Beginners Guide to Lead Generation

Explaining Lead Nurturing and

Marketing Automation

Everything you need to know to get started with lead nurturing and

marketing automation

Contents Page

Introduction Pg 3

What is lead nurturing? Pg 5

What is marketing automation? Pg 9

Lead nurturing top tips Pg 13

Who is our chosen software provider Pg 17

Introduction

The B2B marketing world has changed. The decline of interruptive outbound marketing

techniques, such as telemarketing and direct mail, as effective weapons in the B2B marketer’s

arsenal has led to a rise of content-driven, multi-channel, inbound marketing activities such as

eBooks, engaging blogs, social media campaigns, closely monitored onsite SEO best practice

and other, predominantly internet based techniques.

This change in the marketing world has in turn led to the simultaneous rise of new techniques

and tools – often accompanied by buzzwords and acronyms that confuses the true meaning

and gives birth to unjustified hype!

At The B2B Marketing Lab we have picked out two of these new techniques – Lead

Nurturing and Marketing Automation – and downloaded, digested and discussed the reams of

material relating to them both. The result is that we have educated ourselves to understand

exactly what the terms mean, how they fit into the modern B2B marketer’s world and how

they present real value to B2B marketing campaigns.

In short, we’ve done all the hard work so you don’t have to and created a Beginners Guide!

Why did we create this guide?

Introduction

What is lead nurturing?

Most online visitors are not ready to buy when they first arrive on your website. Even whenthey download a case study or an eBook, it is highly likely that they are doing so as part oftheir information-gathering research and will not welcome a direct sales call in response totheir providing their contact details.

Simply, they’re just not ready yet.

This is the greatest cause of misalignment between sales and marketing – leads that are notyet sufficiently qualified are passed from marketing to sales prematurely. Therefore, marketingneeds to qualify the leads further before handing them over to sales.

This is where lead nurturing plays its part. It is a systematic, ideally automated, process ofmaintaining contact with leads to ensure that when they are beyond the “informationgathering” stage and ready to engage, your proposition is front of mind. Simultaneously, as thelead has gone through the information gathering stage, the lead nurturing process extractsincreasingly more information on the individual prospect to aid the sales team when theyengage.


Let’s get started

Effective lead nurturing programmes include using a combination of engaging content, ideally

hosted on your company website, which is promoted across social media and using email

marketing to send offers of fresh, relevant, content on a personalised basis at predetermined

intervals.

As the prospect engages with more content, the ‘relationship’ grows and a picture

builds up of their needs, interests and degree of “sale readiness”. On the flip-side, if

they do not engage further, then it is clear they are not ready to buy and would have been a

wasted effort had they been pursued by sales.


What tools can I use?

The core concept therefore is that by staying in touch with your

leads by offering content of value during the “information-gathering”

stage of making a purchase decision, you will be front of mind when

they are ready to purchase. This means that sales teams are therefore

only fed high-quality, well-qualified leads from the marketing

department.

As a result of the need to define the degree of qualification so finitely, lead nurturing

programmes are often supported by lead scoring mechanisms. Here, each engagement by an

identified lead (e.g. a download of an eBook or case study, a website visit, an engagement with

your social media profile) is given a certain score. Only once a pre-defined threshold is

reached, the contact is then passed to the sales team as a qualified lead.

Does it work?

According to Forrester Research, well-executed lead nurturing

programmes generate 50% more sales-ready leads at

33% lower cost per lead.

Can you afford to miss out?


Give your leads a score

So what is Marketing

Automation?

Marketing Automation typically refers to software platforms that automate, workflow-drivenmarketing tasks, such as lead nurturing or trigger-based activities, and therefore help toimprove customer acquisition and prospect engagement.

The functions of marketing automation platforms often include an ability to create landingpages. These are website pages that marketers use to drive their audience to, which include acall-to-action, such as a downloadable piece of content like a case study or an eBook, inexchange for email contact details. Marketing automation software provides marketerswith the tools to manage lead data; conduct SEO reviews of their websites;manage and share content through social media platforms; email contacts on apersonalised or segmented basis; and set up targeted lead nurturing programmes.

What is marketing automation?

Improve your customer acquisition

Principally, the advantage of a marketing automation platform is not just its breadth of

functionality, but that by having so many functions, you are able to collect data on every aspect

of your website’s marketing performance. Giving you, as a marketer, a comprehensive, accurate

and real-time view of campaign activity and ROI.

In addition to extracting standard web analytics data – such as pageviews, average time on site

and bounce rates – marketing automation can also illustrate how individual activities and

marketing channels are performing. As a basic example, the conversion rates of landing pages

connected to offline activities, such as telemarketing or events, can be compared to those of

individual email campaigns or social media activities.

Finally, marketing automation software is a critical component of tracking the

progress of individual contacts moving through the sales cycle via lead nurturing and

determining when a contact is suitable for passing to a sales team.


What’s the advantage?

According to Aberdeen Group, the effective use of marketing automation software leads to:

• 107% better lead conversion rate

• 40% greater average deal size

• 20% higher team attainment of quota

• 17% better forecast accuracy


Does it really work?

Lead Nurturing Top Tips

Our team of marketing mad scientists at The B2B Marketing Lab has distilled all the

information we can get our hands on regarding lead nurturing, to provide you with some top

tips when creating your lead nurturing campaigns. These eight helpful hints are a combination

of the advice most commonly cited and also those that our marketing campaigns have shown

to be the most valuable:

1. Create a content grid – identify the reasons prospects come to you and create

material that proves your knowledge about these issues - examples of thought leadership

in the guise of eBooks work well. Demonstrate your experience in solving these issues or

challenges by providing access to customer case studies.

2. Build attractive, high conversion rate landing pages – there are many

considerations when building landing pages, ranging from the position of the form, the use

of calls-to-action to other materials and of course what text should be used. These are all

of course important, but the underlying rules are simple: be informative and clear in what

you are promising, who it would be relevant to, why they should convert and how to

do so.


We’re here to help

3. Don’t put too many fields in the early forms and don’t put too few in the later

ones – when you are trying to encourage a lead to fill in a form for the first time, limit

the information you ask for to the bare minimum. Once you have the prospect in a lead

nurturing workflow, you have gained sufficient trust to ask for more detail of their

background.

3. Make sure the lead nurturing emails are personalised and are offering

relevant content – sounds simple right? But the fastest way to drive someone to the

delete button, or worse, the unsubscribe button, is to undermine their initial trust in

your brand by sending them material that is unrelated to their original enquiry, and is not

even addressed to them individually.

4. Don’t spam them, but don’t let them forget you – the second fastest way to

frustrate a would-be lead is to send them lead nurturing emails too frequently. You want

to make sure you keep in contact with them and make sure they don’t forget you when it

comes to deciding to go further with their sales decisions. But this doesn’t require daily

communication – equally, only contacting them once a year is unlikely to be enough!



6. Always be valuable – if you are ever unsure of the worth of a landing page, piece of

downloadable content or an email, ask yourself whether it’s valuable. Are you helping

your contact understand the issue better, or are you trying to push them to a sale? Is

your lead ready to be sent a price list, or do they need to understand more about your

business, and service offering first?

7. Test, improve, test, improve – most marketing automation packages allow you to

perform A/B tests on various elements of your landing pages. Take full advantage of this

and determine for yourself what works and what doesn’t. But never stop testing!

8. Always integrate your marketing automation with your CRM – make your sales

team’s life easier by making sure that any leads generated from your lead nurturing

efforts instantly and automatically have transferred in their entirety across to the CRM,

whether it’s Salesforce.com, NetSuite or any other.



Who is our chosen

software provider?

When we started on our journey to Inbound Marketing enlightenment we wanted to make

sure had the right method of transport.

We spent time conducting detailed research into the leading market options available and in

the end there was one solution that stood head and shoulders above the rest.

We researched and assessed things like:

• Ease of integration into existing website CMS and CRM’s

• What is the functionality like – i.e. Did you need a Software Engineering degree to build a

workflow or could your average person use the tool?

• What social capabilities did it include?

• What was the company road map for development?

• What was the support team like? i.e. Happy to help or disgruntled that you called.

• Could they deliver accurate campaign analysis?

Most importantly

• Could we deal with them on a regular, day-to-day basis.

Marketing Automation – one stand out winner

One stand out winner

Established in 2006, HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software that helps more than 8,000

companies in 56 countries attract leads and convert them into customers… and counting.

CEO Brian Halligan is credited with coining the term “Inbound Marketing” and in August 2014

announced that they are seeking a further $100 million in investment. With backing from the

likes of Scale Venture Partners, Google Ventures, Salesforce.com, Charles River Ventures, and

others, HubSpot is emerging as one of the most competitive marketing software providers out

there.

What impresses us about HubSpot is the commitment to continually develop and refine its

core solutions, but also to develop new service offerings. The pace of software development

and the rate at which it attracts, engages, converts and delights it’s own customers and

partners makes it our number one choice to provide Inbound Marketing support.

The B2B Marketing Lab’s scientists have experience in deploying and managing

HubSpot driven, sales lead-focused B2B Inbound Marketing campaigns – why

not join the revolution?

Marketing Automation – one stand out winner

We chose

Still have questions?

Get in touch with one of the teamThe B2B Marketing Lab

Unit 7

Europoint

5 - 11 Lavington Street

London

SE1 0NZ

E: [email protected]

T: +44 (0)207 183 0288

http://www.twitter.com/b2bmarketinglab

http://www.twitter.com/b2bmarketinglab

http://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bmarketinglab

http://www.linkedin.com/company/b2bmarketinglab

Beginners Guide to Lead Generation

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