How can you avoid common lead nurturing mistakes?

📣 Using segments or dynamic lists is ideal for lead nurturing to avoid mistakes and enhance relevance. Static lists quickly become outdated, potentially leading to irrelevant content and missed opportunities. 💸 💡Pro Tip: If you can, leverage AI-driven lead scoring to dynamically segment leads based on real-time behaviours and engagement, ensuring your nurturing efforts are finely tuned to your prospects' interests and actions. 🚀 Useful?👍

The biggest mistake I see in marketing is talking to everyone when you should be talking to one person. When you market to everyone you market to no one. The more specific or dare I say "personalized" the better when it comes to your content and nurturing. According to Forbes, the average person see 5,000 ads per day. How many of them are talking to that specific person? Probably not a lot. Create multiple audience types or ideal customer profiles and break down personas based up on the different buyer roles are in the buying committee. Good rule of thumb is that the large the deal size the more personas/buying roles you need to market to. Each one has different needs and desires.

The proper way to nurture leads is this: 1. Map out the buyer journey. This is unique for your industry, demographic, etc. 2. Tailor your communication strategy for each stage of the buyer journey. 3. Build segments for each step to account for the buyer's possible reaction to ensure a tailored and smooth experience. 4. Tweak and refine as needed. 5. Be consistent. The buyer should feel like a VIP at every step in the nurture process.

Here are common mistakes to avoid when setting up a lead nurturing strategy. Please don't skip the research phase, because you need to understand your ideal customers before you can start nurturing them. Not optimizing your lead magnet: Make sure your offer is valuable and relevant to them. Failing to implement a series of lead nurturing email campaigns. Ensure you plan for what you will send to build the trust. Ignoring the follow-up after a lead has expressed interest in your product or service is a catastrophe. Send personalized emails or call them. Leads are unique. Segment them based on demographics, interests, and other factors so you can send them more targeted messages. They are likely to respond to personalized messages.

Besides knowing who you need to nurture, understand what pain point did they come with. Not all your leads are going to have the same troubles and will be at the same stage of the funnel (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU). Segment your leads wisely and nurture them accordingly. Not using automation at such places is a big mistake.

To avoid lead nurturing mistakes, personalize communication, align content with buyer's journey, maintain consistency in engagement, avoid overloading with information, and focus on quality over quantity. Regularly analyze data to refine strategies, respect opt-out requests promptly, and prioritize timely follow-ups. Building genuine relationships, understanding customer needs, and adapting strategies accordingly are key to effective lead nurturing.

Do use one form of communication or social media account? Heck no. Neither do you buyers. Understand where your buyer hangs out. Use cool tools like Sparktoro to do in depth audience research to understand where you buyer "hangs out". A CISO for bank hangs out in a different places than a Martech marketer. Know the channels your audiences hangs out. Having a hard time figuring that out? Ask your current customers. And in the world of so much distraction, you need to show up in more places, at more times. The coolest part of multiple channel approach is leveraging influencers, strategic partners, and customers to spread your message. It doesn't feel the same as an email, social media ad, or blog post.

There is a lot of gray area between marketing & sales in any B2B revenue organization. Not only should you align with sales on what a lead qualifies, but also when is the hand off. What it becomes an MQL? SQL? Get clear definitions and have both teams sign off on it. Phew. Now that we got that done, let's talk nurturing. Who does what? There is no perfect answer. This depends greatly on your average deal size and the sales cycle and the type of sales experience your product needs. Is it a product-led growth motion? Enterprise deals? If it's a small ACV / high velocity deal you probably have marketing do most of the nurturing through email, ads, etc. If you it's an enterprise deal, you probably should have sales get involved 1:1.

💡Pro Tips for testing and optimizing campaigns in lead nurturing: 🔶 A/B Test Content: Experiment with different content formats, messaging, and delivery times to identify what resonates best with your leads. 🆎 🔶 Data-Driven Decisions: Leverage analytics to refine your approach, focusing on what works for your specific audience. 📈 🔶 Feedback Loops: Create mechanisms for leads to provide feedback, ensuring your campaigns align with their evolving needs and preferences. 🗣💬 Useful?👍

Set it and forget it is the last thing you can do in marketing. You need to be consistently evolving and trying new things to stay fresh and ahead of the curve. Sometimes it's hard to test different things if you don't have the criterial mass to really do effective testing. That being said, you can still try different things like A/B testing your marketing emails, ask your customers what resonants with them more, ask webinar attendees for feedback, ask, ask, ask.

In my early days, I made the mistake of being too salesy in my content. Over time, I realized that providing genuine value, be it through insightful articles, actionable webinars, or even free tools, can build trust. It's a long game, but when prospects see you as a valuable resource, they're more likely to turn to you when they're ready to buy.

Add value should really be the first step in lead nurturing. Lead nurturing implies the lead isn't ready to convert. In the B2B world, you haven't provided enough reasons and build enough trust for them to sign-up for demo or free trial. Most folks think "add value" is "how do I convince them to buy" - This is the opposite of what I've found effective. Adding value from a B2B marketing & sales perspective is about delivering impact outside of your product or service. How can you help them solve a problem outside of your product or service? If you do this, you will create trust and reciprocity. Solve one problem and they will want you to solve the other 99. Think of marketing & sales as your organization's first product.

💡Handle personalisation creatively. Instead of relying solely on generic personalized fields, demonstrate a deep understanding of your prospects. Impress them by highlighting specific aspects of their interests or preferences. Avoid coming across as robotic and make them feel like valued individuals rather than just another entry in your CRM. ⚡ 📣 Example: Instead of a generic "Hi [First Name]," you could say, "Hi [First Name], I noticed your recently downloaded "X" content. We thought you might find our latest case study on that subject quite inspiring." This approach shows a keen understanding of the prospect's interests and needs, making the outreach more engaging and impressive. 🚀 Useful?👍

Digital natives are becoming increasingly less comfortable with being manhandled by pushy sales or lead nurturing tactics. Give them space and let them move at their speed.

With the advent of AI, the only way to differentiate is to be more human in your communication. AI doesn't have your experiences. AI doesn't have your perspective. Leverage the human tones and connect more.

Highly templates messages no longer work because nowadays, people can sense scripted messages from miles away. So just be natural and converse as though you are talking to your friend. Secondly, don’t be too concerned about typing the right words or grammar. After all you are human and no one will judge you so highly for making a mistake. So if you mess up words, don’t fret out. Your prospects understands.

DATA All these suggestions are great, but only if the underlying data is accurate and trustworthy. Sequences and personalization? Doesn't't work if the account and buyer signals are incorrect. Smart lists? Poor engagement if the list was built off assumptions and not buyer behavior. The key to lead nurturing is having a data integrity operation and underlying infrastructure to ingest, merge, action, and report on buyer data.

Honestly, the idea of "lead nurturing" goes wrong in so many ways. With marketing automation, we think we can reverse engineer very complex B2B buying decisions and experiences. You add on being able to track interactions less (Apple), moving to a cookie-less world (Google) and throw in dark social, it's almost impossible. Focus delivering as much impact as possible as quick as possible to leads. Give give give.

One of the most common mistakes in lead nurturing is a campaign that’s too short. An effective lead nurture campaign typically has two stages: 1) quickly determining if the person has an immediate need or otherwise merits sales follow-up; 2) staying in touch with that individual over time, educating the lead and maintaining brand awareness Companies often make the mistake of abandoning a lead after Stage 1 when the individual fails to engage. Whereas in almost all B2B categories, and assuming the lead meets MQL criteria, Stage 2 can and should run indefinitely. A prospect could be ready to buy a month or even a year now. Nurturing over the long term gives your company the best chance of being the first person they call.

To avoid common lead nurturing mistakes, ensure your approach is personalized, well-timed, and segmented for specific audiences. Find the right balance between automation and personalization, consistently follow up with leads, and prioritize lead quality over quantity. Provide valuable content, collect and act on feedback, set clear goals, and remain adaptable as market conditions change.

How about don't? When did you last bring B2B software because of an email marketing nurture? Never? yep, me neither. Deliver value with your always-on marketing programs. So when buyers enter a buying cycle, they have you on the shortlist.