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Lead nurturing tips for startups should not be confusing. Most startups discover lead nurturing at later stages of brand building. It can overwhelm new business owners, resulting in messy campaigns and vague strategies. Starting early with lead nurturing holds an advantage in securing long-term customers.
Various marketing surveys point out that the biggest challenge in marketing for small businesses is customer acquisition, followed by retaining customers and increasing email lists. Lead nurturing targets such as marketing problems and aims to establish a better buying journey.
Whether you have a tech, fintech or SaaS startup, all types of businesses must utilise lead nurturing to build a more stable sales pipeline.
In this blog, I will discuss some primary lead nurturing tips for startups commencing their lead nurturing journey. These tips are perfect for marketing beginners and new B2B brands that want to scale their business and boost growth.
Why do Startups need Lead Nurturing?
Generating sales-ready leads is not an easy task for startups. Being new to the market, gathering, converting, and retaining quality leads can take time. If a new business is thinking about relying on cold calling as a medium of acquiring clients, then according to research, it takes up to an average of 18 calls to reach one potential buyer. It results in a waste of time, money, and resources.
In contrast, lead nurturing strongly supports all goals a startup aims for: brand awareness, content marketing, customer acquisition, and retention. Startups can also automate their lead nurturing efforts and utilise the saved time on bigger projects.
But starting with the right foot forward is essential for any marketing effort. So here are the lead nurturing tips every startup would need to get started.
5 Lead Nurturing Tips For Startups
1. 80/20 Rule in Lead Nurturing
The Pareto principle or 80/20 rule is a brilliant economic work that has grown roots in other sectors, one of them being marketing. In business terms, this rule implies that 80% of sales come from 20% of the leads. And research presents evidence to it by stating that 80% of new leads never transcends into sales.
Startups need to apply the 80/20 principle in their business and focus on the 20% of leads that showcase high buying intent. Lead nurturing allows brands to understand consumer needs with the help of tactics like lead scoring and intent-based marketing.
Lead Scoring: It is a grading system that gives scores to various prospects based on their attributes and online interactions with a company. Leads with the highest scores are the ones with promising buying potential.
Intent-based marketing: By closely analysing prospects’ online activities, common questions about consumers that confuse startups get answered. Such questions include:
- What are the prospects’ pain points?
- What to put in personalised content?
2. Don’t Restrict Creativity
Lead nurturing is a medium to increase a brand’s reach through content. Relevancy and creativity play a crucial role in attracting the target audience. Generating relevant content depends on research, metrics, and segmentation. Amidst curating personalised content, marketers should also focus on creativity.
B2B startups’ content mainly focuses on sharing the brand’s services, work process, educational information, and special offers. Instead of sharing content in plain text, there are numerous other ways to innovatively deliver information to potential customers.
New businesses can use formats like newsletters, checklists, cheat sheets, specification sheets, whitepapers, etc., to creatively generate brand awareness. Startups must also develop video based-content like webinars, youtube videos, and short clips to have content for all types of buyers’ personas.
For example, check out these emails shared by different SaaS companies.
The first email is by Writersonic, an AI writing tool. Though the content of the email is interesting, presentation-wise, it looks banal and fails to user attention.
The subsequent emails are from WriterZen, an AI-writing tool, and Trello, a web-based list-making platform. The emails by both companies capture consumer attention through visuals and navigate them to the CTA buttons. Be it a webinar or a bunch of educational blog posts, WriterZen and Trello’s emails look creatively balanced between visuals and text.
3. Diversify Touchpoints
Lead nurturing focuses on keeping a brand at the top of the consumer’s mind when they make a decision to buy a service. As a new business, being present on a single marketing platform limits brand-customer interactions.
For example, if a startup is just nurturing leads via emails, then once a lead unsubscribes from the list, the contact gets lost. It becomes impossible to regain the lost lead. Whereas if the startup was present on social media, they could have re-captured the lost lead there.
A lead nurturing campaign must expand a brand’s reach to different marketing platforms. It helps increase the touchpoints that prospects have with the company. B2B startups must pick different channels according to the presence of the target audience and extend and increase their brand affinity.
4. Focus on Relevancy
Sharing information without context is never a good idea. When a lead enters the sales funnel, it does not know anything about the company or its services. Bombarding fresh prospects with sales offers and pitches degrades their interest in the brand.
Startups must focus on creating content that anchors towards consumer concerns. By creating various buyers’ personas, new businesses must make efforts to understand their target prospects’ needs. Salesforce discovered in research that 97% of marketers observed a rise in business outcomes with the help of personalisation.
The first step toward creating relevant content is research and lead segmentation.
Research: Involves extensive research about prospects, market competition, and potential content ideas. With the help of such information, startups create a more solid content-based approach toward lead nurturing.
Lead Segmentation: It is the process of creating different groups of prospects based on their attributes and online behaviour. It assists in delivering targeted campaigns to all types of leads.
5. Test and Adjust
As a lead progresses in their buying journey, their queries and pain points change. Lead nurturing programs present at different stages of the sales funnel must get tested and adjusted from time to time according to current market demands and prospects’ concerns.
Marketers must use different KPIs to understand the performance of a particular lead nurturing campaign. The campaigns that are not performing up to mark must go through A/B testing.
It is a process that captures real-time prospects’ interactions with a brand’s webpage and helps figure out the weak points of the page. Startups can perform A/B tests for all their marketing efforts, be it email nurturing sequences or landing pages.
Keeping the lead nurturing workflows up-to-date is essential in personalising marketing efforts.
Suggested Reads:
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Conclusion
Lead nurturing tips only work when startups complement them with the proper research and marketing efforts. Whether the goal is to generate brand awareness or leads, lead nurturing works for both. A lead nurturing campaign is incomplete without the above tips.
80/20 rule helps startups keep their business goals crystal clear while relevant and compelling content by focusing on creativity, research, and lead segmentation is essential.
Allowing multiple touchpoints in the buying journey makes it easier to establish a strong image in the consumer mindshare and recapture lost leads.
To create better funnel you can download The Startup Funnel Pack and a Landing Page Copywriting Template in which I’ve also included copywriting tools that can help you wireframe your landing pages.
If you want to know more about B2B lead nurturing, then don’t forget to check out these blogs:
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B2B SaaS Lead Generation Strategies That Actually Work
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