such a process instead of doing it for every one of your leads, case by case.

Plus, when you create your lead nurturing strategy, you’ll probably pick some growth hacking automation tools to make your life easier.

LaGrowthMachine, for example, is a sales automation tool that allows you to send thousands of sales messages to thousands of leads, automatically. Thanks to our Inbox feature, you can answer every one of them very quickly, which makes it an interesting step to be part of a nurturing strategy.

You’ll get a clearer vision of your lead funnel

When you’re nurturing leads, you put yourself in their shoes. You understand what they need to know and when they need to know it.

This gives you a very good overview of your whole lead funnel, from the moment where the lead is identified to the moment they become a client.

You’ll know exactly how to improve it and make the buying decision process shorter for your future leads.

You’ll get more data to iterate

When you’re nurturing your leads, one of your main goals is to always be trying to improve your strategy. You can achieve it by collecting as much data as possible.

With a clean lead nurturing process, you can easily get very accurate data about how many times your leads have been converted, the step where it fails, the content that is the most downloaded, etc…

For example, with LaGrowthMachine, you can track each step of each sequence of each lead, thanks to our live reporting. If many leads failed with one of your sales messages, maybe it’s time to reconsider it.

This way, you can learn tons of useful information about your leads that will help you with your global marketing efforts.

Improve customer lifetime

Finally, lead nurturing helps you improve customer lifetime. By improving the relationship with each of your leads, you’ll improve your brand experience effort and, therefore, satisfaction. A satisfied client stay will stay longer.

And a longer customer lifetime means more upsell, more brand awareness, and many other advantages!

How do you build an efficient lead nurturing strategy?

As promised, in this next part, we’re going to give you a clean, efficient, and scalable methodology to set up your lead nurturing strategy, but also to get the most out of it!

Step 1: Think about the perfect process

Before anything else, you should prepare the basis of your whole strategy.

Try to ask yourself the questions above:

  • How many leads will go through your process globally?
  • How long is your average time for lead conversion?
  • Do you already have some content that might be used for your strategy?
  • Do you have enough people in marketing and inside sales to handle the project?

This is a very important step, as your whole strategy will be designed from this info.

Additionally, you can lead benchmarks to see how your competitors are doing with their own strategy!

Step 2: Design your funnel

In this part, you’ll be thinking about all the different paths your leads might go through from entering your sales funnel to becoming a client.

As examples:

  • Path 1: your lead is entering through SEO. They downloaded an ebook about “Lead Nurturing”. One week later, they’ll receive an email with an invite for a private training session. One month after that, they’ll be called by a sales representative to see if they need more info. Finally, they’ll receive one last email with a 10% coupon if they sign up in the next 7 days.
  • Path 2: your lead is entering through a PPC ad about “How to improve your website’s conversion rate”. They click and arrive on a landing page where they can enter their email to download an ebook. One week later, they’ll receive an email with a case study about how another company increased its conversion rate. Two weeks after that, they’ll receive an email with a free audit offer. Finally, they’ll be called by a sales representative to see if they need more info.

And so on…

The important thing here is to try to map every single step of your strategy. It will help you understand what content you need and how often you should be contacting your leads.

Quick Tip 💡

When creating your lead nurturing campaigns, you should think about lead scoring!

Lead scoring as a method that consists in creating a grading system alongside with your lead nurturing program. Each time your lead will do something such as reading a blog post, answering to social media posts, opening a message from your email marketing campaign, they will get a grade that reflects their involvement in your lead nurturing campaign.

The higher your lead scores, the better their quality! Applying a lead scoring system is something that should be part of any effective lead nurturing tactics.

Step 3: Create your content

As said above, if you already have some content that can be reused, great! If not, you’ll have to create it from scratch. There are many types of content:

  • Blog posts;
  • Ebooks;
  • Videos;
  • Infographics;
  • Podcasts;
  • Free tools;
  • Coupons;
  • etc…

Your job here is to identify which content will be the most useful for your audience at each stage of their buyer’s journey.

For example, if they’re in the awareness stage, the goal of your content should be more educational than anything. If they’re in the decision stage, your content should be much more specific to drive them to the purchasing decision.

Step 4: Set up your automation

This is the bonus stage.

You can do lead nurturing with paper and a pen, or with Excel and a Gmail account.

But it won’t be as efficient as if you were using tools!

To build the best nurturing strategy, here’s our recommendation regarding tools:

1) Marketing Automation tool: such as Plezi for example. This is a good solution if you want to do efficient lead nurturing as it allows you to send a lot of marketing emails to push your different content while observing the lead go through the funnel you designed previously.

2) Sales Automation Software: such as LaGrowthmachine. This second tool can be plugged into your previous one in order to generate the leads you identified with those emails, to convert them in the sales funnel.

3) CRM: such as Hubspot for example. This third tool will allow you to track your new customer once they’ve converted. You’ll be able to get very detailed lead files for each one of your leads and to activate them for upselling.

The good news for you is that if you’re using LaGrowthMachine, you’ll be able to automate a big part of your sales process and scale perfectly with your other tools, as our technology is very open when talking about integration!