Lead nurturing to maximize ROI – Stephen Balogun, EMEA marketing expert

Carlota Pico recently had the chance to chat with Stephen Balogun, former EMEA marketing manager at Cover Genius, who has over 20 years of experience in marketing and communications. Stephen spoke in depth about lead nurturing for B2B marketers and the importance of targeting your audience with the right message at the right time. He also made a compelling case for why you should focus on attracting quality leads instead of creating as many impressions as possible.

You can watch the full conversation in the video above or on YouTube, listen to the podcast on Apple and Spotify, and read our recap below.

Key takeaways

Demand generation and lead nurturing are ways to help the sales team build pipelines and generate a concrete ROI on marketing spending. While it’s good to have a high volume of impressions, if you’re not generating quality leads down the pipeline, it’s of no help to the sales team or the company.

Key skills for international marketers include the ability to communicate across different regions and cultures and to understand their nuances, as well as the ability to stay awake at odd times of the day to work with people in different time zones.

B2B marketing is all about giving your audience the right information at the right time. Each lead is always at a different stage of the customer journey, and tools like HubSpot, Salesforce and Eloqua can help you keep track and target them all.

Business decisions aren’t made by individuals; they’re made by teams. You have to influence every person who’s a part of the decision-making cycle—not just the highest-ranking executive involved.

Account-based marketing has caused marketing departments to shift away from an approach where they throw a wide net (content) into the ocean (the market) and hope to catch some fish (clients). Instead, they go to the part of the ocean where they know a certain kind of “fish” lives and use “bait” that’s made specifically for them.

As a B2B marketer, I’m more interested in conversions than reach or impressions.

Rapid-fire recs

An influencer or professional role model who inspires you?

One of my biggest influences when it comes to marketing is a man named Andrew Davis. He’s able to eloquently simplify the mysteries of digital marketing for companies. He’s a social media influencer now, but I’ve known him my whole life and he’s even my son’s godfather. We’ll often have long conversations about the power of social media.

On a more personal level, my biggest inspiration is my children. They motivate me to be the best I can be every single day.

A valuable resource, tool or group?

LinkedIn is a wonderful tool that I use almost every day. Google Alerts are also really helpful to stay up to date on any topic that you want to follow.

Your favorite app at the moment?

I use Twitter a lot, but I feel like we’ve lost the ability to have meaningful conversations on it and it’s become really toxic. I think I prefer Instagram, because there’s more happening on it at the moment and the content is so much more visually appealing.

Connect with Stephen and Carlota on LinkedIn.

This post was edited by Rishabh Agrawal, a freelance content creator based in Madrid.