Nurturing Investors has changed dramatically. Before COVID-19 hit, the norm was finding investors through physical events, exhibitions, conferences, and emails. It’s no longer the same. Reaching investors digitally has now become an important task for the digital marketing team, which has been quite a success across the Industries due to pandemic.
Digital helps us to categorize the investors as per their intent and knowledge. With the help of marketing automation tools, marketers have been able to develop programs that nurture prospects until they become qualified leads.
The most effective marketers are embracing a multichannel approach and building always-on lead nurturing programs that personalize their communications to deliver the right message at the right time to the right person.
When it comes to LinkedIn Lead nurturing, B2B marketers have the capability to identify the business demographics of website visitors—the marketers can use data to discover, for instance, what industry visitors work in, what their job title is, and what their company size is. By combining this data with what content the prospect viewed on the website, the marketer can serve targeted display and social media advertising to prospects, nurturing them toward becoming a lead or a customer.
Account-based marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach where B2B marketing efforts are focused on highly targeted accounts that have been identified as a good fit for the business. ABM requires close alignment between marketing and sales to identify and market directly to specific individuals or organizations that fit the persona.
ABM uses a variety of ‘outbound’ tactics to stimulate interest from the persona targeted advertising like direct mail, video prospecting and social selling.
“About 84% of companies say ABM delivers a higher return on investment (ROI) than other types of marketing”, according to data from the Information Technology Services Marketing Association.
B2B marketers take note—you don’t want to be left behind!
Key factors to consider before capturing the right audience (Investor)
- Strategy
A solid lead nurturing program begins with a smart and comprehensive strategy. The strategy should determine what good leads look like. What are the business demographics—job titles, industry, geo-location, size of the company—for a good lead? What are the behaviors of prospects that indicate they’re a good lead—visiting certain pages, visiting the website frequently, sharing their email address? When defining a good lead, the marketing department should not engage in this process alone. The most effective way to define a good lead is to use the past as a prolog and analyze the characteristics of people who eventually bought your product and service in the past, say, 12 months.
- Personas
Virtually every B2B marketer has a sense of who the target audience is. They generally have an idea of the job title of the key investors based on past data. But knowing the job titles of the target audience is not enough to build a topflight lead nurturing program. Building an effective program requires personas, which means that B2B marketers should know more about their audience, to truly personalize a nurturing program.
The B2B marketer has to know the personality or the persona of each member of the target audience.
- Segmenting your audience
With lead nurturing, a marketer sends a specific message or sequence of messages to prospects based specifically on their demographics and the digital footprints they leave by their online behavior. In other words, a sophisticated lead nurturing program will segment its audience. Intelligent segmenting is key to making a lead nurturing program thrive.
- Create content for your segments at every stage
Creating a variety of entertaining, helpful and persuasive content that speaks to the needs of every part of the conversion. This content must also reflect at every stage of the funnel, from awareness to consideration to actual conversion.
Final thought
With LinkedIn Lead Accelerator, B2B marketers have the capability to identify the business demographics of website visitors. Marketers can use data to discover, for instance, what industry visitors work in, what their job title is, and what their company size is. By combining this data with the content that the prospect viewed on the website, the marketer can serve targeted display and social media advertising to prospects, nurturing them toward becoming a lead or a customer.
CASE STUDY
On behalf of PETRONAS, Malaysia Petroleum Management (MPM) manages Malaysia’s petroleum resources throughout the life cycles of upstream oil and gas assets. A multi-billion dollar industry that relies on relationship-building and partnering with high net worth Oil & Gas investors. They accomplish this feat via face-to-face engagements, primarily through the annual Malaysia Bid Round (MBR) event held in physical convention and exhibition centres.
The COVID-19 pandemic restricted MPM and investors in more ways than one – putting the physical MBR event on an indefinite hold. MPM took this as an opportunity to bring MBR 2021 online, marking its debut in the digital arena.
Our objectives were:
- To raise awareness among Oil & Gas investors on the newly-digital MBR 2021
- To increase engagement in the MBR microsite
We needed to ensure that the event stood out from the saturated, online crowd in the eyes of big-time players from a traditional industry like Oil & Gas. So we changed the rules of traditional marketing by focusing on niche B2B online marketing, and adopting a Micro Moments-based Account-based marketing tactic – a novel and digital strategy that casts a wider net to target potential investors online while effectively targeting the right audience for an improved engagement experience. This led to us focusing our strategy on three main channels: LinkedIn, Google and Bing.
Niche B2B Marketing:
We analyzed global search trends pertaining to upstream Oil & Gas, and realized that there were related searches coming from Bing. After further analysis, we discovered that Bing is the preferred search engine among B2B investors in North America and Europe, while the rest of the world are on Google.
While advertising on Bing is more expensive compared to Google, we predicted the return on investment would be higher. Taking what we know into account, we targeted various investor intent and ran our search ads by hijacking Oil & Gas-related search trends on both Bing and Google simultaneously, to maximize exposure and engagement to the MBR microsite.
Users from Bing spent more average time on the microsite even though the number of visits were less than Google, resulting in a higher rate of conversion. Thus MPM benefited from an increased number of high-quality users visiting the MBR microsite.
Micro Moments-based Account-based Marketing:
In traditional Marketing, prospects begin at the top of the buyer journey and gradually move down to the bottom. But with Account-based marketing (ABM), you flip the funnel on its head. It is a highly focused and personalized growth strategy that targets high-value accounts that are more likely to be interested in your product.
Once we zeroed in on our potential investors with ABM, we studied their micro moments and online behaviors. Our Oil & Gas audience were engaging in posts involving digital transformation, investment plans and climate change online – we used this information to hyper personalize our content on LinkedIn, the social platform these relevant accounts were engaging in most frequently, which led them to the MBR microsite.
Results:
From a top of the funnel perspective, we saw above-average increases in Users, Reach, Impressions but we also saw a record number of participants registering for the webinars, which impacted the bottom of the funnel.
Some of the content on Linkedin were highlighted within the Top 10 Most Viewed and Shared on the platform, whereas one of our content pieces even ranked Top 1% engaging posts globally!
We saw average website users slowly growing week over week while we continued to run LinkedIn, Google search ads and Bing search ads parallely to keep the traffic flowing.
Here is the performance breakdown throughout the campaign:
- 170.42% User increase month over month
- 242.25% Reach increase month over month
- 469.20% Impression increase month over month
This resulted in the digital transformation of Oil & Gas Marketing.
References
Abeedarshan Shanmugaraja
Associate Lead – Account Management
Enfection
651 Kotte Rd, Kotte,
Sri Lanka
