Let’s say that you’ve run a successful content marketing campaign on ResearchGate or other channels, and have generated valuable top-of-funnel leads. What comes next? How can you convert these new leads into sales? 

Even if you have hit your campaign KPIs, keep in mind that content downloads show interest and consideration on behalf of prospective buyers, but don’t yet indicate readiness to purchase. 

So, now that you’ve captured prospective buyers’ interest, the next stage is to build an effective lead nurturing program that further qualifies leads for your sales team. This entails sending prospects the right content at the right time – whether in the form of suggested content, email marketing, or native ads – based on what stage they are at in the sales cycle and their buyer persona.

Let’s cover the why and the how with our best practices to convert prospects into customers.

Is a lead generation campaign necessary and if so, why?

In short – absolutely. As 96% of visitors who land on your site are not ready to buy yet, multiple marketing touches are needed from awareness to sales conversion during the buyer journey.

When it comes to life sciences, STEM-sector equipment has a long buying cycle. ResearchGate found that scientists start pre-purchase research up to a year earlier for lab items costing more than $10,000, and conduct 1-2 months of research for items under $1000. 

It’s clear that scientists start pre-purchase research early – and that’s where 57% of buying decisions are made. While it’s important to focus on the initial stage of the buyer journey, many brands tend to focus solely on the awareness and consideration stages.

But beyond that point, it gets trickier. In fact, lead generation remains a key challenge for 36% of B2B businesses. Perhaps given that it’s a very time-consuming and resource-demanding process and business leaders overlook the importance of lead nurturing.

So, in order to succeed, you must find effective ways to turn prospects into customers through a tailored lead generation campaign. It’s crucial to act quickly and consistently, while also playing the long game.

What are the benefits of a successful lead generation campaign? 

There are many types of lead nurturing campaigns including educational, engagement, re-engagement, product-driven, and promotional. These can support your business by:

1. Keeping the audience informed:  By sending regular personalized content such as newsletters, product updates, or sales outreach sequences, you can maintain contact with your prospects and drive engagement.
2. Doing the groundwork for your sales team: Cultivate an informed and engaged audience of new prospects by showing how you can provide value to build trust, so they will be primed for sales-oriented conversation.
3. Identifying prospects’ pain points: By analyzing your leads’ actions in a campaign you can better understand their pain points and optimize your messaging accordingly – gradually introducing your services and solutions.
4. Driving brand awareness: By staying front of mind, you generate better brand awareness and have higher chances of filling your pipeline.
5. Boosting campaign results: Studies show that the lead nurturing approach leads to higher click-through rates. It also helps to upsell and cross-sell your products.

Best practices for generating a successful lead program

Remember that 86% of B2B customers use an average of 10 channels in 2021, and regularly channel-hop between them – be it a website, an app, or social media. They are more discerning than ever and less brand-loyal.

So in your lead generation strategy, you must strive for an omnichannel approach to keep prospects engaged over time in a competitive landscape. Here are five tips to make the transition from prospects to conversions: 

1. Identify hot leads 

It’s tempting to pass all leads straight to sales, as 61% of marketers report doing. But instead, you should qualify which leads are worth nurturing and warm them up first with relevant, high-value content. 

Firms that follow up within an hour of receiving an inquiry are nearly seven times more likely to qualify a lead, so don’t wait too long. Use third-party automation solutions to send automatically triggered welcome emails and to help you identify interesting prospects. Setting up automatic lead forwarding from ResearchGate to your CRM can also help you to respond quickly, as you’ll be notified as soon as leads come through.

2. Warm leads with relevant educational content

Also, leverage automation to help you discover, segment, and target distinct buyer personas more efficiently within your database, so you can provide more valuable tailored content. 

In-platform data shows that 65% of scientists on ResearchGate find educational content the most useful for learning about improvements and trends in their area of research.

Common lead-warming strategies to share this information are blog posts, case studies, industry reports and webinars. Based on the user behavior and response to your content marketing campaigns, you can further segment audiences for best results. 

For example, send industry newsletters with thought leadership blogs to keep your subscribers up-to-date with industry news. Consider using a solution like ResearchGate Native Ads to promote  your content throughout the researcher’s journey, where it’s most contextually relevant – leading to higher conversion rates. ‍

3. Qualify prospects with product-sell content

The content you produce for your lead generation campaigns should be “outcome-based” and focus on the problems your customers are facing, rather than on selling products. 

Once the lead is warm, focus on sharing product-sell content such as demos, trials, product brochures, feature lists, reviews and special offers. This type of information is ideal lead-qualifying content that provides a higher purchase intent signal.  

Sharing this product-relevant content via a combination of native ads and targeted sponsored email using ResearchGate can help you reach your target audience, and nurture and convert those warm leads.

4. Provide support for sales teams

With B2B consumers beginning to expect the same on-demand shopping experience found in B2C shopping, salespeople are encountering new challenges, like having to adapt to a new, increasingly hybrid sales funnel. 

By providing better lead-nurturing, marketing can better support the sales team in closing sales. So, sales and marketing teams should collaborate to develop a tailored lead-nurturing strategy to drive conversion – for example, by finding the exact points in the buyer’s journey to hand over marketing prospects to sales. At this point, sales can either share additional relevant content provided by the marketing team to further incentivize prospects or move to the sales-conversation phase.

5. Retain customers with lifecycle marketing

To succeed in lead-nurturing, you need to adopt customer lifecycle marketing (CLM): a strategy for engaging individual customers based on where they are in the buyer journey. Also, you need a mindset shift towards “always-on” marketing, with an omnichannel strategy to back it up. For instance, via the synchronization of holistic marketing campaigns involving targeted contextual ads, dynamic website content, and direct sales outreach.

Invest in maintaining a strong presence on the channels your target audience frequents the most. Then, publish relevant content regularly with strong call-to-actions: be it industry blog posts, or email campaigns. Monitor cross-channel results with AI tools.

Connect with your prospects

Review your current strategy and use these tactics to improve your lead nurturing efforts. Businesses implementing lead nurturing strategies generate 50% more sales-ready leads. 

Using ResearchGate you can create tailored, multi-channel lead generation campaigns to convert prospects via Native Ads, Sponsored Emails, and Sponsored Content.

If you want to learn how ResearchGate can help you generate and convert quality leads using scientific content, reach out to our customer success team for a consultation. 

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