It’s human nature to compare, analyze, and spend time thinking about our options before making a purchasing decision. On average, 74.6% of B2B businesses take 4 months to close a sale with a new lead, with almost half of them taking 7 months or more. To keep your audience engaged throughout the entire buying process, your lead nurturing efforts should be both continuous and personalized.

What is Lead Nurturing?

Let’s break it down. A lead is someone whose information you’ve acquired and who fits a profile as a prospective client for your company. Regardless of how you obtained this information, it’s your job to reach out with content to get in touch with them.

Nurturing in any context means providing for someone or something. When it comes to lead nurturing, providing a valuable experience is of the utmost importance. It’s impossible to provide value to your leads without understanding them on a personal level. So put these two together, and it’s the perfect foundation to present your audience with what they need and desire, whether they know it yet or not.

Benefits of Nurturing Leads

Supporting your audience builds a nurturing relationship, in turn, this generates and converts leads. When it comes to marketing, this can be done by providing a quality experience. Lead nurturing can have a huge effect on your inbound marketing strategy, customer loyalty, customer retention, and revenue.

Sales-Ready Leads

Lead nurturing allows you to turn prospective clients into higher-quality leads because they understand who you are and how your company works. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. Lead nurturing allows you to target future customers with content that shows them how your company can benefit them, and it pays off in the long run. Lead nurturing gives you the chance to increase the number and size of sales. Because of their increased knowledge and trust in your company, nurtured leads make purchases that are 47% bigger than non-nurtured leads.

In-Depth Data

You can learn more about your prospective clients through lead nurturing. When you provide engaging content, your audience will be more inclined to communicate with you and supply you with additional data. Gathering insightful information about the quality of your leads as they make their way through the buyer’s journey will help you elevate their experience in the future and determine how important each interaction is. Once you gather this goldmine of information, you can use it to segment your efforts going forward. If you have the chance to segment your efforts, you should take it. After all, segmented emails alone get 50% more clicks.

Boosted Engagement

Lead nurturing isn’t just about prospects, it’s a way to broaden all of your customers’- past, present, and future- awareness of what you offer. Lead nurturing creates connection, and reconnection points for your audience. Not only is lead nurturing a great way to share offers for the first time, but it’s also a great way to re-engage leads that may have fallen off. Lead nurturing helps maintain engagement after their initial first impression. Responding to your lead nurturing campaign engagement levels through your content increases the odds that your leads interact and share your content.

5 Ways to Expand your Inbound Strategy through Lead Nurturing

Providing a valuable experience for your audience is the backbone of successful lead nurturing efforts. These lead nurturing approaches can help you deliver a personalized experience that will in turn create a meaningful relationship with your clients at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

1. Tailored Experience

   Intriguing your target audience with purposeful content helps you to identify the most qualified leads. This is important because B2B customers are nearly 60% of the way through the buyer’s journey before they even contact you about a sale. Focus on entertaining and educating your audience members with - we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again - personalized content. Personalized content focuses on certain segments of your audience so that you can provide the most in-depth and well-rounded experience of your company for them.
   
   

2. Lead Scoring

   Lead scoring is used to rank clients based on their future alignment with your company. 68% of highly effective marketers pointed to lead scoring as a top revenue contributor. So, understanding the position of your potential clients makes it easier to determine which leads you should focus on. You can implement lead scoring on your marketing automation platforms by assigning numeric values based on your potential client’s interactions with you. A quality scoring outline looks at predetermined criteria like website interactions, browsing behaviors, conversion, and social media engagement. Understanding where a potential client lies in the buyer’s journey puts some power behind these scores.
   
   

3. Focus on Relevance

   Being pushy will overwhelm your audience, so don’t spam them with offers. Focus on developing content that helps them see for themselves what they need. Targeting users with content relevant to their position along the buyer’s journey raises conversion rates by 72%. Lead nurturing is an opportunity to show that you can make a difference for your audience. This is your chance to show them that you are an expert in your industry. Creating insightful content and communicating effectively will boost your reputation and reliability. The likelihood that your clients fall in love, at first sight, is slim, so provide a way for them to understand why they should do business with you.
   
   

4. Lead Follow-Up

   Over 70% of leads are lost from poor follow-up. Personalizing your emails (and the rest of your lead nurturing content) promotes customer retention. Following up with leads promptly keeps them interested and engaged. Successfully following up with your leads keeps your company top of mind. Don’t take this out of proportion. No one likes an overflowing inbox. So make sure your follow-up content is the real deal. We’re talking top-tier quality here.
   
   

5. Multiple Touchpoints

   Leveraging an Omnichannel strategy reaches and nurtures your audience where they are. Don’t solely rely on email campaigns to nurture your leads. Over 66% of buyers indicate that "consistent and relevant communication across channels” is a key influence in choosing a solution provider. Aligning your touchpoints provides a seamless experience for your audience. No matter who makes up your audience base, no one wants to waste their precious time.
   
   

Lead nurturing is one of the only ways to expand your sales funnel and keep buyers moving through it. Developing a good relationship with your audience is essential to your inbound strategy. These lead nurturing approaches will keep you connected with your audience until they are ready to commit to doing business with you.