So you've got leads coming in. Great! But what should you do next? Odds are, your new opt-ins are not going to be ready to buy right away. But b2b lead generation requires nuanced lead nurturing. Marketing automation software is an essential tool to execute your lead nurturing strategy and bring the best prospects to the surface. Well, actually, to the bottom. Of your sales funnel, that is. I'm going to share two ways you can go about setting up your b2b lead generation and lead-nurture marketing. As a B2B marketing agency, we use marketing automation to help clients frame their content-marketing strategy.
Hopefully, when you set up your marketing automation software or forms, you created a form question that asks the equivalent of "How would you describe yourself?" This is your prospects' chance to tell you who they are. But, the question is framed in their words. If you've done your customer personas well, and I'd definitely recommend you do that much earlier than later, you should be able to come up with some fix-field responses that sum up who they are. Work to keep them under 40 characters, and write them in conversational form. For example, if you were selling a SaaS product for personal trainers, you might have the following answers in the form: How would you describe yourself?
When we would promote an eBook on Facebook as part of our b2b lead generation strategy and drive inbound leads into our marketing automation software, we also asked "what's your biggest challenge?" We carefully positioned the statements to tie back to one of 4-5 key product features that could alleviate the prospect's frustration. Here's how we set up the smart field question: "What's your biggest challenge?"
(Note: we didn't include the bit at the end of each answer. We included that here to show how we had each tied back to the product.)
(Solving your customers' biggest challenges is paramount to a great customer acquisition strategy.)
Having the answer up front helped us with tailoring the workflow emails to speak to their pain point, even specifically in the subject line. But it was also a big help to the sales team, who could reference the prospect's pain point in their initial follow-up conversation. We saw a 27% improvement in sales appointments set when the pain point was referenced in the salesperson's initial benefit statement. Try it with your team and let us know the results. When you talk about solutions to a particular client pain point in blog postings, be sure and include linkable text that allows a reader to learn more about your product feature set. Having inbound links coming from your blog to your product features page will help your SEO, and help the most interested prospects move smoothly from the awareness phase to the consideration phase.