INBOUND ACCELERATOR

In the game of Battleship, the largest ship on the board is the aircraft carrier, and taking it out requires five direct hits. But some of the smaller ships can only sustain a couple of hits before they no longer stay afloat.

What is your greatest challenge as a B2B marketer? Let me guess—I bet I know the answer.

Lead generation?

That was actually a fairly sure bet, because 85 percent of B2B marketers cite lead generation as their primary challenge. If that was your answer as well, you are not alone.

If we asked your sales team today where their best leads come from, what would they say?

Lead nurturing is at the heart of inbound marketing — harnessing the efficiency of automation to generate connections with contacts and leads throughout the sales funnel. (Check out the statistics here: 10 Stats To Back Up Your Lead Nurturing Efforts.)

While the marketing blogs are overflowing with information about social media marketing, digital advertising, and content marketing, it can be harder to find resources that pin down the answers to questions specifically about lead nurturing — the automated series of emails used to deepen your business’s connection with the visitors who convert on your website.

With that in mind, I’ve put together the answers to five basic questions people ask about lead nurturing:

Who, what, when, why and how.

I know that lead nurturing is something a lot of marketers are trying to figure out and perfect. That’s why the #2 download from our Inbound Marketing Learning Library is our Lead Nurturing Workflow Template. (See the rest of the top 10 here.)

In marketing, as with almost any endeavor, there is theory and there is reality. Just ask any veteran of a given profession who has recently had a conversation with a freshly-graduated newcomer full of ideas about “how it works” that come from classes and books.

Those classes and books are great, and should be very close to what happens on the ground and in the trenches, but real-world results can also be much different. Which is why it pays to take time to review your actual results and see how they compare to what you would have expected based on best practices and industry averages.

Inbound marketing involves many different marketing tasks and elements, and sometimes it can seem overwhelming for someone new to the practice — or even veterans looking at starting a whole new program. Creating an inbound marketing program from scratch is a lot of work.

We know. We’ve done it. We’ve also developed tools along the way that we can use over and over, so we don’t feel like every new project requires recreating the wheel.

Some sources say that only 25 percent of new inbound marketing leads are actively looking to buy when they first enter your system; some say it is fewer than 1 in 10. That means that all your new leads really want when they first access an offer on your website is information.

And what you want is engagement and a connection, so that when they are ready to buy, you’re at the top of the list.

What if you could move a prospect from “lead” to “customer” more quickly, shortening the sales cycle and improving your marketing efficiency? You can, by nurturing leads with an automated series of offers and emails that are targeted and relevant.

Market2Lead found that nurtured leads generally have a 23 percent shorter sales cycle. Lead nurturing combined with closed loop marketing also provides vital information back to your team that pinpoints actions leads take when they are nearing a decision. This means you don’t send leads on to the sales team until they are qualified, improving your sales closing rate as well.