Whether a purchase happens or not is still decided by the customer. Anyone in B2B who does not accept that can only lose customers from here on.
Self-centred, sales-heavy messaging is outdated; today, focusing on customers and their needs is a must. So as head of marketing, there is no way around lead nurturing. We have summarised the most important facts and benchmarks on the topic (source: Techjury).
Lead nurturing trend #1: rely on marketing automation
One of the clearly identifiable trends for improving lead nurturing in 2022 is marketing automation.
In B2B, success depends to a large extent on staying close to customers and serving them along their customer journey with information that is tailored to them and genuinely relevant.
But how does a company that is growing fast and has to look after many customers manage that?
Rapid growth can be a problem when the resources in marketing and sales are simply no longer enough to give your B2B leads the personal experience they deserve. With marketing automation you can run lead nurturing even for a large number of customers and even free up resources for other tasks.
Marketing automation solves many problems and offers big advantages
Whether you work in B2C or B2B, speed and timing matter. We all want answers to our questions straight away and do not want to wait long for a quote.
HubSpot found in a study that leads are 21 times more likely to go through your sales process if you reply to an enquiry within 5 minutes rather than within the first half hour.
In reality, a reply usually takes longer. According to lead nurturing statistics from Harvard Business Review, the average response time is 42 hours.
To be among the fastest in your industry, marketing automation is the obvious choice. It lets you send a first reply to your leads in less than 5 minutes and buys you enough time for a more detailed answer.
Why marketing automation is indispensable in B2B
For the lead nurturing process, marketing automation pays off twice. According to Business2Community, it enables companies to increase qualified leads by 451 per cent, and these leads later make larger purchases.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is, broadly, a software-based method for automating marketing processes. It makes planning, running and evaluating campaigns easier.
Lead nurturing trend #2: content before selling
Developments show that B2B companies are increasingly turning to a high-quality content strategy. Content is decisive in B2B marketing. Even if it is hard to measure: if you always supply your customers with the content they need at that moment, you will generate more revenue from it.
A full 90 per cent of companies already rely on content in their marketing strategies.
Content marketing is not a trend; it is the foundation of modern B2B marketing. Your company first has to tell an engaging, compelling story before your products and services can be sold.
With content marketing you lay the foundation to supply your leads with relevant content along the entire customer journey. That way you can generate three times as many leads as with traditional measures. Tailoring content to the different stages of the customer journey achieves a 73 per cent higher conversion, as a study by Aberdeen showed.
How B2B lead nurturing helps win customers
In 2022, some clear winners emerge in lead nurturing when it comes to the best tools for winning customers. 47% of the marketers surveyed by Ascend2 say email is the most effective tool in lead nurturing, closely followed by content marketing and social media. This gives the following best-practice recommendation:
Bring leads into your universe with content marketing and social media, then nurture them by sending relevant content by email.
Leads and conversions: the facts in 2022
For 74% of marketers, generating high-quality leads is one of their most important concerns.
Lead nurturing is not a new approach. Still, very few B2B companies nurture their leads in a consistent process. Guidelines and clear processes are often missing.
Marketing Sherpa found in a study that 65% of marketers do without lead nurturing.
Sadly, this finding is not surprising. Lead nurturing is still considered one of the biggest time sinks in B2B marketing and is therefore often only tackled once there are already many leads lying idle in your database.
Besides missing resources and processes, 16% of marketers see timing B2B lead nurturing correctly as the biggest challenge.
For success in nurturing, it is decisive to find the right content for every customer and deliver it at the right time through the right channel.
Conclusion: what matters most in modern B2B lead nurturing
Content marketing is fundamental to the success of your lead nurturing. Only if you manage to serve B2B customers with relevant content at every step of the customer journey will you be preferred over your competition in the end. Marketing automation software helps you deliver the right content to your leads at the right time through the right channel.
But you will only be able to run successful automated lead nurturing once you have defined clear processes and have enough high-quality content.
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