Author: KEVIN STANLEY, Copywriter Leads are the holy grail of B2B. Even if you have them, you’re looking for more so you can continually increase sales. They’re the lifeline of all B2B industries and are the base to the conversions that nearly all companies need to survive and thrive. Now, many companies have lead developing
Author: KEVIN STANLEY, Copywriter
Leads are the holy grail of B2B. Even if you have them, you’re looking for more so you can continually increase sales. They’re the lifeline of all B2B industries and are the base to the conversions that nearly all companies need to survive and thrive.
Now, many companies have lead developing and sales strategies. The issue doesn’t lie there. The problem is in the ensuing stages where nurturing comes into play. This is when a sale is setup for success, and one of the primary ways to get conversions is by implementing lead nurturing into your content strategy.
A content strategy is a necessity for B2B companies, helping them to form consistent messaging and targeting audiences across all outlets to drive leads and sales. We’ve dived deep into the importance of a cohesive content strategy in previous posts, but here you’ll find three steps for implementing lead nurturing into your content through different platforms such as blogs, white papers, case studies, social media and other marketing outlets.
1. Build on Current Relationships
If building relationships seems like a no-brainer for content strategy, that’s because it is. You should already be looking to establish connections with audiences through different platforms in your content, but with lead nurturing, you’re trying to build on already existing relationships. Regardless, it’s still the first step in implementing lead nurturing into your content; primarily because at its core, nurturing is all about making a relationship you already have even better.
You must look to integrate specific lead nurturing strategies into your content plans to build up these connections. This includes different forms of research to find out just what it is your audience is looking to consume, including:
- Social media interaction
- Email communication
- Phone calls
- Surveys/questionnaires
When you move onto the following steps, you begin to take action and find out what your audience is looking for.
2. Find Questions and Answer Them
Developing content that your audience is looking for is always a must, but you’ll have to go much more in-depth to start creating content for lead nurturing. You must look to find questions that your leads are asking and develop content that is based off those issues.
Whether it’s an industry problem or specific company obstacle, developing for purpose will make your content substantially more effective and increase the chance of sales conversions. As an example, take this very post, where we’ve taken these steps to solve a specific problem for our audience:
- Built on current relationships and established connections
- Researched and found issues such as lead nurturing, that are common in the B2B sector
- Developed a content strategy that helps overcome these obstacles and provides solutions
You are currently reading a solution to the issue of lead nurturing and low conversions in B2B. We do this not only on our blog, but across our social media channels, website, RSS feed and in our marketing campaigns. Now, finding those questions takes time and developing the content that answers them involves our next step, which is to work together with other branches of your staff.
3. Work Together to Develop Effective Content
The main mistake content developers are making right now is not working with other parts of the company to create effective content. The customer support and sales team are likely the main points of contact between your company and the leads you are targeting, so why aren’t you using them to your advantage? They already know the concerns that are coming from these leads, why they’re interested in your services and more. All you have to do is get that information and use it.
In this stage you are finding out the common questions and issues that your leads have. Once you find out what those problems, obstacles, and questions are, you can develop effective content that’s more likely to be consumed.
Look at this step as the deepest part of audience targeting for your content strategy. It will reveal what your target leads need at the core for a sale to happen, give you the solutions and increase the possibility that they’ll do business with your company.
Check back with us for our next post in the B2B content strategy series, as we go over the measuring and results stages of the process. We’d love to work with you to help establish your content strategy for lead nurturing that will help you close sales and achieve more conversions.
Contact us today to learn how Dream Factory can help you with your content strategy!
*photo by mamanat
