80% of your leads are not ready to buy from you the first time. However, lead nurturing helps you connect with prospects at every stage of the buyer journey. It enables you to develop personal relationships with people at critical points in the buying process, leading them into a purchase.

Lead nurturing is an often-overlooked tactic that can be a game-changer for many businesses. It's an approach where you contact your leads more than once with information about their needs before finally asking for the sale. 

What makes lead Nurturing an essential part of your business?

Here are some of the benefits of lead nurturing: 

Higher conversions

Lead nurturing drives higher conversion rates because it allows you to develop relationships with potential clients. You can analyze how each prospect interacts with your marketing efforts and tailor future messaging based on these interactions.

Well nurtured leads become more likely to buy. Furthermore, you can avoid wasting time with unqualified leads and focus resources on promising ones. 

Build connections with prospects

In B2B sales, it's more about making your leads feel comfortable enough to take the next steps. You can easily achieve this by building trust and rapport over time and providing prospects with the answers they need at each point of engagement. Lead nurturing is an ideal approach to establish such a connection.

Establish yourself as an authority

Lead nurturing could make you an authority in your industry. 42% of companies increase brand awareness with lead nurturing. 

Providing content to your subscribers helps them stay informed about your business and increased brand awareness. Over time, you become their go-to for information, making them more likely to buy from you.

Cost-effective

Reports state that you can enjoy much higher conversion rates with low marketing costs with lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is an inexpensive marketing strategy that can be done in-house or outsourced at little cost but with great benefits over time.

5 Lead Nurturing Strategies To Adopt Today

However, to maximize the benefits of lead nurturing for your business, you must use the right strategies. Some proven strategies successful brands use include:

1. Strategically Using Targeted Content

Lead nurturing with targeted content can help you accomplish your goals much faster. Successful lead nurturing programs need to be tailored for your audience at their respective stage of the journey.

For instance:

Top of the funnel: Generate awareness

Targeted content helps you to reach just the right audience for your business. Top-of-funnel content includes blog articles, videos, and social media content, which must all answer questions or solve problems for your targeted audience. 

Target popular keywords that prospects look for to rank prominently in search results and generate traffic to your content.

Middle of the funnel: Convert leads

At this stage, lead nurturing content focuses on educating prospects about the benefits of your product or service. Your middle-of-funnel content includes case studies, white papers, or webinars that take your prospects into details about how you can help. This content helps them consider buying. 

Bottom of the funnel: Close the Deal

Your content should push your prospects to buy your product or service at later stages. 

Provide live demos and case studies of how your products work. Streamline their purchasing process with opt-in incentives such as discounts and free trials. Overall, guide them efficiently toward becoming a client.

2. Multiple Touches

Multi-channel lead nurturing allows you to leverage different channels of contact that reach specified target market members through their purchase cycle. 

You should tailor content in each channel to suit your audience and goals. It should be based on customer data, not on campaign parameters. 

Creating a mix of content types and channels is the perfect way to go. For instance, articles on your blog, videos for your social media, imagery in your emails, etc. Otherwise, the audience would alienate you for the same and repeated content.

3. Use of Marketing Automation

Developing relationships with new prospects requires time and effort. 

Marketing automation allows you to create and customize messages. These can be based on the subscriber's audience, campaign details, including the time to do so. It thus helps build relationships with each of the recipients more efficiently.

For example, top firms all use email marketing automation to reach large audiences at once or even create sequences.

4. High-Quality Content

Statistics show that most marketers now use content marketing. So, there is already plenty of content out there. Furthermore, your prospects are people, not robots. So, you must give them valuable information to keep them engaged. 

Learn what interests your leads and send them valuable content when they are ready for it. Each piece of content should create value for the audience.

5. Lead Scoring

Lead scoring helps you identify leads that are most likely to turn into sales. So, it is vital for a successful lead nurturing strategy. 

By scoring your leads, you can determine those worth pursuing and which ones aren't. That way, you can focus resources on engaging leads most likely to purchase. Many nurturing strategies fail because teams spread out too thin, engaging multiple leads at once.

Bonus: Common lead nurturing strategies to avoid

Messaging too often

While it might be tempting to bombard your leads with brand messages continuously, don't do it! Many people don't like being sold to or hearing from a brand every day. So, optimize your communications. Best practices suggest at least twice a week is fine.

Generic communications (with no segmentation or targeting)

Most fall into the same trap by sending generic communications to their prospects at various stages of the funnel. In so doing, most leads immediately become disinterested because your messages appear to be from "just another business." Also, they will ignore your brand if it constantly provides irrelevant content.

Pushing for a sale too soon

You can't rush through the sales process and get your leads and prospects to buy your products and services. Your first contact is not the time to push for a sale. Leads usually only convert once trust is established.

Conclusion

Lead nurturing is proven to convert more leads into sales. Personalized, relevant emails and text messages strengthen your relationship with potential customers and increase the customer base for your business.

If you're not already following these lead nurturing strategies mentioned, now is the time to start. However, also avoid common blunders like over communication and generic messaging.