With up to 9 out of 10 visitors to your website not ready to buy, lead nurturing is one of the most important factors in B2B marketing today. Few companies do it at all, and very, very few do it well.
Lead nurturing is the process of sharing valuable content (to them) over time, earning their trust, till they are ready to buy.
From Marketo, here are the benefits of lead nurturing:
- Fewer marketing-generated leads ignored by sales (from 80% to as low as 25%)
- 150% increase in contact-to-lead conversion rate
- 2-3x lift in conversion rates on raw leads to qualified opportunities
- 20% more sales opportunities
- 225% increase in volume of prospects that convert to sales opportunities
- 7% points higher win rates on marketing-generated leads
- 6% points lower rate of "no decisions"
- 2x increase in bid-win ration
- 47% higher average order values
Problem is - most companies simply send out email after email without any plan - so they rarely get the results promised by Marketo and others.
What you really need is a story that walks the prospective buyer from Problem to Solution - leveraging deep buyer personas. Only with deep insights, will you be able to craft the compelling messages you need to move the prospective buyer through the process.
Check out what Forrester wrote about lead nurturing. We could not agree more.