From Lead to Sale: How to Nurture Leads with B2B Content Marketing

As a marketer, nothing is more frustrating than watching leads languish in the middle of the funnel. These leads know who you are, but they haven’t raised their hand to become an opportunity or converted into a customer—yet. When our clients analyze their sales funnel, the lead stage is often where they struggle the most.

This challenge is common across industries because many companies are still using outdated lead scoring models that aren’t as accurate as they could be and that fail to capture all of the data needed to drive better (and faster) decisions around marketing spend and lead nurturing programs throughout the sales cycle and beyond it to customers’ lifetime value and profitability with the company’s products and services over time.

B2B sales can take months, if not years depending on the complexity of the sale. That’s why it’s vital to have an effective B2B content marketing strategy that will help nurture passive leads into active opportunities.

Long sales cycles also mean a lot of marketing content is needed to educate and persuade reluctant leads. The folks over at Demand Gen Report recently shared three tips for improving your B2B content marketing—all practices that we employ with our clients. These include:

• Aligning sales and marketing so the content your marketing team produces directly supports sales’ goals
• Diversifying the type of content and the way it’s distributed so as not to “alienate and limit audience and market size”
• Combining the power of video and email marketing to improve click-through rates for leads

Don’t let leads stay in limbo. Ultimately, to improve your B2B content marketing tactics, you need to understand your different buyer personas and create varied forms of content (video, blogs, case studies) that appeal to their interests and pain points at different stages of the buying process—and lead nurturing can help! With automated email workflows and lead scoring in place to nurture your prospects with relevant content at the right times during their buying journey; you can increase conversions and sales revenue for your business by generating more qualified sales-ready leads to nurture and close faster than ever before.

Not sure you’re doing everything you can to nurture your B2B leads? Get in touch for a customized assessment of your lead nurturing strategy.