Creating a Lead Nurturing Workflow

Creating an awesome lead nurturing workflow involves careful planning, personalized content, and continuous optimization. By having a deeper understanding of your customer, you are better positioned to identify their specific needs, or pain points. By providing helpful and personalized content at each point in sales cycle, you earn the opportunity to engage a sales lead and nurture them further into the funnel towards that delightful moment when they become a customer.

Only a very small percentage of potential customers who seek out information about your product or service are ready to buy when they start their sales journey. The others need to be educated and listened to, and their wants need to be assessed at various points once they enter the sales funnel. Just like any other relationship, they need to be nurtured from interested party in order to convert to valued client.

Lead nurturing at its simplest means taking an interested party and building that relationship so that someone who was not ready to buy at the beginning of their sales journey becomes someone ready to pull the trigger and become a satisfied customer.

Define Your Goals: Clearly outline your objectives for the lead nurturing workflow. Identify your target audience segments based on their interests, behaviors, and stage in the buyer’s journey. You’ll need to consider how each customer is different, and work to find commonalities among both existing customers and potential ones. Demographics are one powerful segmentation tool; gender, company position, age, income level and geographical location are all attributes that you can take into account as you create content. Certain industries gravitate to approaches driven by SMS or social media, while others rely on more traditional email communication. Statistics derived from those emails are already likely a crucial part of how you track leads; similarly, the ways in which your potential customers interact with your website should be a key in determining what kind of content you provide them with as you lead them through your funnel.

Once you know your goals and outcomes, start building a lead nurturing workflow with these key considerations.

1. Understand Your Buyer’s Journey: Map out the stages of your buyer’s journey and the content needs at each stage. Tailor your lead nurturing content to align with the needs of leads as they progress through the funnel.
2. Segment Your Leads: Segment your leads based on their demographics, interests, past interactions, and behavior. This will enable you to deliver personalized content that resonates with each segment.
3. Create Valuable and Relevant Content: Develop high-quality content that educates, informs, and addresses the pain points of your leads. Offer a mix of content types, such as blog posts, e-books, webinars, case studies, and videos.
4. Automate Your Workflow: Utilize a marketing automation platform to set up the lead nurturing workflow. Automate the delivery of content and trigger actions based on lead behavior or engagement.
5. Start with a Welcome Email: The first email in your workflow should be a warm and engaging welcome message. Thank the lead for their interest and set expectations for future communications.
6. Personalize Your Content: Use the data you have collected to personalize your emails and content for each lead segment. Address leads by their names and tailor the content to their specific interests.
7. Use Behavioral Triggers: Set up behavioral triggers to send specific content based on lead actions, such as website visits, content downloads, or email clicks.
8. Progressive Profiling: Gradually collect additional information from leads over time using progressive profiling. Use the data to further personalize your interactions.
9. Include Calls-to-Action (CTAs): Encourage engagement and further interactions with your content by including relevant CTAs that direct leads to the next stage in the buyer’s journey.
10. Lead Scoring and Grading: Implement lead scoring and grading to identify highly engaged and qualified leads. Prioritize your follow-up efforts based on lead scores.
11. Test and Optimize: Continuously test different elements of your lead nurturing workflow, such as subject lines, content, and send times. Analyze the results and make data-driven improvements.
12. Align Marketing and Sales: Foster collaboration between your marketing and sales teams. Share insights and feedback to ensure a seamless transition of leads from marketing to sales.
13. Measure and Track Results: Monitor the performance of your lead nurturing workflow using key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and lead-to-customer conversion.
14. Iterate and Improve: Based on the data and insights, make necessary adjustments and improvements to your lead nurturing workflow to enhance its effectiveness continually.

Remember that an effective lead nurturing workflow is customer-centric, personalized, and focuses on building trust and relationships with your leads. By providing valuable content, addressing their needs, and engaging with them at the right time, you can guide leads through the buyer’s journey and increase the likelihood of converting them into loyal customers.

Moving Prospects Through Your B2B Sales Funnel

Now that we understand that we can educate prospects to become buyers, we need a clear and consistent strategy to move prospects through the B2B sales funnel from the Awareness stage and convert them into a new, high-volume customer. It’s important to remember too that your business is not the only one making this adaptation; a quick Google search for a simple term like “digital marketing” will generate hundreds of millions of possible hits.

Your ideal customer needs to feel that their needs are understood in order to make a purchase decision, and similarly, you need to have a comprehensive understanding of your own company and the value it offers. And when your organization has a fully aligned sales and marketing approach, you’ll have that same understanding of your customer base.

When these qualities are determined by data, you have a great opportunity to capture a lead and move it through your sales funnel to successful conversion.

A lead nurturing workflow—a series of automated marketing actions and communications designed to engage and nurture leads over time—builds relationships with potential customers and guides them through the buyer’s journey. This typically involves sending a sequence of targeted and relevant content to leads based on their interests, behaviors, and stage in the buyer’s journey. The content is delivered through automated emails, triggered by specific actions or time-based intervals. The workflow aims to keep leads engaged, provide value, and address their needs and concerns throughout their decision-making process.

You’ll need to use progressive profiling to gradually gather additional information about leads over time. Instead of asking for a large amount of information upfront on a lead capture form, progressive profiling allows marketers to collect data in a more gradual and non-intrusive manner.

Every one of us as a customer has abandoned research into a product when our information gathering is slowed by an overly intrusive or large lead capture form. Progressive profiling allows you to build a profile of your lead over time as they interact with various content. The marketing automation system then tracks the lead’s interactions, behavior, and engagement with the website and marketing content.

As the lead continues to interact with the website or engage with marketing content, subsequent forms presented to the lead are dynamically updated based on the information already collected. The form fields are adjusted to ask for new information that has not been previously provided.

Each time the lead encounters a new form, they are asked for one or a few additional pieces of information. This approach reduces form fatigue and makes it more likely that the lead will provide the requested information.

The additional data collected through progressive profiling allows marketers to personalize their communications and segment leads based on their interests, behaviors, and preferences.

And while you are obviously familiar with the need for tracking standard content reporting metrics like page views or conversion rates, these progressive practices will allow you to observe where a prospect drops out of the sales funnel. Armed with that information, you can adjust your marketing efforts and strategies to easily micro-tune your approach so that it is better aligned with your ideal customer profile.

Basic outline steps that help effectively move prospects through the B2B sales funnel

1. Define your target audience: Clearly identify your ideal customer profile (ICP) and understand the characteristics of the companies or individuals who are most likely to benefit from your B2B offerings.
2. Generate awareness: Use content marketing, social media, email marketing, webinars, and industry events to create awareness about your brand and solutions. Provide valuable content that addresses the pain points and challenges of your target audience.
3. Capture leads: Offer gated content, such as e-books, whitepapers, or industry reports, in exchange for contact information. This helps you capture leads and build your email list for further engagement.
4. Nurture leads with relevant content: Utilize targeted email campaigns and marketing automation to nurture leads with personalized content. Send them industry insights, case studies, success stories, and educational content to keep them engaged and informed.
5. Qualify leads: Implement lead scoring to identify and prioritize the most qualified prospects. Assess their level of interest, engagement, and fit with your ICP to focus your efforts on the most promising opportunities.
6. Personalize the sales approach: As prospects move further down the funnel, personalize your sales approach based on their specific needs and pain points. Conduct thorough research to understand their business challenges and demonstrate how your solutions can address them.
7. Arrange meetings or product demonstrations: Offer one-on-one meetings, product demonstrations, or personalized consultations to showcase the value of your B2B offerings. Tailor these interactions to address the prospects’ unique requirements.
8. Address objections and concerns: Be prepared to address any objections or concerns that prospects may have. Provide relevant information and evidence to instill confidence in your solutions.
9. Offer trial periods or pilot projects: For more complex B2B solutions, consider offering trial periods or pilot projects to allow prospects to experience the benefits firsthand before committing to a full purchase.
10. Present case studies and testimonials: Share success stories, case studies, and customer testimonials that highlight the positive outcomes experienced by other clients. This social proof can build trust and credibility.
11. Negotiate and close the deal: As prospects become more interested and committed, negotiate the terms and conditions, pricing, and contract details. Address any final concerns before closing the deal.
12. Provide exceptional post-sales support: After the sale, continue to provide excellent customer service and support. This builds customer loyalty and increases the chances of repeat business or referrals.

Throughout the B2B sales funnel, communication and collaboration between your marketing and sales teams are essential. By aligning marketing efforts with sales strategies, you can create a seamless and effective experience for your prospects, increasing the likelihood of converting them into long-term, satisfied customers.

Run an Account Based Marketing Campaign Successfully

Account-based Marketing (ABM) can be a very effective way to reach your target accounts and generate leads. But it is not an appropriate solution for selling to all possible customers. Typically, you will need information from your existing sales and marketing programs to determine which existing customers are of the highest value, and which potential customers are worth the intensive investment of resources that a successful ABM program requires.

ABM works best when you can target a higher-value segment of your market. High volume, low value sales aren’t ideal for an ABM campaign. At the simplest level, in an ABM campaign, the pre-qualification you do for each potential new customer leads to an increase in profitability, because your customers have been pre-vetted as qualified. Similarly, because you have targeted an audience with a higher budget, a successful campaign means sales with a larger annual contract value (ACV). Since the cost of doing business remains roughly the same, your profitability increases by serving these potentially higher-value clients.

Those higher-value clients are found by writing and refining an ideal customer profile (ICP) that moves over the course of your work from identifying a theoretical ideal customer to identifying real businesses that could potentially benefit from investing in your product or service.

Those named-account targets can be found by examining data you should already have on hand in your customer relationship management solution (CRM). You’ll want to examine the metrics of each of your existing customers, and then do the same for your theoretical ideal customers. With your existing customers, the focus is on trying to identify which qualities of a customer make them more valuable. Are you selling to customers only of a certain size, a certain number of employees, or with a certain annual revenue? Are your deals concentrated in specific geographic areas? Are they triggered by events, such as a change in senior leadership, a change in industry trends, current events, or even changes in the company’s financial standing, such as a missed earnings target, a new stock offering, or a recent bankruptcy?

Once you have a deeper understanding of your customer, you’ll use that information to add to your portrait of an ideal customer. Using your newly developed ICP, you’ll have targeted sales prospects for your ABM campaign.

Running a successful account based marketing campaign requires a strategic approach and effective execution. ABM is a collaborative effort between marketing and sales. You need to involve sales early in the process so that they can provide input on the target accounts and help to close deals. The key to ABM is personalization. You need to create messages that are tailored to the specific needs and interests of your target accounts. You shouldn’t rely on just one channel to reach your target accounts. You need to use a variety of channels, such as email, social media, and direct mail. And because your ABM campaign is literally born out of data, it’s imperative to track the results of your ABM campaign so that you can make necessary adjustments to both your marketing campaigns and your ideal customer profile.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you run an Account Based Marketing campaign

1. Define your ICP: Begin by clearly defining your target accounts based on your Ideal Customer Profile. Identify the characteristics and criteria that make a company a good fit for your products or services.
2. Identify target accounts: Based on your ICP, create a list of high-value target accounts that align with your business objectives and have the potential for significant impact.
3. Research and gather insights: Conduct thorough research on each target account to understand their specific needs, challenges, goals, and key decision-makers. Gather insights from both internal sources (e.g., sales teams, customer support) and external data providers.
4. Develop personalized content: Create tailored and relevant content that addresses the pain points and objectives of each target account. This could include customized blog posts, case studies, whitepapers, videos, or other formats.
5. Choose appropriate marketing channels: Select channels that are most effective for reaching your target accounts. This may include email marketing, social media, direct mail, webinars, events, and one-on-one interactions like phone calls or in-person meetings. Different customers require different approaches based on their demographics.
6. Coordinate sales and marketing efforts: Alignment between your sales and marketing teams is crucial for ABM success. Collaborate with your sales team to develop account-specific strategies and messaging.
7. Personalize outreach and engagement: Craft personalized messages for each key decision-maker within the target account. Address their specific needs and pain points to demonstrate that you understand their challenges.
8. Implement automation and technology: Use marketing automation tools to scale your ABM efforts efficiently. Automation can help with content distribution, lead tracking, and personalized follow-ups.
9. Measure, Analyze, Optimize and Iterate: Track key performance indicators (KPIs) specific to your ABM campaign, such as engagement rates, conversion rates, pipeline progression, and revenue generated from target accounts. Analyze the data to assess the effectiveness of your campaign and make data-driven adjustments. Continuously review the performance of your ABM campaign and optimize your strategies based on the insights gained. ABM is an iterative process, and ongoing improvements will lead to more effective targeting and engagement.
10. Focus on long-term relationships: ABM is not a one-time effort; it’s about building lasting relationships with key accounts. Nurture these relationships with personalized attention and ongoing support.

Remember that ABM is a targeted and personalized approach, so it may involve fewer accounts than traditional marketing efforts. However, the high level of engagement and personalized attention can lead to stronger connections, increased customer loyalty, and higher ROI from your most valuable customers.

When to Use Account Based Marketing (ABM)

There are many strategies to help focus B2B marketing efforts. Among the most effective is Account-Based Marketing (ABM), a strategic marketing approach that focuses on targeting and engaging specific individual accounts or companies. ABM narrows your marketing focus towards a segmented, hand-selected group of customers that fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) rather than casting a wide net to a broader audience. It takes the concept of marketing towards your ideal customer and narrows the focus even further. Learning how and when to use account based marketing tactics can improve your sales funnel production.

The goal of ABM is to create highly personalized and targeted marketing campaigns that cater to the specific needs and preferences of key accounts or high-value customers. In traditional marketing, businesses often develop generic messages and content to reach a wide audience, hoping to attract potential customers among the masses. However, ABM flips this approach and customizes marketing efforts for individual accounts or a select group of high-priority accounts.

The ABM strategy involves the following key steps:

1. Identify target accounts: The first step in ABM is to identify and select the high-value accounts that align with the company’s ideal customer profile. These accounts are typically those with significant revenue potential or strategic importance.
2. Gather insights and research: Once the target accounts are identified, detailed research is conducted to understand the account’s specific needs, pain points, organizational structure, decision-making processes, and key stakeholders.
3. Personalize marketing messages: ABM involves creating tailored and personalized marketing messages, content, and offers for each target account. The content is designed to resonate with the account’s specific challenges and goals, showcasing how the company’s products or services can address their unique needs.
4. Select marketing channels: ABM uses a mix of marketing channels to reach the target accounts effectively. This could include email marketing, social media, direct mail, personalized website content, and one-to-one interactions such as phone calls or meetings.
5. Engage key stakeholders: ABM focuses on engaging multiple stakeholders within the target account, as buying decisions in B2B scenarios often involve various decision-makers and influencers. The marketing efforts aim to build relationships with these stakeholders and align the company’s offerings with their individual interests.
6. Measure and optimize: ABM campaigns are closely monitored and measured to assess their effectiveness. Metrics such as engagement rates, conversion rates, pipeline progression, and revenue generated from the targeted accounts are analyzed to optimize future ABM strategies.

ABM is particularly effective in B2B (business-to-business) marketing, where sales cycles are longer, and individual accounts hold significant value. And ABM works best when it represents a collaboration between all your customer-facing teams, including sales and customer support. They can provide valuable information about the needs and challenges of your target accounts. Once you have identified potential target accounts, engage in account profiling to deepen your understanding of each account. This involves researching the account’s business objectives, recent news or events, financial performance, and any other relevant information that can inform your ABM strategy. Engage in regular discussions with your sales team to get their input on target account selection and to ensure alignment on account-specific strategies.

By focusing efforts on a select group of accounts and delivering personalized experiences, ABM can lead to higher customer satisfaction, increased customer retention, and improved overall marketing ROI.

When Should You Use Account-Based Marketing?

ABM is a valuable strategy in specific scenarios where the company’s goals and customer engagement can benefit from a highly personalized and targeted approach.

Here are some situations when a company should use ABM:

1. High-value or strategic accounts: ABM is particularly effective when dealing with high-value accounts or strategic customers. If your business relies on a small number of key accounts for a significant portion of its revenue, ABM can be an ideal approach to nurture and deepen relationships with these accounts.
2. Long sales cycles: In B2B industries with long and complex sales cycles, ABM can be instrumental in engaging and nurturing key decision-makers within target accounts throughout the buying process. By providing personalized content and support, ABM can help accelerate the sales cycle and drive conversions.
3. Multiple stakeholders: When the buying decision involves multiple stakeholders with different needs and interests, ABM can help align the messaging and content to address each stakeholder’s concerns effectively.
4. Customizable offerings: Companies that offer customizable products or services can benefit from ABM since it allows them to showcase how their offerings can be tailored to meet the specific needs of individual accounts.
5. Account expansion and up-selling: ABM can be used to up-sell or cross-sell to existing customers within an account. By understanding the account’s needs and providing tailored solutions, companies can strengthen their relationships and increase customer lifetime value.
6. Penetrating new markets or industries: When a company aims to enter a new market or industry, ABM can be valuable for building relationships with key accounts in that sector. A personalized approach can demonstrate the company’s understanding of the industry’s unique challenges and position it as a trusted partner.
7. Limited marketing resources: ABM is a focused strategy that requires resources, and it may not be feasible for every company to implement ABM across its entire customer base. Companies with limited marketing resources can use ABM to concentrate their efforts on high-priority accounts that offer the most significant potential for growth and revenue.
8. High competition: In highly competitive industries where differentiation is crucial, ABM can help companies stand out by delivering unique and personalized experiences to target accounts.

Ultimately, the decision to use ABM should be based on a careful assessment of the company’s business objectives, target market characteristics, and the potential benefits of a more personalized marketing approach. By leveraging ABM strategically, companies can build stronger relationships with their most valuable customers and achieve better results in terms of customer acquisition, retention, and revenue growth.

The Four Stages of Digital Content for Lead Nurturing

At every stage of a buyer’s journey, buyers need to be able to learn more about the seller and its products or services. If you want to keep your leads engaged throughout the buyer’s journey (and steward them forward with an automated pre-sales education process) it’s essential to provide them with the right type of authentic educational content at the right time. This require creating the right type of content for every step in their buyer’s journey and your pre-sales education process.

The four stages of the buyer’s journey are a framework that marketers use to understand and address the different phases that a potential customer goes through before making a purchase decision. These stages are commonly used in inbound marketing and sales strategies.

This typically divides itself into four distinct stages:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Preference
• Decision

Let’s quickly look at all four stages and what type of content is required at each stage for effective lead nurturing.

AWARENESS

The first stage of a buyer’s journey is Awareness.

At this initial stage, the buyer realizes they have a problem or a need and they begin to research what solutions are available. They are seeking information and education about their challenges and trying to understand both the scope of their issues and the resources that will be required for a solution. During this phase, the buyer may not yet be aware of your specific product or brand. The goal for marketers is to raise awareness by providing valuable content, such as blog posts, educational videos, or social media content, that addresses the buyer’s pain points. At this point, the buyer isn’t ready to commit to speaking to a sales rep at length – they are still gathering data to inform their decision.

What type of content does a buyer want at the awareness stage?  At this stage the buyer wants content that helps educate them about their problem and how they should think about solving it. This can include blog posts, info-graphics, short videos and statistics. It may also include self-assessments.

CONSIDERATION

The second stage of a buyer’s journey is the Consideration stage. At this point the buyer has identified/agreed/decided that there is an issue/problem they need to address and is actively researching potential solutions. In this stage, the buyer will continue to conduct research to understand their problem and narrow down their solutions to a few final contenders and/or approaches to the solution. They will continue to do a little more research about the problem and the specific vendors that solve these problems.

Content that is valuable during the Consideration phase is content that dives deeper into the problem and the solution.  Content types for this stage may include features and benefits pages, webinars, and detailed demo videos.  Articles and videos that help buyers think about “what to consider…” are also helpful.

PREFERENCE

During the preference stage the B2B buyer will start to select their preferred solution.  They have narrowed down their options and are looking for the best fit for their specific requirements. Marketers need to provide content that supports the buyer’s decision-making process, such as customer reviews, testimonials, free trials, or discounts, to encourage them to choose their product or service. A potential customer may narrow down to one or two finalists. In this stage, they will almost always contact those vendors to speak to sales reps. Ideally your sales rep should have already reached out pro-actively at this point based on your buyers Lead Score.

This is when they start creating their business case and formalizing the purchase request with higher management. Content types that are effective during this stage include testimonials from existing customers, use cases, detailed webinars, use cases, pricing pages and about us pages.

DECISION

The fourth and final stage of the B2B buyers’ journey is the decision. At this point, your potential customers are deciding whether they should buy from you or a competitor. It’s important to make sure that they have all the information they need in order to make an informed decision.

What content does a buyer typically use to make a decision? During the decision stage, content like case studies and detailed product comparison pages become very important. Additionally, anything that can provide reassurance to the buyer that they are making the right choice is also useful. This could include customer testimonials, awards and certifications, technical details, customer service expectations and, in some cases, even free trials or samples.  ROI videos and ROI calculators are also helpful at this stage.