Research shows that 71% of leaders executing lead nurturing programs indicate warmer, sales-ready leads as the top benefit, with 23% seeing a 30% increase in sales opportunities.
The takeaway? Not every lead is ready for a sales call. Just because someone downloads a whitepaper or attends a webinar doesn’t mean they should be handed off to sales immediately—no matter how eager they are for new leads. Identifying and targeting potential buyers is the easy first step but motivating them to engage with your content further and convert requires strategic nurturing. By building relationships at every stage of the buyer’s journey, you can accelerate pipeline movement and improve conversion rates.
Still skeptical? The data below will show why lead nurturing is essential for attracting, converting, and retaining customers.
5 Findings on Lead Generation in B2B Marketing
To effectively nurture leads, you first need to master the art of lead generation. Understanding key industry benchmarks gives you a competitive edge, allowing you to fine-tune your top-of-funnel strategies and measure your success against the broader market. By leveraging these insights, you can optimize your lead generation efforts so that they’re not just working—but outperforming your past campaigns.
- For 50% of marketers, lead generation is the top marketing priority, driving their strategy and growth efforts.Generating leads is crucial for B2B companies, guiding their marketing strategy and growth goals. But focusing too much on creating demand and not enough on capturing demand through nurturing efforts will result in accounts being stuck in the pipeline because you’re not motivating them to choose you to fix their problem—you’re only showing them that you fix problems. Buyers need to trust and acknowledge your brand, and they need the right information to be able to convince the rest of the buying group that your solution has what they need.
- Poor lead quality is the top complaint among sales teams handling inbound leads.Sifting through unqualified leads can significantly reduce sales team productivity, preventing them from focusing on high-value accounts and leads that are more likely to convert. Streamlining lead validation and promoting sales and marketing alignment ensures that sales efforts are focused on high-priority accounts, which in turn helps to speed up pipeline progression.
- According to 39.5% of marketers, access to more accurate data could significantly enhance the lead-generation process.Your first-party data reveals important insights about in-market accounts, but identifying high-potential early-stage accounts requires deeper datasets so you can get better targeting accuracy across your campaigns. Access to historical performance, technographic, and intent data is essential to pinpoint accounts with the greatest likelihood of converting, so that you can apply deeper insights to your lead gen strategy and prioritize accounts effectively.
- More than 90% of marketers agree that personalizing lead generation isn’t just a trend—it’s a proven driver of business growth. B2B buyers love personalization because it shows that you understand the buying committee members and their pain points. You should care about personalizing the experience for buying group members because it will help shorten the buying journey and accelerate the time to purchase when they get what they need to understand how you will benefit them and reach a decision. Since buying group members only spend about 5% of their time talking to sales, it’s up to marketing to boost personalization efforts for faster deals and more value. Data is crucial for unlocking personalized experiences, allowing you to tailor content based on funnel and buying stages. It helps identify key buyer personas within buying committees, influences decision-making, and provides insights into trending topics your target audience is researching. By aligning content with these insights, you can effectively engage and nurture leads at various stages.
- 95% of marketers believe they can identify the channel that drives the most leads.This finding is encouraging, as it shows that more marketers are identifying stronger measurement methods to understand lead generation campaign performance and campaign optimization opportunities. But this confidence doesn’t reflect the full complexity of the data landscape. B2B Marketers must agree on the metrics that matter to the business, and what metrics accurately reflect their lead generation efforts. Traditional metrics like lead volume miss the deeper engagement and intent signals crucial for ABM success. You need to understand the full scope of the buyer’s journey, ensuring that each touchpoint contributes to strategic insights. Analyzing datasets and metric performance together, from channels such as email, social media, content, and website interactions, allows you to illustrate your lead generation program’s overall performance so that you can proactively address any gaps or stuck areas across the buyer’s journey.
5 Findings on Lead Nurturing
Building strong, lasting relationships with your prospects requires ongoing engagement. While it’s essential to focus on sales-ready leads, nurturing leads who are still in the early stages is just as important. By creating nurturing strategies that deliver personalized content, solve problems, and offer valuable insights, you can significantly increase your conversion rates.
Wondering just how impactful lead nurturing can be for your bottom line? Let the statistics show you just how powerful your lead nurture strategy and efforts can be in driving revenue and growth.
- It bears repeating: 71% of survey respondents recognize that the number one benefit of lead nurture programs is generating warmer, sales-ready leads.As a marketer, your objective is to turn accounts and leads into genuine pipeline opportunities. Lead and account nurturing campaigns play a key role in guiding these prospects through the buying journey by providing valuable, targeted content that addresses their needs. This approach results in better-qualified leads and accounts that are more likely to convert quickly.
- Marketers who implement lead nurturing strategies experience an average 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to those who don’t nurture their leads. A strong lead nurture strategy builds meaningful relationships with buyers at every stage of the funnel. By maintaining engagement throughout the buyer’s journey, marketers can keep leads progressing, cultivate trust, and ultimately generate more B2B sales opportunities.
- 43% of marketers believe their lead nurturing strategies need improvement, while only 31% rate their strategies as average.It’s clear that there’s significant room for growth in this area. To enhance your nurturing efforts, following nurturing best practices is crucial. Start by segmenting your audience to deliver more personalized content, ensuring your messaging aligns with where leads are in their buyer journey. Automate where possible to ensure timely and consistent communication but also keep the human touch to foster genuine relationships.
- 49% of B2B marketers use intent data to identify and prioritize leads and accounts that they want to nurture. 46% also use content engagement data.To effectively nurture leads, it’s essential to first understand who they are. Engagement and intent data serve as the foundation for creating detailed buyer personas and accurately mapping the customer journey through customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation tools. By analyzing behaviors, interactions, and intent signals, you can pinpoint the content that resonates with different buyer personas at various stages of the buying cycle.
- Nearly half(49%) of successful B2B companies that transition leads from marketing to sales consistently run and document tests to evaluate the effectiveness of their lead nurturing campaign elements.Systematic testing and documentation play a crucial role in optimizing lead nurturing efforts. It’s not just about running campaigns—it’s about continuously analyzing what works and refining strategies based on data. Companies that fail to test and document their findings risk stagnation, while those that run and review tests are more likely to improve conversion rates and accelerate pipeline progression.
5 Findings on Multi-Channel Lead Nurturing
Successful lead nurturing means meeting buyers where they are at every stage of their journey. While email remains a prominent channel for many B2B marketers because it offers direct, personalized communication, scalability, and measurable engagement, relying on it alone isn’t enough. Buyers engage across multiple touchpoints—social media, display advertising, content syndication, and more—so expanding your nurturing strategy across channels is essential. A multi-channel approach ensures a seamless, relevant experience that keeps prospects engaged and moving toward a purchase.
- It takes an average of 6-8 touches to convert a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL).Buyers don’t rely on just one or two channels to gather information—they research across email, social media, paid ads, search engines, and industry content. To effectively move an MQL to an SQL, marketing teams need to engage prospects consistently across these touchpoints, ensuring that key messages are reinforced and aligned with buyers’ interests. Every interaction—whether it’s a targeted email, a LinkedIn ad, or a helpful blog post—contributes to the necessary touches that build trust and readiness before a lead is ready to engage with sales.
- Email and social media are the top two channels that B2B marketers use for nurturing.While email remains a core nurturing channel, relying on it alone isn’t enough to keep buyers engaged throughout their journey. Social media, particularly LinkedIn, plays a critical role in a multi-channel nurturing strategy. With its advanced targeting capabilities, LinkedIn allows marketers to reach accounts already in the buying process, ensuring that nurturing efforts are directed at the right prospects. It also offers multiple content formats—articles, sponsored posts, videos, and InMail—that help reinforce messaging in a more dynamic and engaging way. As the #1 social media platform for businesses, LinkedIn is a trusted space where 97% of B2B marketers elevate their brands and connect with buyers, making it essential for building credibility and guiding leads toward sales.
- Nearly half (49%) of U.S. advertisers leverage Connected TV (CTV) for lower-funnel objectives, while 64% use it to drive upper-funnel goals.Incorporating CTV into your multi-channel lead nurturing strategy offers several advantages. CTV allows marketers to engage potential buyers with highly targeted, immersive video content that reinforces messaging across the funnel. Unlike traditional digital ads, CTV delivers a “lean-back viewing experience” where audiences are more attentive, making it a powerful tool for building brand awareness and keeping your solutions top of mind. Additionally, CTV’s advanced targeting capabilities ensure your content reaches the right accounts, complementing other nurturing efforts like email, LinkedIn, and display advertising, to help deliver a seamless, multi-touch journey that moves leads closer to conversion.
- Marketers who align content to specific stages of the buyer’s journey see 73% higher average conversion rates compared to those who don’t.A multi-channel lead nurturing strategy ensures you’re delivering the right content at every stage of the buying journey. At the awareness stage, prospects may not know your brand yet, so educational content on platforms like LinkedIn, CTV, and paid media helps capture their interest. As they move through the consideration and decision-making stages, targeted email campaigns, case studies, and webinars can nurture them further. But nurturing doesn’t stop at conversion—retaining and expanding customer relationships is just as important. Engaging existing customers through personalized content, upsell opportunities, and ongoing support strengthens loyalty, increases lifetime value, and opens doors for expansion and cross-sell opportunities.
- Landing pages are a key lead nurturing tool, with 68% of B2B companies using them to drive engagement and boost conversions.With 78% of companies using email marketing, 73% leveraging event marketing, and 67% relying on content marketing to generate leads, one thing is clear: no single channel is enough. Successful lead generation and nurturing require a multi-channel approach. Buyers engage with brands in different ways, from emails and events to educational content, and meeting them across these touchpoints is essential for driving conversions. A well-rounded nurturing strategy ensures consistent engagement, guiding prospects seamlessly from awareness to purchase and beyond.
2 Other Findings to Note
- The vast majority (80%) of marketing professionals state in the 2024 State of Marketing Automation report from Ascend2 that automation software is a crucial factor in enhancing lead nurturing performance.
- More than half of marketers (51%) leverage AI to enhance their lead nurturing efforts, and 63% have seen higher conversion rates as a result.
These findings make one thing clear about the future of lead nurturing: automation and AI are no longer optional in lead nurturing—they’re essential. Automation streamlines engagement, while AI enhances targeting and decision-making. Generative AI takes it a step further by enabling real-time content creation and hyper-personalized messaging, ensuring that each prospect receives relevant, compelling touchpoints. By integrating these technologies, businesses can scale their lead nurturing efforts, maintain meaningful interactions across multiple channels, and drive higher conversion rates, ultimately maximizing ROI.
Complement Your Lead Nurturing Strategy with Madison Logic
Improving your marketing motions means taking a closer look at your current lead nurturing efforts and finding ways to optimize them for better results. The key is to streamline parts of the buying cycle, helping leads convert more quickly toward having meaningful conversations with your sales team.
To empower your leads and guide them seamlessly toward a demo or meeting, it’s essential to provide the right attention and personalization at every step of their journey.
Download the Convert to Conversations Blueprint: How to Turn Leads into Sales Meetings to learn about the five actionable steps for developing a strong, repeatable approach that drives leads toward sales meetings. In this blueprint, you’ll discover how to leverage data for better content matchmaking, identify key metrics to optimize your campaigns, and refine your lead nurturing strategy to ensure your leads get the attention they need to convert.
