The Five Principles of Lead Nurturing All B2B Marketers Need to Know

The Five Principles of Lead Nurturing All B2B Marketers Need to Know

Let’s start by stating the obvious: There are far more than just five principles that are important for utilizing drip marketing techniques to nurture leads and increase your B2B sales. But we need to start somewhere, so here are five principles that everyone can take back to work and put to use.

1. Use conversational tone (not marketing or sales tone)
2. Use lead nurturing only in the right phase of the sales cycle
3. Use web analytics and tracking to adjust and mold your messages to your targets
4. Use lead scoring to target highest potential leads
5. Consistent repetition, consistent repetition, consistent repetition.

Use lead nurturing only in the right phase of the sales cycle

As we all know, prospects advance through a “sales funnel” of various stages or phases of buying behavior, from initial contact through to (hopefully) closed sales.  Marketing or sales funnel classifications may vary by company. A good example of the levels or phases in a sales funnel might be:

1. All possible contacts
2. All target contacts
3. Interested leads
4. Pre-qualified prospects
5. Qualified prospects
6. Closed sales

All sales processes and pipeline definitions account for the fact that buyers exhibit different behaviors and look for different things at each stage of their progression through the process. It’s critical to match your drip marketing content to both your and your prospects’ objectives for each phase.

The time to use drip marketing for nurturing your leads is after they have expressed some level of interest, but before they’re ready to take a meeting or seriously evaluate your specific product or proposal. In most online lead generation scenarios, this means you’ll be getting new, interested leads who are in the “search for solutions” phase, who probably signed up for a webcast or a white paper, or contacted you for more information through your web form. The proper marketing content for generating the interested lead would be a white paper, article, podcast, or webcast about the general topic related to what benefits your product delivers. Once your new, interested lead has self-identified in order to receive that content, it’s very likely (70% or more) that although they’ve demonstrated interest, they’re not at all in a timeframe of buying or even evaluating products yet. It is at this point that your lead nurturing and drip marketing should begin.
The intent of lead nurturing between the “interested” and the “pre-qualified” stage is to keep your company’s brand in front of your prospect repeatedly during the period of time when they are working through their own processes that lead to evaluating, justifying, and finally purchasing a product.

If you're interested in learning more about the five principles, visit http://www.wingreenmarketing.net/Pages/WPTopFiveRulesforUsingLeadNurturing1.aspx to get your own complimentary white paper, entitled Top Five Rules for Using Lead Nurturing To Increase Sales -- How to Setup a Drip Marketing System to Keep Prospects Engaged Until They are Ready to Buy From You

WinGreen article published by Marketing Executives Group

It's always nice to see our work recognized by others.  The Marketing Executives Group, organized by Mr. Barnard Crespi (see http://www.marketingexecutives.biz/about-us and  http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/36393), has published one of our byline articles on their website, and also promoted it through their Daily Briefing newsletter.

The article, Top Ten Reasons You Should Seriously Consider Outsourcing Your Content Marketing, is based on a white paper published by WinGreen Marketing Systems.  If you wanted to see the white paper (or any of its many companion white papers), just visit www.wingreenmarketing.com/resourcecenter.aspx

The article is at http://www.marketingexecutives.biz/top-ten-reasons-you-should-seriously-consider-outsourcing-your-content-marketing.  Here's the beginning of it:

Top Ten Reasons You Should Seriously Consider Outsourcing Your Content Marketing

Author:  Don Montgomery,  CMO,  WinGreen Marketing Systems - LinkedIn profile:  www.linkedin.com/in/donmontgomery/

In this article, we’ll explore what outsourced content marketing is and why today’s marketing and sales leaders should be taking a solid look at taking advantage of it in their organizations. Hint: For starters, you can triple your inbound leads while reducing cost-per-lead by half.

[...]

Why Content Marketing is an Essential Tool for Sales Prospecting

Why Content Marketing is an Essential Tool for Sales Prospecting

Successful marketing in today’s business-to-business environment requires a mix of tactics and methods. The modern marketing organization may have many functions within its scope, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

While all of these functions are important to a company’s success, the overall objective of marketing is usually something like “Create an environment into which products can be sold most effectively”. When the mix is managed well, all of the components do their parts to support effective, productive, efficient selling by the sales organization.

Content marketing both leverages and supports multiple functions within the marketing mix.

Content marketing is an essential part of the sales prospector’s toolkit for a number of reasons: 

1. Content marketing spans or touches all of the marketing functions 
2. The economics of content marketing with email and Internet tools are literally orders of magnitude more attractive than those of legacy or traditional direct marketing 
3. Content marketing allows marketers to expand reach both instantly and with almost no cost (e.g. expand marketing targets from Northeast United States to all United States) 
4. Content marketing allows marketers to create precisely defined target segments to which to market. 
5. Content marketing matches the new buyers’ paradigm, where marketing must be “non-interrupt”, buyers conduct most of their research and evaluation online without vendors’ involvement, and the buyer ultimately must “opt in” or agree to be sold to.

Learn more with the free white paper, Content Marketing: The Sales Prospector's Essential Toolkit.

Top Ten Reasons You Should Seriously Consider Outsourcing Your Content Marketing

Top Ten Reasons You Should Seriously Consider Outsourcing Your Content Marketing

1. You probably can’t do it yourself (even though you know what it is, what systems you need, and what the components are).
2. You don’t have the software platform.
3. Even if you acquire marketing automation software, you probably don’t know how to quickly deploy cross-platform integration and the required degree of automation.
4. You can’t generate enough content to sustain multiple campaigns per month, every month of every year.
5. Your marketing people know how to write, but don’t have domain or technology depth to create compelling content.
6. Your domain or technology experts know all about your products, your technologies, and how your customers use them, but aren’t capable writers.
7. It’s no one’s job to author, copyedit, and set up 30+ white papers, 50+ original articles, and 20+ webcasts per year. (Corollary: Do you really want your top technical people spending up to 20% of their time writing marketing content?)
8. The marketing staff gets pulled in many different directions throughout the year. “Fire drills” interrupt the schedules for content marketing campaigns.
9. You probably don’t have access to 10,000 to 1,000,000 email addresses from your target market in order to promote content directly, and you probably don’t know how to find them.
10. The modern techniques of online content marketing are still not taught in business schools, marketing curricula, or even professional training courses. There are very few individuals available in the job market with the required experience and know-how to build and run a complete “system of content marketing”. As a result, you have little resource to attack the previous nine items, and you’re faced with on-the-job training someone to build your system and methods for you.

Want to learn more about the features and benefits of outsourced content marketing? Get your complimentary copy of the white paper, Outsourced Content Marketing: Features and Benefits -- How Outsourcing Your Content Marketing Can Triple Your Sales Pipeline at 50% Lower Cost per Lead