Nurturing B2B leads: Top 4 tips to increase conversions with an audience-first strategy

In the ever-changing world of B2B marketing, capturing leads is merely the starting point of an effective marketing strategy. While attracting prospects is crucial, it's also essential to nurture their purchasing journey with personalized, data-driven content that adds value and resonates with their unique business goals.

We've summed up a few pro tips for nurturing prospective customers with an exceptional brand experience throughout their buying experience.

1. Place your audience at the core

It's true: when you market to everyone, you're reaching no one. In order to maximize the potential of your marketing efforts, your content must resonate with your audience on a personal level.

Personalized content based on your ideal customer profile (ICP) should be the lifeblood of your lead nurture campaign. Leveraging key customer insights enables you to create storytelling that excites, inspires, and connects with your target audience. But remember, your story is not only about the utility of your content—it's about the lasting impression you leave on your buyers.

Pro tip: Push yourself to produce content your audience wants, rather than telling them what you want them to know. Begin by researching your audience, particularly in terms of what roadblocks or pain points they commonly face. Surveys are another great research tactic to help uncover what’s concerning your current customer base. Posing even just three or five questions in a simple form can unearth a bounty of information.

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2. Build better experiences with advanced nurturing

As mentioned above, capturing new leads is just the beginning of the marketing journey. Recent surveys reveal that B2B brands often fall short in providing buyers with positive initial brand interactions.

Only 36% of B2B buyers report having a positive experience with a B2B brand in the initial interaction of the purchase journey. That means 2/3 of buyers are potentially dissatisfied or neutral about the content they’re seeing. A lack of healthy brand interactions can result in missed opportunities, sour customer relationships, and negatively impact your sales and marketing initiatives.

One way to overcome this common pitfall is by creating data-driven nurture emails that cater to the expectations of today's B2B buyers. You can address specific concerns by categorizing leads by job function and level. This allows you to provide tailored, relatable content to individual decision makers and position your product or service as the solution to helping them achieve their specific goals. For instance, sales managers may respond positively to insights on sales efficiency, closing deals, and so on. Alternatively, procurement professionals are more likely to engage with content related to cost savings or maximizing return on investment.

Pro tip: When marketing to c-suite members, deliver concise, strategic, and thought-provoking content. Their time is precious and not to be wasted. Remember: c-suite = short and sweet.

3. Continue the conversation with relevant content

An effective lead generation campaign begins with a conversation. By the later stages of the campaign, you can capitalize on the opportunity to carry that story forward to further engage with customers and strengthen your brand perception. Do so by creating hyper-relevant content that nurtures your prospects. If interactions stall, adapt your content creation strategy and consider providing leads with educational or informative material to keep them engaged.

Pro tip: By breaking larger B2B industries down into sub-industries you can create advanced nurture campaigns from relevant case studies instead of relying on broad industry metrics. This method allows you to zoom in on the issues and topics relevant to niche buyers, thus strengthening your brand’s position as a solution to their problems.

4. Effective nurturing requires mindful segmentation

Segmentation of your lead database can seem like a daunting task. But the good news is every segment doesn't require individual nurtures campaigns. You can start by prioritizing the most important customer lists and deliver each of them the same (or similar) content. Just remember to tailor each touchpoint to their unique needs and highlight specific value propositions for each group. Versioning your content this way is an effective means to creating numerous campaigns based on a single idea.

Pro tip: When it comes to lead nurture, less is more. Resist the impulse to bombard your prospects with frequent interactions; this hurts your brand equity. Aim instead to deliver fewer but more meaningful (and personal) engagements. Always prioritize delivering value over quantity.

Questions to reflect on:

• Which segments should we prioritize for advanced nurturing?
• Does our nurture content deliver value by speaking to our buyers' needs?
• Is our nurture campaign overly aggressive?
• What's working? What can we tweak to help enhance engagement?

Key takeaways

Putting your audience at the core of your nurturing strategy is a key component to campaign success. By curating memorable brand experiences and offering relevant, value-driven content, you can forge stronger connections with your prospects and drive business growth for the long term.

Take the next step toward transforming your nurturing efforts. Download our ebook for a deeper understanding of how to generate leads beyond the ordinary.