After learning that marketing automation can do miracles for B2B lead nurturing, you decided to use HubSpot to engage with your leads and prepare them for sales. Congratulations, this is the type of investment that can take your marketing efforts to the next level and increase ROI significantly.
However, software alone can’t deliver the right content within the best context without a little help. You need to learn how to make the most out of each interaction you have with your prospects to reach your bottom line.
These five tips will help you use Hubspot’s lead nurturing features to move prospects through your sales funnel.
1. Learn all you can about your leads
HubSpot defines lead nurturing as “the purposeful process of engaging a defined target group by providing relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey.”
If we break down this definition, there three major tasks you should focus your efforts on:
- Defining target groups
- Delivering relevant information
- Identifying in which stage of the buyer’s journey your leads are
To complete these tasks successfully, you need to understand who your leads are and why did they come to you in the first place. You can’t correctly segment your leads into target groups without first knowing this information. Going further, you can’t deliver relevant information unless you know what problems they have and what topics they’re interested in.
Last, but not least, B2B lead nurturing is about sending the right content, to the right person, at the right time. If you don’t accurately identify in which stage of the buyer’s journey your leads are, then it’s likely that you won’t send them the best content to help further guide them toward a purchasing decision.
Luckily, HubSpot’s CRM stores and tracks all contacts. When you capture leads, just make sure you ask the right questions in your forms and pop-ups to learn as much as you can about your contacts without pushing them to reveal too much personal information.
Think about it like this: Behind every white paper download, there’s a question that needs an answer. Make sure you know what that question is before you start to push emails towards your new lead.
2. Encourage marketing and sales to work together
It may seem surprising, but quality lead generation and nurturing can still have different meanings for your marketing and sales teams. Statistics confirm it. Only 56 percent of B2B organizations verify valid business leads before passing them to sales.
Without effective communication between marketing and sales, your business suffers. A few years back, marketers only job was to attract and nurture prospects to get them ready for the sales team to come into action with a tailored approach. Now, the two departments should work together right from the start to implement a personalized conversation with each prospect before discussing the sale.
Both teams should have the same goals and be able to track each other’s efforts and progress, to make collaboration possible (and you can do that with HubSpot!). Encourage them to keep an open dialogue on how buyer personas develop over time. In this case, the sales team can get valuable information from interacting with prospects. Your marketers, on the other hand, can use this data to update buyer personas and leads’ profiles to enrich your B2B lead nurturing strategy with more relevant content.
3. Contact leads in the first 5 minutes
Efficiency is a critical element in B2B lead nurturing. HubSpot revealed that prospects are 21 times more likely to become qualified and enter the sales process when contacted within five minutes versus 30 minutes from the first website conversion.
Not all B2B buyers will want to engage with the sales team right from the start. But they sure crave for information that puts them in the driver’s seat and helps them make educated buying decisions. Slow response time from your side reduces the odds to start a productive conversation with a new lead.
Attention spans shrink, so use HubSpot to open a conversation at the moment in which the lead came to you, not after 24 or 36 hours. Automation enables you to be there for your leads 24/7. Use this feature to build solid relationships with your prospects and boost sales.
4. Make your content “human”
One of the best things about HubSpot is that software easily captures data with forms and pop-ups, integrates it into your database, and uses it to send welcome emails and communicate regularly with your leads.
Automation allows you to open relevant conversations with your leads when they contact you. To benefit from this communication, you need to design email sequences that encourage dialogue.
When you design your buyer’s journey and plan the content for each stage, make sure you keep a “human” voice. Also, track how your contacts interact with your emails and don’t be afraid to change up your strategy based upon their actions or feedback, at a later time.
How many leads open your emails? From these, how many also click on the links you send them? These questions help you understand the direction in which the conversation is going and how leads move from one stage to another in the buyer’s journey.
Try to determine the actions that your leads might take after reading your content. This way, you’ll know when a lead is qualified for sales and not lose out on any business opportunity by calling too early or waiting for too long to make a move.
5. B2B lead nurturing requires patience
Automation makes it easier to send a lot of emails with minimum effort. However, if you send out too many emails, it can slow down engagement considerably.
Let’s face it! For how compelling messages could be, no one likes a full inbox.
Analyze your leads’ behavior to determine the right frequency for each segment of your email list. This way, you’ll send more targeted personalized emails at the right time. When you use analytics to create patterns for sending emails, not only will your messages be more relevant, but more prospects will open them.
Be ready to communicate with your leads through alternative channels if they don’t seem interested in reading your emails. Live chats or messenger can turn into powerful lead nurturing channels as well. Like with email, act based on the feedback you collect from your leads for increased personalization.
Final thoughts on B2B lead nurturing tips
HubSpot can enhance your B2B lead nurturing efforts, by allowing you to automate email marketing so that you can build a human, helpful, and holistic inbound strategy. Specifically, you should know your audience, be able to personalize your content to match their preferences and needs, and use automation to send timely targeted messages. To reach that, you need patience and collaboration between marketing and sales.
The more time you spend “listening” to your leads and learning from the data the software gathers, the higher your chances will be to turn leads into buyers. These tips will help you build relationships with your prospects using Hubspot.
With all these in place, you may still wonder if you’re doing it right! Test, measure, revamp your strategy, and repeat. Or, book your free HubSpot portal audit to see where you stand.
