Just like the immortal character "Beanie", played by Vince Vaughn in Old School, you have to be careful about making sure the right message goes to the right audience. Sometimes you need to use earmuffs. (And not just in Chicago in February.) Here are two b2b lead generation strategies you can use as a B2B or SaaS company when setting up marketing automation workflows.
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.
Set Up Your B2B Lead Generation Nurturing by Customer Persona.
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?
- I'm an independent personal trainer
- I own a personal training studio
- I'm a personal trainer working at a gym
- I'm a group exercise instructor
- I'm actually just working toward my certification
Not only will it be great to look at closing percentages, but now you know have a very valuable piece of information that will shape your b2b lead generation and lead nurture marketing. We knew each niche of our "personal trainer software" market had slightly different needs. So, when we wrote blog articles about the benefits of having a professional online profile where clients could book and pay, we used different language in the nurture marketing emails when we were speaking to a trainer just getting started vs. a studio owner. For the trainer just getting started, we wanted them to understand how setting up a professional-looking online presence would be a good first step in establishing themselves as a professional ready to help clients. Compare that to a studio owner, where the language would be more tailored to how a professional profile with easy book&buy functionality could be an easier process for clients than the current payment model. Studio owners' payment process involves continual swiping every time a 10-pack of visits was used up. Both blog postings / nurture marketing emails addressed essentially the same product feature. However, the content was framed slightly differently thanks to how we had inbound marketing prospects self-personify themselves.
Setting up Your Lead Nurture Workflows by Customer Pain Point.
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?"
- "Keeping clients engaged between sessions" (workout homework)
- "Getting clients to book & pay when they find me" (payments from profile)
- "Staying organized with all my client records in one place" (paperless record keeping / CRM)
- "Putting forth a professional appearance" (Professional, "LinkedIn-style profile)
(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.
