modern marketer’s guide to b2b lifecycle marketing lead ... · 4 “the definitive guide to lead...

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LEAD NURTURINGMODERN MARKETER’S GUIDE TO B2B LIFECYCLE MARKETING

Insights into how to develop an informed and relevant nurturing strategy.

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Chapter 3: Lead Nurturing - overview

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................................3

The Modern Marketer ..............................................................................................................................4

Lead Nurturing basics .............................................................................................................................. 5

Modern Marketing’s influence on Lead Nurturing ........................................................................ 6First things first: Develop a strategy. ........................................................................................7Your content matters. Really matters. ....................................................................................8Not all Prospects are created equal .........................................................................................8Have clearly defined criteria for Suspects, Prospects and Qualified Leads ............. 9Capture information along the way ......................................................................................... 9Automation and analytics are essential ............................................................................... 10

Key take-aways ..........................................................................................................................................11

To-do’s ...........................................................................................................................................................11

Want more on this subject? .................................................................................................................12

What’s next .................................................................................................................................................12

MODERN MARKETER’S GUIDE TO B2B LIFECYCLE MARKETING – LEAD NURTURING

© 2017 Gain

BUYER’S JOURNEY LIFECYCLE MARKETING


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Introduction

of all marketers agree that marketing has value and that value can be measured.

of all marketers agree that marketing has changed more in the last two years than in the last 50.

of all marketers agree that, for most companies, digital marketing approaches are in a constant cycle of trial and error.1

These are telling results from a study of 1,000 U.S. marketers. The new world of on-demand technology has created as much confusion as it has opportunity. When new technologies are brought together with a more-informed-than-ever consumer, the result is the need for greater innovation in marketing to drive business success.

Innovation, by definition, is the introduction of something new or different. However, innovation doesn’t have to mean “ahead of its time” or “complex.” It simply requires a greater understanding of the way we approach B2B lifecycle marketing.

The “Modern Marketer’s Guide to B2B Lifecycle Marketing” series was created to help you narrow your B2B lifecycle marketing focus through the eyes of your consumer. We’ll share a blueprint for aligning your current lifecycle marketing efforts with the consumer decision-making journey from a Modern Marketers point-of-view (POV). At each decision step, we’ll outline what questions to ask, what tools to apply, strategic considerations and the significance of integration.

81%

76%

61%

1 “Digital Distress: What Keeps Marketers Up at Night?” Adobe Systems Incorporated Study, 2013



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The Modern Marketer

Emerging from a world in which outbound campaigns, characterized by advertising and intuition predominated, today’s “modern marketer” faces a new paradigm shift of inbound marketing programs driven by digital channels, served by multiple touches and measured by sophisticated technologies – and where data analysis is king.2

It’s a pretty long definition for a simple concept. Modern Marketing is about the consumer. The data you have available about consumers. How you use technology to engage consumers. And of course, the measurement of the outcome from your efforts.

Advancements in technology and a more empowered consumer have led to a marketing renaissance. A recent B2B survey of over 500 B2B marketing professionals reveals seven areas that have contributed the most to the formation of the Modern Marketer2:

‘‘‘‘

60%

58%

42%

42%

33%

30%

19%

Ability to track marketing ROMI due to technology

Use of social media in marketing

Shift of power from the brandto the customer

Maturation of demand generationand lead nurturing

Emergence of mobile marketing

Fragmentation of media

Improvements in data cleansing

2 “Defining the Modern Marketer: From Real to Ideal.“ BtoB in partnership with Oracle Eloqua, 2013



Consumer decision step

Marketing strategy

Marketing objective

Commonly used tools for B2B Lead Nurturing

Consideration

Lead Nurture

Nurture to a sales conversion

ContentPPC (Pay-Per-Click)Remarketing / RetargetingDisplay advertisingEmail marketingMarketing AutomationCRM integrationOutbound telemarketing (OBTM)MailSales team

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Lead Nurturing basics: “Consideration”

These are the basics ... and they’re basic for a reason. Keep your approach simple. Remember, complex does not necessarily equal better, so don’t over complicate. Continue learning, work to not repeat mistakes and, most importantly, capitalize on successes.



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Modern Marketing’s influence on Lead Nurturing

The experience a business consumer has with your brand during the early stages of their decision-making journey is just as important as their making an initial purchase. The reason is that, through their Discovery and Consideration decision steps, they are increasing their knowledge of your brand, your products and services, your point-of-view, as well as those of your competitors. The knowledge you have of your consumer, along with the content and technology you use to communicate with them, is what separates the Modern B2B Marketer from the rest.

Educating your audience, and the relationship you build in the lead up to purchase creates a greater likelihood that they will select you over a competitor. It also increases the potential for repeat purchases over the life of the relationship. Modern Lead Nurturing is the ability to build strong, trusting relationships through the entire B2B buying decision process.

Companies that excel in Lead Nurturing3:

Generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost per lead

Reduce the percent of marketing-generated leads that are ignored by sales (from as high as 80% to as low as 25%)

Raise win rates on marketing-generated leads (7% points higher) and reduce “no decisions” (6% points lower)

Have more sales representatives make quota (9% higher) and a shorter ramp up time for new sales reps (10% decrease)

3 Marketo, Forrester and CSO Insights, 2009

B2B LifecycleMarketing

Participating in the businessconsumer’s decision-making journey


GAIN ACTION STEP – ALIGN

Make sure everyone has a voice – from product marketing to sales to executive leadership – in order to ensure all parties are in agreement with stated goals, accountable and vested in their part to achieving those goals.


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First things first: Develop a strategy.

Staying top-of-mind is critical during the Consideration step in a consumer’s decision-making journey. Take the time to outline your objectives and develop your strategy accordingly. It should align with the need your product or service meets for your customers, your sales team structure, and your sales cycle. Be sure to establish milestones or KPIs to measure success and determine when a strategy needs to be expanded or revisited.

Your Lead Nurture strategy should be a natural progression from your Lead Generation strategy. Through your Lead Gen efforts, your audience became aware of who you are and what you offer. Now they need to learn more. And right now, it’s about continuing to provide reasons to stay in their consideration set as they narrow their options for purchase.

Today’s business consumers move at their own pace ... and make purchasing decisions on their terms. Staying in front of them with relevant content is necessary to stand out from others in your category. Leveraging a Marketing Automation (MA) platform that can interact with a Display Advertising Network with remarketing capabilities will allow you to re-engage Prospects* based on past behavior. By monitoring engagement and leveraging technology, you can deliver the right message at the right time through multiple channels (email, display, etc.) to migrate a consumer through the stages of the buying process.

It’s important to remember, people do business with people they like and believe will provide value. Set boundaries for your marketing and sales efforts and don’t overstep them by committing to the hard sell too early. The greater the trust your Prospect has in your brand, the greater the opportunity you have to become their next purchase.

Be patient. The average sales cycle has increased 22% in the past five years due to the number of decision-makers involved in the process.4 This is why it is important to have your data, strategy, content and technology tools in place to reach both decision-makers and influencers with relevant and timely messages during this part of their decision-making journey.


GAIN ACTION STEP – INTEGRATE

Integrating your CRM and MA systems is critical to achieving alignment between Marketing and Sales. It will help with efforts to segment your database and provide the signal as to when a lead is ready to pass to sales.

It also gives your Sales Team valuable intelligence — by capturing activity and engagement levels with marketing campaigns, your team will be armed with information needed to close the deal.

* Prospect: someone who has shown interest in your product or service by providing contact information4 “The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing,” Marketo - 2009


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Your content matters. Really matters.

Content is the best way to tell your story. Make the most of it. While your content doesn’t have to “sell”, it should educate and add value to the solution your product or service provides. The more content resources you have available, the greater the opportunity to be perceived as a thought-leader in your industry. While you may not have the budget to be the industry-leading marketing / advertising brand, you do know enough about your product / service to be an industry thought-leader on the subject. Your point-of-view is your differentiator – make it readily available.

Develop a library of content that effectively communicates your understanding of your target audience’s challenges and points them in your direction. Provide your perspective through the filter of the consumer’s needs. That means you have to be willing to forego the hard sell (for now), to become a trusted resource. Building trust by delivering value through good content is the new cost of doing business.

You’ll quickly find that you can repurpose content for several different outlets. Make sure your content is available in different formats, in different places, to create the greatest opportunity for exposure. This doesn’t require the creation of hundreds of pieces of content but rather repurposing existing content to take different forms for different outlets – infographics and presentations on SlideShare, video for your YouTube channel, eBooks and whitepapers on your .com, etc.

Not all Prospects are created equal.

Migrating from Suspect* to Prospect to Qualified Lead to Conversion is a process. It does not typically happen all at once, nor should you expect it to. This process is the core of the B2B consumer’s decision-making journey. Understand your audience (buyer) – and know why they are searching for a solution. Then you can go about how to insert your brand into that decision-making journey that ultimately leads to a purchase.


* Suspect: someone who has not shown interest in your product or service, but may share the similar characteristics of a current customer.

GAIN ACTION STEP – REACH

Repurpose your content to extend your reach. Rework SlideShare slide shows to be infographics, whitepapers to be SlideShare presentations, etc. B2B consumers go to different places for different kinds of information. Make sure your content is where your consumer is.


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Have clearly defined criteria for Suspects, Prospects and Qualified Leads.

Use your current data and communicate with your audiences accordingly. If you don’t have a robust in-house data group, partner with someone. If you don’t have the resources to seek outside partners, develop your own basic outline based on customer data. Conduct a random sampling of your customer database and develop “personas” for what they look like as a consumer. This will help craft relevant messaging and content for even more effective communications. And if it’s available, retrace the steps they took that led to their purchase (from both the Customer and from the Sales Team point-of-view).

Following these simple suggestions can provide insight and direction as to how to segment your audiences for your Lead Nurturing program. You will have established criteria defining your segments, distinguishing between a Suspect, Prospect and Qualified Lead to ensure communication content aligns with the decision-making step of the consumer. And you will be able to craft communications better tailored to your target segment ... because you have a better overall understanding of their needs.

Capture information along the way.

Content is purchased with the currency of data. Test your form length and fields to determine the optimal amount of information a Prospect is willing to continue to provide. Capture as much information on a potential lead as you can. You can implement trackable emails, landing pages, PPC download pages, remarketing and much more. However, just because someone provides you their information doesn’t mean they are ready to purchase. Only 25% of leads are legitimate and should go to sales. 50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy.5


5 Gleanster Research, SilverPop / DemandGen Report and InsideSales.com

GAIN ACTION STEP – TEST

GAIN ACTION STEP – COLLECT

Test the number of data collection fields you use to see what drives movement. Start by using 3 - 4 fields and test up and down from there. Knowing your audience is understanding what they are willing to divulge, and what they aren’t.

Using Progressive Profiling is a great way to gather additional information on your Prospect as they show more interest in your brand and solution.


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Automation and analytics are essential.

It’s no longer enough to have great copy, concise positioning and solid offers with strong calls to action; while still as challenging as ever to create communications with these elements, it’s the minimum requirement in today’s reality. Modern Lead Nurturing requires using science and technology to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. The shift has been made from bulk emailing to a more focused approach that is customized to each individual Prospect and, more importantly, where they are in their decision-making journey.

A Marketing Automation (MA) platform can help you shift gears by connecting personally with your Prospects to create one-to-one communications. Research has shown that 82% of Prospects found content to be more valuable when it was aligned with their particular industry and 67% reported content relative to their job function / role to be more valuable.6 Another benefit of MA is once you have discovered behavioral patterns responsible for triggering certain responses, you have an opportunity to automate the process for greater efficiency.

One of the most powerful aspects of running campaigns is what you learn that allows you to refine and optimize future efforts. Marketing Analytics is the fuel that turns data into insight — showing you what is working, and more importantly, what is not. This feedback allows you to optimize on the fly; you can cut out what doesn’t work and reallocate that budget to what does, or use those savings to fund further testing.

While most focus on measuring overall conversions, don’t forget to keep track of your micro-conversions as well. People are not always at your site to buy. They are there to perform research on your brand, products and services. Each micro-conversion has the potential to build into a sale so don’t be too quick to disregard them. Think of each micro-conversion (such as what pages are viewed or where a Prospect clicked) as valuable sources of data that allow you to refine your efforts further. Whether it’s generating additional content based on what you learn from page views or segmenting your audience based on certain behaviors — the incremental power of such activities should not be overlooked, no matter how small they appear.


6 “The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing,” Marketo, Marketing Sherpa - January 2012

GAIN ACTION STEP – REFINE

Automate repetitive tasks you identify in the process to be more efficient.

Reduce “generic” contacts by personalizing, providing relevant content, and adjusting your programon the fly.


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Key take-aways

Because sales cycles have increased in duration, you have more opportunity to collect additional data points along the way.

Contact data is the currency with which content is “purchased.”

Measure everything you can — use analytics to drive learnings and optimize marketing efforts on the fly.

Integrating your CRM and MA systems provides valuable intelligence for your sales team.

Automating repetitive tasks leads to greater efficiency and cost savings.

To-do’s

Bring all stakeholders to the table, define your strategy and agree on goals.

Determine what your customer base “looks like” and develop personas based on findings to apply to your Lead Nurturing efforts.

Assess your content and repurpose to make it available in multiple formats.

Consider using progressive profiling to collect various data points over time; as your content proves valuable to your audience, they will be willing to share more information.

Use analytics to track your performance — start with a limited number of metrics that you can expand on over time.

Could you use an outside perspective?



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Want more on this subject?

We know you’re busy. That’s why we’ve developed the quick-read Best Practices for our chapter on Lead Nurturing. It’s a helpful guide chock-full of useful tips and insights on developing or enhancing your Lead Nurture strategy.

Download Lead Nurturing Best Practices now.

What’s next

You’ve just read the “Modern Marketer’s Guide to B2B Lifecycle Marketing — Chapter 3: Lead Nurturing”

Chapter 4 of the “Modern Marketer’s Guide to B2B Lifecycle Marketing — Onboarding” provides insights into how to apply a Modern Marketer’s perspective to the Onboarding process, using the consumer’s POV.


About Gain: We create opportunity, Aha! moments and action. Click here to learn more.

Want to talk shop? Contact Collin Trost at 404/386-0391 or [email protected].

© 2017 Gain

GAIN’S B2B BEST PRACTICE SERIES

Lead Nurturing


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Six practices to nurture your lead relationship as they continue on their journey toward your brand.

According to Sirius Decisions, as many as 80% of leads dispositioned as “not ready to buy,”

eventually became qualified leads. We all understand the pressure for immediate results and how that pressure drives strategic decisions. But identifying and

making use of the buyer’s position in the overall lifecycle with the right approach can yield more fruitful results, compared

to pushing the hard sell at the wrong time. Larger business purchasing decisions lead to longer sales cycles, today taking anywhere from 18-24 months. Faced with a

potentially lengthy courtship, view your Lead Nurturing strategy as a series of “micro conversions.” Until you determine if

there is real interest or are able to build on the current level of interest, you shouldn’t assume your lead is ready to commit.

But with continued nurturing and patience, you can qualify them at a higher level, deliver real value, and begin your

relationship even before they make a purchase.

1. Take a simplified approach, it’s worth it.“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” — Albert Einstein. Or in other words, just keep

it simple. It’s not necessary to take on your entire database in one fell swoop. Hone in on a specific segment to begin

with, measure your progress and optimize accordingly. Your top scoring leads are the best places to start. The key is to

take incremental steps while keeping it as simple as possible to reduce complexity while learning the ropes.2. Use your audience understanding to create targeted communications.Getting “the right message to the right person at the right time” is what every marketer seeks. Technology has

provided access to a wealth of information and subsequently created a paradigm shift that has changed the marketing

perspective to a consumer-focused one rather than product focused. This shift has ushered in the Age of the Customer.

In its wake are the “one-to-many” communications containing generic information sent to broad audiences, discarded

in favor of “one-to-one” communications that are responsible for propelling leads closer toward a purchase. Using a

targeted approach, each person is guided through their personal stage in the lifecycle. Segmenting your database by

behavior or developing personas (snapshots of your segments), can enable you to deliver targeted communications to

drive success in your Lead Nurturing activities.

3. Personalization goes beyond a name and title.An effective Lead Nurture campaign is powered by data; but to truly realize the potential, you have to put that data

to use. This concept extends past addressing your leads by name or title; it involves using their digital footprint to

determine what content is useful and relevant to them. Research from Marketing Sherpa showed that 82% of

Prospects identified content targeted to their industry as more valuable, and 67% found content targeted to their

job function to be more valuable. By personalizing content, you make it more relevant, while moving your Prospects

through the nurturing phase. Embrace their unique qualities to get more out of your nurturing efforts, while increasing

the lifetime value of them as a customers.

ONBOARDINGMODERN MARKETER’S GUIDE TO B2B LIFECYCLE MARKETING

You’ve earned their business. Now keep it by starting the relationship off right.


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