Buyer Persona Creation and Importance

In the first part of this blog series, I have covered: “lead nurturing meaning and how to set up lead nurturing campaigns. In the second part, I covered the benefits of lead nurturing. This is the third and concluding part of the blog series. I will cover winning lead nurturing strategies that work.

Inbound marketing campaigns help businesses to generate leads regularly from multiple sources. But businesses cannot increase the number and value of orders only by focusing on generating more leads. In addition to generating leads regularly, your business must focus on nurturing every lead in the most effective way. You can easily increase the volume and size of orders by keeping in place elaborate lead nurturing strategies.

Lead nurturing can be defined as the process of communicating and engaging newly generated leads at every stage in the sales process or sales funnel.

According to Business2Community.com, “Aligning content with a prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey can boost conversion rates by 72%.”

You can implement a lead nurturing strategy to convert leads into customers by sending relevant and personalized content according to their position in the buyer’s journey.

The lead nurturing tools help you to segregate leads, focus on sales-ready leads, and send personalized messages without deploying additional resources. But you must remember that lead nurturing is an ongoing and long-term process. You cannot drive sales simply by investing in the right lead nurturing system. In addition to choosing the right lead nurturing solution, your business must implement effective lead nurturing strategies and lead nurturing best practices.

Lead Nurturing in Digital Marketing

Lead nurturing in digital marketing is the strategic process of building relationships with potential customers through personalized and automated communication. By leveraging email campaigns, retargeting ads, and content marketing, businesses can engage leads at every stage of the buyer’s journey. A well-structured lead nurturing strategy helps brands stay top-of-mind, guiding prospects from initial interest to conversion. Digital marketing tools like CRM systems, AI-driven chatbots, and marketing automation platforms make it easier to deliver timely, relevant messages based on user behavior. When executed effectively, lead nurturing not only increases conversions but also strengthens customer loyalty, ensuring long-term business growth in a competitive online landscape.

13 Lead Nurturing Strategies and Best Practices to Drive Sales Conversion

Bridge the Gap between Marketing and Sales

In most organizations, marketing professionals generate leads and salespeople follow up the leads. But you cannot nurture the leads effectively without aligning marketing and sales seamlessly. You can easily bridge the gap between marketing and sales by adopting an account based marketing (ABM) approach. Unlike conventional marketing approaches, ABM emphasizes collaboration between marketing and sales teams. The marketing and sales professionals can nurture the leads as a unified team by launching campaigns that are both personalized and targeted.

Track Every Customer Interaction

You cannot nurture leads properly without storing all business interactions with them in a centralized location. Your business can easily collect, aggregate, and organize real-time customer data collected from various sources using a customer relationship management system (CRM). The CRM will create a customer profile for each lead. You can access the customer profile to find key information like location, occupation, industry, most visited site pages, most downloaded content, and preferred communication channel.

It is very important that your CRM needs to support marketing lists and marketing automation activities. I would strongly recommend the use of Hubspot CRM for this purpose, it will enable seamless integration of other amazing products like Hubspot email and landing page builder and make your lead nurturing process super smooth.

Create Buyer Personas

As a semi-fictional representation of a consumer, a buyer persona helps you to understand the needs and expectations of consumers clearly. While creating the buyer persona, you must cover the key attributes of an ideal consumer – age, gender, location, needs, expectations, pain points, and budget. You can refer to the buyer personas to answer important questions like how to influence the buying decision of the lead. You can seduce the lead to place the order by sending him content to address specific problems or meet specific needs.

Do check out the Make My Persona tool from Hubspot and get started with your journey. You can also get the free downloadable version of the buyer persona worksheet.

Analyze Buyer’s Journey

A lead behaves differently in each stage of the sales funnel. You cannot convert a lead into a customer without sending personalized and targeted content according to her current position in the buyer’s journey. You must prepare an elaborate customer journey map as part of the lead nurturing strategy. Also, you can refer to the customer journey map to understand what product/service the lead is looking for, what problems the lead is facing, what affects the lead’s purchase decisions, and what prevents the lead from placing orders. The information will help you to communicate effectively by sending highly targeted content according to the current position in the buyer’s journey.

Assign Scores to Each Lead

As a key aspect of lead nurturing, lead scoring helps you to identify and segregate sales-ready leads by assigning scores from 0 to 10 to each lead. The lead scores will help you remove dormant leads from the database and focus only on highly qualified leads. Also, you can differentiate between the leads who are ready to place an order and the leads who are interested in your product or service. Hence, you can easily drive sales conversion by sending highly targeted content only to sales-ready leads. Likewise, you can influence the purchase decisions of interested leads through regular and timely communication.

Follow up on Every Lead in a Timely Way

The lead nurturing tools help you to communicate with a large number of leads. But you cannot influence a lead’s buying decision without sending the right message at the right time. You can easily convert a prospect into a customer by sending a timely email or making a timely phone call. Unlike cold calling, lead nurturing helps you to understand a lead’s needs and expectations precisely. Personal information will help you to create sales opportunities by choosing and sending the right content. However, you need to ensure that the content is delivered to the lead in a timely way.

Create and Send Highly Targeted Content

Highly targeted content is the key element of lead nurturing campaigns. You cannot drive sales conversion by sending the same content to every lead. You have to create targeted content for each buyer person based on important attributes like needs, interests, and objectives.

Also, you need to create content by keeping in mind the lead’s position in the sales funnel. For instance, while creating content for the top-of-the-funnel leads you must focus on answering their common questions. The information will make the lead shortlist your products or services while doing pre-purchase research. You can find a good example of this below:

Combine Multiple Channels of Communication

Many businesses these days nurture leads by sending automated emails. But you must remember that customers these days interact with a business through multiple channels of communication. You can easily influence a lead’s buying decision by communicating with her using her choice of communication channel. While implementing a lead nurturing strategy, you must emphasize delivering timely and personalized messages to the leads through commonly used communication channels like emails, text messages, in-app notifications, social networks, and PPC ads. You can further drive sales conversion by running re-targeting campaigns.

Personalize Every Message

According to SmartInsights.com, “72% of consumers say they now only engage with marketing messages that personalized and tailored to their interests.”

In addition to sending highly targeted content, your lead nurturing strategy must focus on sending personalized messages to each lead. You can easily impress and engage the leads by mentioning their name at the top of the message. At the same time, you also need to customize the email content according to important attributes of the buyer persona like interests and needs. The leads will become customers only after believing that your information will help them to solve specific problems.

Send Content in Multiple Formats

According to Hubspot.com, “32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their business, with blogging in second (27%).”

Many customers these days prefer watching or hearing information instead of reading information. You cannot engage leads without combining textual and visual content. You can easily influence the buying decisions of leads by conveying the targeted content in the form of video clips. The video clips will help you to interact with the leads by responding to the comments posted by them. Also, the comments make it easier for you to understand the needs and expectations of customers.

Focus on Multiple Touches

A buyer’s journey differs across businesses and industries. The same buyer’s journey also differs according to the nature of products or services. You cannot convert a lead into a customer without sending at least 10 touches through the buyer’s journey. Your lead nurturing strategy must help the lead progress through the buyer’s journey by providing the right information at the right time. Hence, you must communicate with the lead throughout the buyer’s journey by sharing a variety of content – blog posts, FAQs, podcasts, videos, whitepapers, and social media posts.

Monitor and Optimize Lead Nurturing Programs

The performance of a lead nurturing program varies based on a slew of factors. You cannot increase sales conversion simply by keeping in place a lead nurturing strategy. You must assess the performance of individual programs using important metrics like the number of messages sent, delivered, opened, and bounced. Also, you need to fine-tune the lead nurturing programs regularly to generate higher ROI.

Don’t Ignore Post-Sales Nurturing

You must not forget that lead nurturing is an ongoing process. In addition to nurturing the sales-ready leads, your business must continue nurturing the leads after receiving orders or closing sales deals. The post-sales nurturing will help you to understand customer needs and expectations as well as improve customer satisfaction. Also, post-sales customer communication will help you to discover opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling of products.

Your business can easily drive sales by complementing lead generation with lead nurturing. The lead nurturing tools help you nurture and manage leads efficiently without putting in extra time and effort. It’s also important to review your lead nurturing strategies at regular intervals. You need to keep an eye on lead nurturing best practices and refine your strategies accordingly.

Saurav, One of my good friends, who has recently set up his own startup, called me last Friday evening and asked me “Hey, I have started working on my 2024 marketing plan. We have a robust email marketing plan ready. Can you quickly tell me what are the other ways to generate B2B leads”. My answer to him was “It Depends. It all starts with your products, target customers, what are the problems they are facing, what kind of problems are solved by your products, and also, the price points of your products. Based on that you will need to create multiple touchpoints for your target customers to influence their purchase decisions and create your B2B lead generation strategies”.

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Like traditional inbound marketing, account based marketing also uses content to drive sales conversion. But account based marketing, unlike traditional inbound marketing, focuses on personalizing the buying experience of every high-ticket customer. In addition to synchronizing marketing and sales activities, the approach influences the purchase decisions of customers using highly personalized content and interactions.

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At present, account based marketing or key account marketing is one of the hottest trends in business-to-business (B2B) marketing.

According to a global survey conducted by LinkedIn,

“Over 56% of B2B marketers are using account based marketing in their current business operations. Likewise, over 80% of those surveyed plan to increase their budget account based marketing over the next year.”

Your business must switch from conventional B2B marketing to account based marketing in 2024 to increase the numbers and sizes of closed deals. As highlighted in our previous blog post on what is ABM and account based marketing best practices, this form of marketing differs from conventional marketing strategies in many aspects. While implementing account based marketing strategy, you have to target individual enterprises and specific decision-makers.

Also, you have to focus extensively on personalizing the buying experience of every high-ticket enterprise customer. Hence, you must identify the key target accounts, major customer pain points, and most effective communication channels. At the same time, your account based marketing strategies must boost the creation and distribution of contextual and targeted content.

You have to consider a wide variety of factors while making and implementing account based marketing strategy in 2024. You further need to measure the performance of account based marketing campaigns using the right metrics. That is why; you can make account based marketing strategy effective in producing the best results in 2023 only by adopting a slew of best practices.

15 Best Practices to Make Your Account Based Marketing Strategy Successful in 2024

1) Develop and Make Account-Specific Offers

Unlike conventional marketing techniques, account-based marketing (ABM) emphasizes personalization. Your organization cannot close multiple sales deals by offering the same offers to various accounts. You can close more sales deals only by developing account-specific offers.

While developing offers, you must answer one important question – why the account find your offer lucrative and valuable? Also, you must use the account-based offers as a powerful tool to make the account agree to meet your sales representative.

2) Assign Every Account to the Right Sales Representatives

While making account-based marketing strategies, you must remember that every marketer and salesperson has her own strengths and weaknesses. You can close sales deals quickly and successfully only by assigning an account to the most appropriate employees.

Your strategy must focus on identifying the skills and expertise required to nurture and engage a particular account. Also, you must find employees who possess the soft skills and social connections required to manage the specific account.

3) Connect with Target Accounts by Sending Direct Mails

Search engines and social networks directly impacted the popularity of direct mail as a form of advertisement. However, several studies suggest that direct mail is one of the most powerful marketing tools to facilitate one-to-one communication with prospects and leads.

While making account based marketing strategy, you must leverage direct mail to reach executives through one-to-one communication. The direct emails will make it easier for your sales team to connect with target accounts that do not spend time on social networks, register for newsletters/whitepapers, and respond to marketing emails.

4) Create One-to-One Campaigns

Unlike conventional marketing methods, ABM emphasizes nurturing leads individually. Your account based marketing strategy must focus on planning and launching one-to-one marketing campaigns by targeting a particular account. The individualized campaigns will help your salespeople build a relationship with the target account through direct emails.

The sales manager can connect with the target account by sending an email conveying key reasons or benefits of connecting. Also, the salesperson can nurture and sustain the relationship by sending follow-up emails or making follow-up calls. However, she must look for opportunities to connect with other executives involved in the decision-making process.

5) Design Account-Specific Landing Pages

You cannot close sales deals in 2023 without delivering personalized messaging to every account once she reaches the landing page on your website. Many B2B marketers these days boost sales conversion by creating an account-specific landing page.

The account-specific landing page will deliver a targeted and personalized message to the account according to the ad she has clicked on. You can easily impress the account by displaying her name on the landing page. Also, you can persuade the account to place an order by including personalized content, offers, forms, and images on the customized landing page.

6) Engage Accounts through Retargeting

Your account based marketing strategies must leverage retargeting to show prospective customers your ads on other sites after they leave your website or social networking page. Retargeting ads will further help your business to connect with decision-makers instead of gatekeepers.

Many B2B retargeting companies and ad networks these days display retargeting ads to accounts by identifying them based on their IP addresses. Also, they leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to display retargeting ads according to the account’s search intent based on their search engine queries.

7) Leverage Social Intelligence

Social intelligence helps you to build social relationships with others successfully by understanding how they feel in various social situations. Building relationships with accounts by delivering personalized and targeted content is one of the key characteristics of ABM. Social intelligence will help your ABM team to understand how a targeted account feels and behaves to changing triggered events. The understanding will make it easier for them to revise and finetune the content to be sent to the account based on fresh and actionable information.

8) Don’t Target Only Higher-Level Executives

While implementing account-based marketing strategies, many decision-makers target only vice presidents, directors, and similar higher-level executives. In large companies, purchase decisions are made only by C-suite executives. But many decision-makers these days involve lower-level executives in the buying cycle to get actionable insights and make informed decisions. That is why; your strategy can increase the number of closed sales deals only by targeting executives with various business titles.

9) Redefine Buyer Personas

While planning conventional marketing campaigns, marketers create buyer personas that represent ideal customers semi-fictionally. Your ABM strategy can leverage the existing buyer personas to make salespeople understand the people they will engage with during the sales process. However, the strategy must redefine the buyer personas based on real-time information and customer information collected using various techniques – contact us forms, social listening, and conventional interviews. Also, you must focus on creating ideal customer profiles individually based on the buyer personas.

10) Keep Customer Data Clean and Clear

You cannot create ideal customer profiles without integrating and analyzing information collected from various channels and sources. However, your account based marketing strategy must focus on identifying and segregating the correct and valuable information about target accounts. You can analyze the information collected from diverse sources efficiently and accurately only by keeping the data clean, clear, and organized. Also, you must use predictive analytics to compare new accounts with existing customers based on their characteristics and behaviors.

11) Adopt Multichannel Communication

While running ABM campaigns, B2B marketers spend a significant amount of time meeting prospective buyers in person. But you must remember that business owners and decision-makers these days use multiple communication channels.

For instance, most B2B buyers spend time regularly on specific social networking platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. Also, B2B marketers can interact with accounts through emails, text messages, and video conferencing tools. That is why; you can make the ABM strategy successful in 2024 only by adopting a multichannel approach.

12) Unify Sales and Marketing Teams

Many organizations still run ABM campaigns through salespeople. However, you cannot make account based marketing strategy succeed without involving both marketers and salespeople in the campaigns. The sales team must help marketers to identify and target the most relevant prospects. Likewise, marketers must leverage the inputs shared by salespeople to generate more relevant leads. Your account-based marketing strategies must facilitate the development of an ABM team by unifying marketing and sales teams.

13) Drive ABM Campaigns by B2B Influencers

Like ABM, influencer marketing is currently one of the hottest trends in B2B marketing. Many businesses these days use B2B influencers to guide entrepreneurs and decision-makers through the buying process. You can make ABM campaigns more impactful in 2024 by involving B2B influencers. While running ABM campaigns, marketers can influence prospects more effectively by collaborating with B2B influencers. The reputation and reach of the influencers will make it easier for marketers to add momentum to various multichannel ABM activities.

14) Automate ABM Activities

The new-generation technologies help you to automate common ABM activities. For instance, you can use advanced analytics to measure the performance and impact of individual account-based marketing strategies. Likewise, you can leverage artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to identify and target the most relevant accounts by understanding customer profiles. There is a slew of AI-powered software solutions that help you create personalized and targeted content for every account across communication channels.

15) Define and Combine the Right ABM Metrics

You can increase the number and value of closed sales deals only by assessing and improving the performance of various account based marketing activities. Your strategy must define the metrics and KPIs to be used to measure the performance of individual activities. While selecting metrics, you must divide the ABM activities into two broad categories – pre-sales and post-sales.

You should use pre-sales ABM activities using important metrics like target account reach, marketing-qualified accounts, sales-qualified accounts, average contract value, and deal velocity. On the other hand, you should use key metrics like cross-sells, upsells, referrals, and net promoter scores to measure the impact of post-sales ABM activities.

Like conventional marketing trends, account based marketing trends change from time to time. You can make the account based marketing strategy relevant in 2024 only by adopting both existing and emerging trends. Hence, your account based marketing strategy must remain flexible enough to adopt new trends early and proactively.