Explaining Lead Nurturing and

Marketing Automation
Everything you need to know to get started with lead nurturing and
marketing automation

Contents Page
Introduction

Pg 3

What is lead nurturing?

Pg 5

What is marketing automation?

Pg 9

Lead nurturing top tips

Pg 13

Who is our chosen software provider

Pg 17

Page 2

Introduction

Introduction

Why did we create this guide?

The B2B marketing world has changed. The decline of interruptive outbound marketing
techniques, such as telemarketing and direct mail, as effective weapons in the B2B marketers
arsenal has led to a rise of content-driven, multi-channel, inbound marketing activities such as
eBooks, engaging blogs, social media campaigns, closely monitored onsite SEO best practice
and other, predominantly internet based techniques.
This change in the marketing world has in turn led to the simultaneous rise of new techniques
and tools often accompanied by buzzwords and acronyms that confuses the true meaning
and gives birth to unjustified hype!
At The B2B Marketing Lab we have picked out two of these new techniques Lead
Nurturing and Marketing Automation and downloaded, digested and discussed the reams of
material relating to them both. The result is that we have educated ourselves to understand
exactly what the terms mean, how they fit into the modern B2B marketers world and how
they present real value to B2B marketing campaigns.

In short, weve done all the hard work so you dont have to and created a Beginners Guide!
Page 4

What is lead nurturing?

What is lead nurturing?

Lets get started

Most online visitors are not ready to buy when they first arrive on your website. Even when
they download a case study or an eBook, it is highly likely that they are doing so as part of
their information-gathering research and will not welcome a direct sales call in response to
their providing their contact details.
Simply, theyre just not ready yet.
This is the greatest cause of misalignment between sales and marketing leads that are not
yet sufficiently qualified are passed from marketing to sales prematurely. Therefore, marketing
needs to qualify the leads further before handing them over to sales.
This is where lead nurturing plays its part. It is a systematic, ideally automated, process of
maintaining contact with leads to ensure that when they are beyond the information
gathering stage and ready to engage, your proposition is front of mind. Simultaneously, as the
lead has gone through the information gathering stage, the lead nurturing process extracts
increasingly more information on the individual prospect to aid the sales team when they
engage.

Page 6

What is lead nurturing?

What tools can I use?

Effective lead nurturing programmes include using a combination of engaging content, ideally
hosted on your company website, which is promoted across social media and using email
marketing to send offers of fresh, relevant, content on a personalised basis at predetermined
intervals.
As the prospect engages with more content, the relationship grows and a picture
builds up of their needs, interests and degree of sale readiness. On the flip-side, if
they do not engage further, then it is clear they are not ready to buy and would have been a
wasted effort had they been pursued by sales.
The core concept therefore is that by staying in touch with your
leads by offering content of value during the information-gathering
stage of making a purchase decision, you will be front of mind when
they are ready to purchase. This means that sales teams are therefore
only fed high-quality, well-qualified leads from the marketing
department.
Page 7

What is lead nurturing?

Give your leads a score

As a result of the need to define the degree of qualification so finitely, lead nurturing
programmes are often supported by lead scoring mechanisms. Here, each engagement by an
identified lead (e.g. a download of an eBook or case study, a website visit, an engagement with
your social media profile) is given a certain score. Only once a pre-defined threshold is
reached, the contact is then passed to the sales team as a qualified lead.
Does it work?
According to Forrester Research, well-executed lead nurturing
programmes generate 50% more sales-ready leads at
33% lower cost per lead.
Can you afford to miss out?

Page 8

So what is Marketing
Automation?

What is marketing automation?

Improve your customer acquisition

Marketing Automation typically refers to software platforms that automate, workflow-driven
marketing tasks, such as lead nurturing or trigger-based activities, and therefore help to
improve customer acquisition and prospect engagement.

The functions of marketing automation platforms often include an ability to create landing
pages. These are website pages that marketers use to drive their audience to, which include a
call-to-action, such as a downloadable piece of content like a case study or an eBook, in
exchange for email contact details. Marketing automation software provides marketers
with the tools to manage lead data; conduct SEO reviews of their websites;
manage and share content through social media platforms; email contacts on a
personalised or segmented basis; and set up targeted lead nurturing programmes.

Page 10

What is marketing automation?

Whats the advantage?

Principally, the advantage of a marketing automation platform is not just its breadth of
functionality, but that by having so many functions, you are able to collect data on every aspect
of your websites marketing performance. Giving you, as a marketer, a comprehensive, accurate
and real-time view of campaign activity and ROI.
In addition to extracting standard web analytics data such as pageviews, average time on site
and bounce rates marketing automation can also illustrate how individual activities and
marketing channels are performing. As a basic example, the conversion rates of landing pages
connected to offline activities, such as telemarketing or events, can be compared to those of
individual email campaigns or social media activities.
Finally, marketing automation software is a critical component of tracking the
progress of individual contacts moving through the sales cycle via lead nurturing and
determining when a contact is suitable for passing to a sales team.

Page 11

What is marketing automation?

Does it really work?

According to Aberdeen Group, the effective use of marketing automation software leads to:
107% better lead conversion rate
40% greater average deal size
20% higher team attainment of quota
17% better forecast accuracy

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Lead Nurturing Top Tips

Lead Nurturing Top Tips

Were here to help

Our team of marketing mad scientists at The B2B Marketing Lab has distilled all the
information we can get our hands on regarding lead nurturing, to provide you with some top
tips when creating your lead nurturing campaigns. These eight helpful hints are a combination
of the advice most commonly cited and also those that our marketing campaigns have shown
to be the most valuable:
1. Create a content grid identify the reasons prospects come to you and create
material that proves your knowledge about these issues - examples of thought leadership
in the guise of eBooks work well. Demonstrate your experience in solving these issues or
challenges by providing access to customer case studies.

2. Build attractive, high conversion rate landing pages there are many
considerations when building landing pages, ranging from the position of the form, the use
of calls-to-action to other materials and of course what text should be used. These are all
of course important, but the underlying rules are simple: be informative and clear in what
you are promising, who it would be relevant to, why they should convert and how to
do so.
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Lead Nurturing Top Tips

Were here to help

3.

Dont put too many fields in the early forms and dont put too few in the later
ones when you are trying to encourage a lead to fill in a form for the first time, limit
the information you ask for to the bare minimum. Once you have the prospect in a lead
nurturing workflow, you have gained sufficient trust to ask for more detail of their
background.

3.

Make sure the lead nurturing emails are personalised and are offering
relevant content sounds simple right? But the fastest way to drive someone to the
delete button, or worse, the unsubscribe button, is to undermine their initial trust in
your brand by sending them material that is unrelated to their original enquiry, and is not
even addressed to them individually.

4.

Dont spam them, but dont let them forget you the second fastest way to
frustrate a would-be lead is to send them lead nurturing emails too frequently. You want
to make sure you keep in contact with them and make sure they dont forget you when it
comes to deciding to go further with their sales decisions. But this doesnt require daily
communication equally, only contacting them once a year is unlikely to be enough!

Page 15

Lead Nurturing Top Tips

Were here to help

6.

Always be valuable if you are ever unsure of the worth of a landing page, piece of
downloadable content or an email, ask yourself whether its valuable. Are you helping
your contact understand the issue better, or are you trying to push them to a sale? Is
your lead ready to be sent a price list, or do they need to understand more about your
business, and service offering first?

7.

Test, improve, test, improve most marketing automation packages allow you to
perform A/B tests on various elements of your landing pages. Take full advantage of this
and determine for yourself what works and what doesnt. But never stop testing!

8.

Always integrate your marketing automation with your CRM make your sales
teams life easier by making sure that any leads generated from your lead nurturing
efforts instantly and automatically have transferred in their entirety across to the CRM,
whether its Salesforce.com, NetSuite or any other.

Page 16

Who is our chosen

software provider?

Marketing Automation one stand out winner

One stand out winner

When we started on our journey to Inbound Marketing enlightenment we wanted to make
sure had the right method of transport.
We spent time conducting detailed research into the leading market options available and in
the end there was one solution that stood head and shoulders above the rest.
We researched and assessed things like:
Ease of integration into existing website CMS and CRMs
What is the functionality like i.e. Did you need a Software Engineering degree to build a
workflow or could your average person use the tool?
What social capabilities did it include?
What was the company road map for development?
What was the support team like? i.e. Happy to help or disgruntled that you called.
Could they deliver accurate campaign analysis?
Most importantly
Could we deal with them on a regular, day-to-day basis.
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Marketing Automation one stand out winner

We chose
Established in 2006, HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software that helps more than 8,000
companies in 56 countries attract leads and convert them into customers and counting.
CEO Brian Halligan is credited with coining the term Inbound Marketing and in August 2014
announced that they are seeking a further $100 million in investment. With backing from the
likes of Scale Venture Partners, Google Ventures, Salesforce.com, Charles River Ventures, and
others, HubSpot is emerging as one of the most competitive marketing software providers out
there.
What impresses us about HubSpot is the commitment to continually develop and refine its
core solutions, but also to develop new service offerings. The pace of software development
and the rate at which it attracts, engages, converts and delights its own customers and
partners makes it our number one choice to provide Inbound Marketing support.
The B2B Marketing Labs scientists have experience in deploying and managing
HubSpot driven, sales lead-focused B2B Inbound Marketing campaigns why
not join the revolution?
Page 19

Still have questions?

Get in touch with one of the team
The B2B Marketing Lab
Unit 7
Europoint
5 - 11 Lavington Street
London
SE1 0NZ
E: info@b2bml.com
T: +44 (0)207 183 0288