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.


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