Targeted Lead Nurturing Using Marketing Automation Solutions

In B2B marketing, lead nurturing is a vital process that enables marketers to slowly and steadily convert a prospect into a sales-ready lead. For lead nurturing to be successful, marketers require real time background information to devise a lead nurturing workflow.

Lead background information gathering is usually done in the website through forms. The information gathered is used by sales teams. Usually marketers collect basic information such as industry segment and email id is collected. Since this information is not sufficient for lead nurturing, intelligent marketing automation tools are being deployed. The main benefit of a marketing automation tool lies in its ability to track background information about website visitors that can be used for lead scoring and lead nurturing activities.

In some cases, sales teams may lose interest in the lead due to lack of progress, while marketing department may loose sight and might not follow up on the leads as they have already identified and handed them over to Sales. This results in loss of prospective leads on account of lack of sustained interaction with the lead and collaboration between internal teams.

So, to procure information on prospective clients and not let the good ones leak out at any stage in the marketing funnel, marketing automation tools are imperative. Effective marketing automation software can help marketers to procure a sustainable flow of qualified sales leads over a long period of time.

Marketing automation software can enable marketers to easily identify and nurture leads.  It can:

• Identify leads that have shown an interest but are not yet sales ready can be nurtured.
• Nurture leads by informing and educating them with relevant information.
• Understand the intent of the leads, and their purchasing stage.
• Classify the leads on the basis of sales readiness.
• Pass leads to Sales enabling them to reach prospects that are ready to buy now, with a relevant solution.
• Execute personalized and intent driven lead nurturing campaigns.

In the future, B2B marketers will extend the use of marketing automation platforms to other phases of the customer lifecycle as well. Today most B2B companies use marketing automation platforms exclusively for demand generation, and may not understand their versatility. With a few tweaks they can be used extensively for customer training, retention and loyalty programs, and to generate customer feedback.


Read more on - lead generation

Executing a Successful B2B Social Media Marketing Campaign

A MarketingProfs report states that “Across the various platforms, brands cited the following adoption levels: Facebook (87%), Twitter (83%), LinkedIn (76%), YouTube (66%), and blogs (57%).”

There are many new social media channels rolling in every day and marketers are continuously pressurized to engage prospects that are active on each of them.  In social media marketing, one solution does not apply to all channels, is a known fact. Example: a Facebook marketing strategy is completely different from a marketing strategy executed in LinkedIn or Pinterest.

However, there are some best practices that have to be followed when it comes to executing social media B2B marketing strategies. While marketing is only a part of the activity, it should always be remembered that marketers need to first build a community of prospects, partners and customers who will be evangelists for their company some day.

Step 1: Identify Target Audience

The first step for social media success is to identify your target audience. First, join social networks, where peers are already on board. Applying some smart brand building techniques combined with personalized nurturing of prospects, based on their interest levels, is the first best practice to adopt for social media campaigns to be effective.  

It is important to find out the top social applications used by your target segment. They, analyze forums for offers and promotions that have worked very well with your target audience to assess how they respond to them.

Step 2: Personalize Marketing Strategy

Every social networking site is different and hence marketing strategies must be planned and executed accordingly. Some important pointers for personalization of marketing strategy are:

• Find out who the key social media influencers are with the help of free search tools such as Technorati, Twitter Search or Google Blog search.
• Design and execute marketing campaigns to reach out to these purchasing influencers.
• Determine the key business objectives that are to be met with social media marketing, first.
• Allocate manpower to dedicatedly create, track and monitor social media campaigns.
• Use marketing automation tools to track website visitor intent and use that intelligence to create personalized campaigns.
• Devise a social media marketing strategy based on your revenue targets, product releases, upcoming events, etc.
• Prioritize your social media campaigns activities based on how fast your brand image gets established on the social site. Example: If your Twitter stream is going  great guns vs. your Facebook presence that is still lacklustre, it makes sense to spend more time and campaign money on Twitter than Facebook.

Leads procured through social media can be scored using lead scoring model and nurtured through smart drip marketing campaigns.


Read more on   -  Lead Management

Winning Strategies for Lead Generation

Inside sales teams were a frustrated lot, earlier. This is because they constantly had to deal with dead end calls as they worked with incomplete lead contact information. Marketing automation tools have made this process simpler by capturing qualified leads visiting the website. By tracking down leads that show buying interest, teams could generate faster sales and develop a more targeted responses to those browsing the website.

When leads are generated using lead intelligence, they have a significantly higher conversion success rate than cold contacts. When lead website activity is tracked, they can be scored based on the profile set by the marketer. This way, marketers can pre-qualify their leads, and pass them on to sales teams when they deem fit.  A robust lead generation system combined with some smart marketing techniques will aid marketers in closing deals faster.

Email Marketing
Email marketing is the most widely used B2B marketing technique that is used to connect with prospects. It can be used to send personalized and targeted messages for lead generation and lead nurturing purposes. Marketers can choose to email exciting offers, propositions, events, newsletters, etc. Analyst reports, survey results or website metrics are always a good draw with prospects. So, sharing these reports through email will aid in increasing click through rates for landing pages.

Content Marketing
Marketing collaterals like newsletters and articles are an effective way to touch base with subscribed prospects. When prospect is in the awareness stage, he will be actively looking for information about related products and solutions. So, well-written and researched articles/whitepapers/case studies/success stories can help to engage him on a regular basis.

Nurture
Marketers need to follow up on all leads that have shown interest in the product, irrespective of their buying stages. With the help of marketing automation systems, marketers need to install a regular follow-up system on all leads and customers to ensure they remain warm.  Integrating their own CRM system with marketing automation software will help to automatically nurture these leads.

Display Customer Success
The company website has to project the product’s benefits and the customers who have benefited from it. Customer success stories or case studies are widely read by prospects in the considering state. Therefore, it is important to have a testimonial column on websites which displays the customer success stories as well.

Marketing automation
Using automated tools, marketers can build a pipeline of qualified leads in the marketing funnel (who will be nurtured through email marketing), track visitor intent in real time, shorten sales cycles and boost revenue, and align marketing and sales goals.


Also read more on - Lead Scoring Model, Search Engine Optimization Tools