Introduction
It’s not news that marketers want to convert leads into revenue. In a slow economy, it’s not only more important than ever, but also more difficult.
While you are under budget constraints and under more pressure to produce, your customers and prospects are also limited by the same concerns.
That means you need to bring your “A game.”
So, let’s talk about your lead nurturing strategy — and data-driven targets. Don’t forget personalization, multiple channels, education, automation, and more.
The Importance of Lead Nurturing Strategy for an Economic Downturn
“Business as usual” becomes less effective as budgets shrink and goals stretch. Though
economic uncertainty raises barriers for many in marketing, it also opens doors for the disciplined and the visionary.
A recession is the right opportunity for marketing leaders to advance while their competitors bog down. Bain & Company found that fortunes flourish for 47% more companies during a recession than in stable times.
Meanwhile, 89% more companies falter. This is where your competitive edge must stay sharp. Maintaining consistent marketing effectiveness can help you capture market share as competitors pull back.
This is not the time to sit and wait for the economy to rebound.
Strategic lead nurturing fosters relationships, builds trust, converts leads into loyal customers, and grows your business, regardless of downturns or upturns.
Drive Strategies with Data
In hard times, precision matters. Lean into well-considered data analytics and segmentation to identify and reach your high-potential prospects. The rest of your
lead generation efforts will amount to nothing if they focus on irrelevant program attributes.
Target carefully by identifying the most promising personas and building out their profiles to identify their pain points, aspirations, and urgent needs. This will help you tailor messaging, content, and media more narrowly and allocate your resources more efficiently.
Segment your lead development by demographics, behavior, or industry – and any other aspect pertinent to your business – to finetune your outreach. Apply useful tools like buyer matrices and profiles to coordinate efforts between
marketing and sales teams.
The goal here is to focus your lead nurturing to improve engagement and increase the likelihood of conversion.
Personalize at Scale
It’s been said that nobody reads emails – they just read what interests them and sometimes it’s an email. So, of course, you need to personalize your content.
It’s the cornerstone of successful lead nurturing strategy during a recession. Your prospects respond to tailored messages that connect with their challenges and goals.
It’s more than inserting their name at the top of your emails, though you should do that too. It’s about using what you know of your prospects to define parameters for dynamic email content.
It’s about personalizing landing pages to help your prospects see specifically what they’re looking for and to know that you are already on top of their needs. Tailor content for specific verticals or personas, such as white papers for evaluators, how-to guides for IT managers, or demos for key buying committees.
With the advent of generative AI, content personalization is easier than ever at whatever scale your program requires. GenAI will help your teams rapidly adapt existing content into different forms and expertly build new content from your information stores.
It’s understood that you and your teams will want careful oversight of GenAI’s output to ensure it meets your quality standards.
Effective personalization isn’t just about names, it’s about delivering the right content at the right time to truly engage your audience.
Engage Across Channels
Though we frequently use email as an example of lead nurturing, let’s be clear that expanding beyond email is vital. Successful lead nurturing means that you must meet your prospects where they are already active. And that means using multiple channels.
Do your tightly defined prospects turn to social media to stay current with their peers? Then your lead nurturing must include social media. Are they attracted by industry luminaries giving webinars? Then – you guessed it – you should hold webinars hosted by luminaries.
And you need to include
multiple channels for each initiative. “One and done” won’t cut it anymore. That webinar needs support from social media, email, paid advertising, organic posts – even skywriting if that’s what gets you in front of the right people at the right times.
Of course, multichannel engagement can stretch your recession-affected resources. That is why it’s imperative that you have carefully focused your nurturing strategies and detailed your prospect personas.
Well-aimed lead nurturing is your opportunity to apply your resources for the greatest effect.
Align with Your Buyer’s Journey
The secret of all great lead nurturers is timing. It isn’t just what content your prospects need, but when they need it. A sales call is a waste of everyone’s time if you haven’t yet built trust and credibility with the prospect.
In fact, Gartner research finds that
75% of B2B buyers prefer to purchase without a sales representative, cementing the importance of low-touch interactions through lead nurturing.
Give your prospects enough time and the right educational information to prime them for that first sales call and then a long-term relationship.
Develop blog posts and videos that help create shared thinking and mutual language with your prospect for the challenges you’ll help them solve.
Blog posts on common pain points, perhaps. Or case studies that show how others in their industry or profession have developed ROI with your products. Interactive tools that help to define problems and guide decision-making. These can all be very useful.
Content that focuses on the value your prospects will receive from you is especially forceful in a recession. Education on their major pain points nurtures your leads naturally and positions your brand as a trusted advisor.
Only then can your sales team focus their efforts on the specifics and nuances that their interpersonal communication can build out.
Automation, Analytics and Agility
Lead nurturing requires a special blend of mass production and personal attention. Don’t attempt it alone. Choose from the many
marketing automation tools that help you streamline and scale your lead nurturing program. Take advantage of their insights to challenge your assumptions and optimize your initiatives.
But choose wisely. You want any new tool to integrate well with your existing systems and processes. A recession is not the time to broadly reconfigure your infrastructure.
Also look for robust analytics that go a little beyond what you think you need. Your lead nurturing may well expand in sophistication and warrant those additional insights.
Part of fine-tuning your lead nurturing is the ability to make real-time adjustments based on current, clear data.
At the very least, your team needs ready access to email open rates and click-through rates, conversion rates at each stage of the funnel, time to conversion, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and
customer lifetime value (CLV).
You’ll also want smooth implementation of A/B testing to help you quickly and accurately refine your campaign messaging and formats.
Consider these metrics to understand where to invest, pivot, or cut back to directly support your organization’s goals: Pipeline velocity, win rate, marketing-generated revenue (MGR), engagement-to-conversion ratio, and ROI.
Examine Lead Nurturing Strategies from Industry Leaders
The B2B industries are already an enormous test bed of lead nurturing best practices. Evaluate the program effectiveness of your peers, competitors, and other industries. Remember that good marketers copy while great marketers steal. Here are two views to start with:
- HubSpot employs a spectrum of lead generation tactics that includes high-quality content marketing through blogs, e-books, and guides, and by attracting attendees to webinars and virtual events. They offer free tools such as website graders and CRM software to help prospects capture lead information. For lead nurturing, HubSpot uses personalized email marketing and lead scoring to design and deliver targeted content. All told, their lead nurturing makes significant contributions to HubSpot’s leadership in the B2B software marketing and sales.
- Squarespace attracts leads with targeted advertising and content marketing, which include blog posts and video tutorials that highlight their platform’s benefits. They build community through forums and by partnerships with influencers, enhancing their reputation and encouraging word-of-mouth referrals. In the consideration stage, Squarespace nurtures leads by offering a free trial and by personalizing email campaigns. By helping potential customers experience their platform’s features firsthand and engaging them with exclusive offers, Squarespace nurtures their leads into paying customers and future brand advocates.
Over to You
A recession demands the very best from those who will succeed. Some around you may wish to restrict your resources for short-term gains on the balance sheet. Shift that conversation to one of focus not limitation.
Focus your efforts to capture and educate – nurture, really – your prospects with the most potential. That will bring you the best opportunity to help drive sales during the downturn and build enviable momentum for the brighter times ahead.