The Ultimate Lead Nurturing Guide for 2024 (Strategy & Tips)

Have you heard that well-cared-for leads buy 47% more than those that aren’t taken care of?

Are you wondering how to make your strategy better?

Or maybe you’re frustrated because your old lead-nurturing plans don’t seem to be working in 2024, and you want to change them as soon as possible?

We’ve got the simple guide for a guaranteed successful lead-nurturing campaign, no matter where you are in your marketing plan. Algorithms are always changing.

According to experts, Google alone adjusts its methods 500 to 600 times every year. Also, people are always changing, and the things they liked last year might seem dull now.

So, it’s not unexpected that the top way to take care of your potential customers in 2024 is different from what worked best in 2023.

To keep up with your potential customers, you need to know what methods and trends are working. Fortunately, this guide makes it simple by breaking everything into easy steps that you can easily follow.

What you can look forward to:

• What is lead nurturing?
• The benefits of a good lead nurturing plan
• Why is content marketing the best way to nurture leads?
• There are 7 steps to a successful lead nurturing campaign.
• Our top 6 strategies for lead nurturing.

What is lead nurturing?

In simple terms:

Lead nurturing is about building connections with customers and showing them the value of your product to boost the chances of making a sale. Think of lead nurturing tactics as a trail of breadcrumbs guiding someone towards a purchase.

For a long time, people thought “lead nurturing” was just for non-sales leads. The idea was that some leads were ready for sales, the team would handle those, and the others would go to lead nurturing.

Nurtured leads perform better than non-nurtured prospects when it comes to sales opportunities, as reported by 83% of B2B marketers. This is the effect of lead nurturing on your sales and marketing efforts.

Each breadcrumb works to get the person interested, build trust and authority, and assure them that your product can solve their problem. This can involve using various ways like email, pop-up forms, and calls-to-action, all timed just right for the customer.

“Nurtured leads tend to make purchases that are 47% bigger than leads that haven’t been nurtured.”

Simply generating a lead through your marketing doesn’t mean the person is ready to make a purchase right away. Potential buyers usually have questions, and lead nurturing helps you provide answers and guide the lead through the process of making a decision in their buying journey.

The benefits of a good lead nurturing strategy

Before you start planning your lead nurturing campaign, think about the good things that could happen. If you do a good job with lead nurturing, you might expect to get these benefits:

• Leads that are 50% more ready to make a purchase and cost 33% less.
• A 47% increase in the average amount spent per order.
• Customers who buy again have a 60 to 70% chance of becoming customers again.

Moreover, it adds to your brand’s credibility in your industry. Regularly sharing high-quality content establishes you as a knowledgeable figure, and as a result, someone customers are more likely to trust to solve their problem.

When a consumer sees you as an expert in your industry, you are more likely to be at the forefront of their thoughts when it comes to comments and suggestions.

Also, considering a Google study found that consumers are doing more research before making purchases, using your marketing efforts to position yourself as a brand authority will prevent you from losing out to the competition.

Additionally, only 35% of B2B marketers are currently using a lead nurturing approach, giving you an immediate advantage.

Why Content Marketing Is The Ultimate Way To Nurture Leads

Reassuring potential customers that you can provide the solutions they need to achieve their goals is a crucial aspect of nurturing leads. Using content marketing is an excellent way to build trust and authority.

Developing content helps showcase your brand to potential buyers in a natural manner. Instead of aggressively promoting your products and services, it involves offering customers valuable and free information.

The trust you build through your expertise will make it easier to convert leads into customers later on. Additionally, content promotes lasting connections through meaningful communication, which can be more profitable in the long term compared to one-time sales from traditional advertisements.

Using different types of content is important at every step of a successful lead nurturing campaign. Keep reading to discover how to include more content marketing and improve your plan for guiding leads to success.

7 Steps To a Successful Lead Nurturing Campaign

You might be wondering how to begin now that we’ve talked about why having a lead nurturing plan should be a big part of your digital marketing efforts. Lead nurturing takes time and needs consistent effort.

But with these steps, our goal is to make it easy and doable for you to create a successful lead nurturing campaign.

1. Use Multiple Channels (Including Social Media And Email Marketing)

One vital part of helping potential customers grow is making sure the right information and prompts are in front of them when needed.

In the past, strategies for helping potential customers mainly relied on sending a series of emails. However, due to spam filters, evolving rules about data protection, and people generally disliking obvious sales emails, guiding your potential customers with just a few emails is getting harder.

This requires not only improving your email marketing (more on that later in the post!), but also broadening your approach to helping potential customers across various channels.

When you share specific digital marketing content through email, social media (from TikTok to LinkedIn), and even text messages, you increase your chances of grabbing your audience’s attention. This helps in establishing brand awareness and authority over time.

Your methods to get new leads through different ways go hand in hand with how you nurture those leads. B2B marketers use various ways to build good relationships with potential customers. About 46% use social media, and 31% find event marketing effective for nurturing leads.

2. Get The Help Of Marketing Automation

Nurturing leads can feel like a lot, but it’s essential. First off, you need to keep sending emails, social media posts, and website stuff that guides your leads toward becoming buyers.

Second, you need to organize these campaigns so they show up for the potential customer at just the right time. Luckily, using marketing automation is a great fit for lead nurturing.

It looks at everything about a buyer, like what they’re interested in, and collects this info for each lead. This helps figure out what solutions and content would work best for each unique lead.

To put it simply, marketing automation helps you understand your potential customers better than you could on your own. So, it’s a good idea to include it in your plan for building relationships with potential customers right from the beginning.

3. Follow Up With Your Leads Immediately

It might seem obvious, but not enough businesses pay attention to this: The sooner you reach out to your potential customers, the more interested they become.

Depending on what you do, this sales-inspired strategy can work for both individual customers and other businesses you want to connect with.

Don’t underestimate the power of a fast response through email or phone call if you’re looking for a simple way to grab the potential customers who are ready to buy now, before you focus on the others who might need more attention with a specific marketing campaign.

Quick follow-ups, rather than reaching out to people who haven’t shown interest, are more likely to connect with potential customers when they’re actively thinking about buying a product or service like yours.

Remember: When given more than five types of sales content, 42% of B2B customers feel overwhelmed. To prevent losing potential customers, make sure to carefully manage your lead engagement content.

4. Get Personal By Segmenting Your Email List

We earlier talked about building relationships, and think of it like making friends. How can a friendship grow if you don’t connect with people?

Splitting your email list is a key step in sending super personalized emails to your contacts, making them feel like you really get them. 62% of marketers found that sorting leads boosted how well people responded to their nurturing campaigns.

One common way to split your email list is by looking at what products they liked when they signed up for your emails. This helps you send them more info, deals, and actions about stuff they are interested in.

5. Use Lead Scoring

Ask B2B marketers about their main problem in taking care of leads, and 41% will tell you it’s not having enough information on which leads to focus on. Using lead scoring and qualification can help in this situation.

If you don’t know what lead scoring is, think of it as a way to figure out which potential customers are the most promising.

This helps you use your time and money more efficiently. Lead scoring assigns scores to all your potential customers based on things like their online actions, social media interactions, and completed actions.

Here are some things to think about when evaluating and developing B2B leads:

• Demographics like where they are, how old they are, and what job they do.
• Whether they’re open to changing and saying yes to buying from you.
• How much they interact with your content and sales teams.
• Signs they might be interested in reviews and sales discussions.
• How often they visit your website and use your content, like webinars.

By looking at these scores, you can decide which leads are ready for quick sales attention and which ones should be developed over a longer time.

6. Retargeting

Due to the frequent use of sponsored ads, using a retargeting strategy can often be a big part of a marketing team’s budget for attracting potential customers.

When someone leaves your website, they see an ad for your site on another website or on social media. This helps remind them of what they were interested in, hopefully encouraging them to return to your site and make a decision.

You can use:

• Social Media Retargeting – people spend about 151 minutes each day on social media, and that’s just the average. It can be useful to reconnect with your potential customers there, but it works best when you pick the right social platform.
• Display Retargeting – Display retargeting shows ads to your potential customers based on where they are in the buying process. You can encourage customers to make a purchase by closely looking at this path and each step they take.

7. Consider the Buyer’s Journey

When you look at the usual sales process, marketing leads are usually at the beginning, and sales leads come later on.

In digital marketing, people often keep marketing and sales separate, but it’s important to connect them in the customer’s journey.

This helps in keeping a potential customer interested and making sure they’re ready to make a purchase.

In the workflow, this might involve figuring out key moments in the customer’s journey when the potential customer is handed from the marketing to the sales teams. Then, both teams should set clear goals and expectations.

Our Top Lead Nurturing Tactics

Now that we’ve discussed the steps for starting a successful lead nurturing campaign, let’s add some helpful tips to help you really stand out in your nurturing efforts. Make your emails, ads, and social media more personal.

Personalization is a powerful strategy in inbound marketing. When you directly reach out to a potential customer and include details like their name, interests, and location, they feel more like an individual and less like a number.

Recent data actually shows that email campaigns with a customized subject line have a 50% higher open rate. You can apply this in your email communications, whether they’re newsletters, announcements, or follow-up emails.

You can make your messages special on social media, targeted ads, and clever content on your website. Doing this helps build trust with potential customers and sets you apart from others in the business.

B2B Leads Nurturing Process Strategy

This is a common challenge in B2B marketing, especially SaaS.

A few things to consider:

• What were the commonalities between those 11 that got passed to Sales? Any commonalities when it comes to verticals or size or demo / firmographics? Was the handoff to Sales based on them doing a BOF action (e.g. demo / trial) or raising their hand to signal an interest to buy?
• Are the content assets you’re creating + promoting truly creating value and addressing the unique pain points of the market you serve? They may have a good hook, but if the content itself isn’t addressing pains + solutions and providing educational value, you may not be creating enough demand to generate qualified prospects through your demand capture initiatives.
• Have you surveyed your existing customer base – or those 11 that made it Sales – to find out what resonated with them? What are the pains they’re experiencing? What drew their attention to your brand? If you can talk to your customers, what would they say your unique selling points are and why they went with you over your competition? Break down any silo’s that may exist between marketing / sales / customer success teams and create a feedback loop that identifies + validates unique selling points and competitive advantages. Then use those in your marketing activities and content. High likelihood you impact the pipeline positively.

Depending on your marketing mix you could also be driving unqualified prospects into your system.

Leverage Valuable Content

Customized messages help build trust with your potential clients. The more you tailor your content to fit the needs of specific clients, the better your chances of making sales.

You can achieve this by using information from marketing tools, a categorized email list, or basic buyer profiles. Craft content that directly addresses their concerns, important questions, wishes, and expectations.

Also, adjust your communication style and content length to match the specific demographics on your email list. This way, you’ll connect with your audience more effectively.

Provide Tactical Freebies

We don’t mean giving your product out for free! However, it is crucial to understand that helping potential customers can take time and patience. Offering them a little something for free can lead to a big reward.

A free gift like an eBook, video, pictures, advice, or research can all assist your customer in reaching their goal. This way, customers know you can help with their problems, and your products become even more valuable. Plus, sharing some of your unique experience for free builds trust in your expertise.

Know Where To Put Your Calls-To-Action

Calls-to-action in any content, like on your website, webinars, a social media post, or an email, work to grab your customer’s attention with something you provide that they might be looking for.

Make sure you don’t leave them out of your efforts to build a connection! These Calls-to-action (CTAs) should be in your blog articles, social media posts, videos, captions and stories, demonstrations, landing pages, emails, and anywhere else you engage with customers!

Use Surveys To Pre-Qualify Leads

Surveys are a great way to attract new customers at the start of their buying journey. They help you tailor your communication and build a connection. When creating surveys, ask questions that highlight the value of your offerings instead of directly promoting your product.

It’s essential to align your actions with the answers you receive. Understand how to handle leads based on their survey responses.

For example, if someone comes to your website naturally and mentions they’re there “for research,” it’s not the right moment to invite them to a product demonstration.

Add a Personal Touch

Based on a survey by Accenture, 75% of shoppers are inclined to buy from a company that understands what they’ve bought before, greets them by name, or suggests items based on their past purchases. Lead nurturing is all about building a personal connection with your potential customers.

Final Thoughts

Now that you know the importance of a good lead nurturing campaign. You’re ready to take on more leads.

You can keep nurturing older leads and current clients, even if they’re not actively looking to buy, by offering value through your lead nurturing program.

By staying in touch with your leads and reminding them of the great things they were interested in, like boosting brand awareness, increasing sales, building a good reputation, and so on, you achieve various goals.

Keep in mind that your potential customers prefer to do their own research before buying. Therefore, your nurturing efforts should aim to naturally change their opinions about your company and encourage them to make a purchase decision.