048. Lead Nurturing for B2B vs B2C

All right hello everyone this is emilio garcia welcome to another episode of demand gen studio with me as always is gavi how are you gavi i'm emilio you're fine how are you i'm doing good hopefully technology will not fail us this time and we can record as expected i'm hoping that everyone is having a great day today we are going to have a conversation about lead nurturing for b two b versus b two c i know that we have covered some aspects of lead nurturing as part of complete demand generation strategy and definitely something worth commenting today ideally what we want to discuss today is how lead nurturing is different for from what you typically do on b two c and i think that's relevant because there are some marketers that are listening to us that probably come from the b two c world and they are you know going through the first stage of their b two b journey and wonder what things will be different from what they typically do or used to do in their b two c or d two c world so i think that's relevant also as well for someone that is just starting and they are hired for the b two b company probably the information that you will find they will find in tools or academies or resources will not necessarily make the distinction and that's important because the flows and the way that you nurture leads on a b two b process are typically very different from what you have what you have on b two c so let us just start right away diving into the into the topics first probably the first idea to discuss will be understanding you know lead nurturing itself what is the purpose of it and so i i find that some of the activities that we describe for demand generation programs actually are like recycling things for example remarketing for me is recycling efforts that you have done on paid either through search or paid social or actually recycling any other effort that is bringing flow or traffic to your companies so for example if you are doing advertising and or search and someone doesn't convert right away you recycle that investment through remarketing to increase the chances that have happened so for me lead nurturing has a similar role because most of the efforts that you do are over a database of contacts that you have acquired over time and that not necessarily buy today or they are not ready to buy today and very importantly also is that they have consumed a piece a small piece of all the content all the education that is available on your website and they might not be aware of the rest of your offer all the things that you can do so in that case lead nurture help you to recycle if you want to say that way your audience with the purpose of continue that education with the purpose of making sure that they get the rest of the of what your company does how do you think about it how are you different from the competition and obviously eventually build up conversion in the form of an opportunity so that's clearly the purpose of lead nurturing build up that process however this is important to understand the unique aspects of lead generation for or the lead nurturing for b two b and in this case the difference is the sales process itself b two b and we have discussed this many many times but b two b has a different way that you target people because initially you have to think about companies or accounts rather than contacts only in the b two c component typically what you do is you're thinking just about people but in b two b that is not the case you have to think of accounts and therefore if you think of accounts you think about industries you think about company sizes you think about locations you think about technologies and grades of maturity of the technology and therefore when you are building your audiences to decide what is that you are going to nurture to you have to take into account that b two c is completely different because there you have a very short sales cycle typically it's more impulsive in nature and the decision maker is usually just one person two at most and so the way that you convey information about your company is completely different so that's probably the biggest the biggest idea here to bring up and the way that i will address that in the future will be what strategies can you build for lead generation for b two b so for example one quick one is that because you have the data about the companies if people opt in one great way to segment that audience will be through building up segments for industries for example right so if you have a group of people within your database that is focused on finance that will be a great way to segment the database and you create content that is relevant to your group of buyers that are in the finance industry or if you are focused on education or you are focused on health care you build up different segments and cater content that in theory you already have right that you have already built on your website that you have already created the events and the webinars for example to each of these industries and then you share that directly over email for example if you have that opt in so you can establish an abm strategy and thought leadership based on segments another criteria that you can use is company size right the problems that very small companies or very small businesses will have will be very different from the problems that enterprise companies will have and you need to have a good understanding of the difference so you can create content that is appropriate to each of those stages so that's another way that you can measure or feel the differences and put that out there on your content on your lead nurturing criteria for example in b two c this will be very different because you are basing all this on emotions on impulse more rather than not and therefore you are more focused on immediate pain points and you are more focused on the flow and the trends that are happening right now and therefore your communications are more about you know the things that make your product difference yes but also being aware of the holidays the promotions the discounts that you will have available definitely customer reviews are a big element and that translates into that effort of the influencers and people that can make good comments about your brand i think that's also really really helpful now obviously it doesn't matter if it's b two b or it's b two c you want to be able to measure success and you need some kpi's for that and the way that you do that is that in the case of lead nurturing you want to be able to track leading indicators and then lagging indicators right a combination of both so leading indicators for lead nurturing depending on the channel that you have will be around for example if you are using email open rates click through rates bounce rates all of those all of that criteria and most of the tools that you would use for doing email marketing for example if that's the way that you're going to nurture those leads we'll give you indications of that typically what you want is to have a growing database that grow fast enough that compensate for the churn of the of the database itself people will unsubscribe some of them will bounce off they will start using those emails especially in b two b they will move from the company and start different ventures so that churn will exist and you will need a way of keep adding those contacts on top of that database typically in the way of forms for downloadable content and obviously the course of regular business when people inquire for commercial reasons so you want to measure those leading indicators typically though email marketing or in this case lead nurturing based on email marketing will have if not a challenge and attribution from the b two b size at least it will not be clear the impact that it has because all those contacts typically already source or attribute to another point that brought them in on the database like typically organic or a paid channel so the influence of lead nurturing over the impact of the business will be more about affected or what is the word influence context or influence accounts rather than direct attribution one way that that i have seen that being measured over time is that it should impact sales velocity meaning that if you take the people that have been impacted by your lead nurturing efforts and compare that to the people or the accounts that haven't been impacted you should see a difference on the close rate on the opportunity creation rate and the sales cycle they should be shorter so those are some of the examples even if you continue to measure you should see impact also on customer retention and lifetime value so those are different ways that you can measure that impact but definitely obviously if you really want to compare you know in a way that impact business you can just stop doing it and you will see after a few weeks or months the difference that it makes so i think that's an important way to compare and measure and measure that impact now what tools can you use to implement your lead nurturing strategy right so definitely there are marketing automations here that can help you do the work it really depends on the if not the channel the data that you have from your users opt in for communications email is the most popular one but it's not the only one you also have just to put an example sms or you know messages over phone numbers in some places like in latin america whatsapp is a viable source or route for communications so depending on the system and the and the channel that you have access to those will be the tools obviously you have your mailchimp your hubspot your constant contact tools to set up that and you can you can start in different levels of automation if you want to say that way one typical way is that you can start at least with a newsletter something that you send every quarter or at least once a month and as you progress and make a more sophisticated approach you can break it down into segments on that newsletter or you can add behavioral components or demographic components so you can add some automation based on what people do that will be obviously the end game right that you can automate as much just a quick piece of advice don't start automating just because you want to automate something typically automation has to come from a big volume of manual activities that you want to reduce the time that humans dedicate to that right that people dedicate to that and that's when it makes sense to to make automation because if you don't have a good process and you automate it then you will be automating something that doesn't work well and you will just amplify the waste if you want to see it that way so really really important that we focus on understanding what is worth automating all right so i think this is going to be a short episode basically the summary of it or the conclusion would be that lead nurturing for b two b is different from b two c because the sales cycle is different because the accounts and the people that you're going to target is going to be different it takes more time so you need to convey a more robust set of data or information for your buyer it takes more time so you need to little by little offer through those lead nurturing communications explanations about what problems that you solve how do you solve them why are you different something that in b two c is not necessarily that detailed because the actions are more transactional are more impulse based in any of the two cases you can use marketing tools that allow you to initially send information manually typically over email but can be also over sms but over time if you discover there are typical behaviors or typical segments that need a specific set of information you can build up cadences over that so you can improve the chances of having more impact and that's when automation makes sense so i hope that you have found this topic helpful and i'll look forward for our next conversation everyone have a great great day thank you.