Nurturing Leads with Strategic Targeting

We frequently discuss the importance of nurturing leads through the buying process. One method of doing so is retargeting. Retargeting often gets treated as a separate sales initiative to get more leads; however, we see it as part of the overall marketing strategy. We were pleased to see Luke Summerfield’s article, “A Powerful Cocktail: Mixing Retargeting with Content Marketing” because it makes a stronger point: that content marketing should be a part of retargeting, in particular for B2B marketing.
Summerfield suggests a set of tactics to drive leads back through the funnel:

1. Develop a hyper-targeted blog post geared for your potential customers at the top or middle of the funnel. (Use LinkedIn or Quora to vet topics even.)
2. Create two mini-content offers from the initial blog topic, with extra value. One will be served to those who performed an action via the blog; the other will be used in a retargeting campaign.
3. Soft-launch your blog through your network. Incorporate their responses to improve the blog and calls to actions.
4. Develop a highly targeted paid promotion mix of display and social ads to drive traffic. This gives you possible conversion on mini offer as well as customer data pixels for retargeting efforts.
5. Retargeting time! Create a list from those who read the blog but don’t act on the offer and then approach them with the mini offers, splitting the offers with the list so you can test each half with your message.

You will be able to drive more people to your content, including existing blogs that are performing well, using these tactics.
ClickZ also reported on the 2015 “B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends” survey, conducted by the North American Content Marketing Institute, claiming 86 percent of B2B marketers are now incorporating content marketing, but only 35 percent of those who do track their ROI. In addition to other social media to get the word out, B2B content marketers are using:

• LinkedIn – 94 percent
• Twitter – 88 percent
• Facebook – 84 percent
• YouTube – 48 percent
• SlideShare – 42 percent

Paid advertising on search engines is still a factor. Content marketing accounts for 28 percent of the budget for most B2B marketers too.
Just like retargeting is not always considered a part of the content marketing strategy, sometimes email marketing works separately too. Email marketing is the first message you send potential customers, however, so your content should be aligned with your overall messaging strategy. Zach Heller gives us some pointers in “How to Tell If Your Email Is Working” to keep email campaigns vibrant.

• Track open rates.
• Track click-through rates.
• Track email back to sales.

Now the first two are basics, and using unique open or click-through data will help determine the real amount of people you’re reaching. Add some finesse by testing subject lines (also a part of content strategy!) and the various places to click on an email…and you get a pretty tight strategy. But, how do you track sales to your email campaigns? You have to track actions, such as sign ups, referrals, and offers, which means you have to customize your emails beyond the standard service to get that extra information.
Image via Hans Splinter