The failsafe approach to building strategic nurture paths

With intense pressure on marketing teams, capturing and retaining user attention is more competitive than ever. Many B2B marketers focus on generating leads for sales, but the real goal is to create strategic nurture paths that guide potential customers through discovery, trust-building and self-driven conversion.

While there are many ways to build a powerful nurturing campaign, everything we’ll unpack here is simply based on what makes the most sense when you put yourself in the end user’s shoes.

Understanding the user’s journey

The foundation of any successful nurture path is a deep understanding of where the user is in their journey. This involves analyzing the type of page they are visiting and how they arrived there, whether through organic search, LinkedIn, PPC ads with software intent or other channels you may be using within your GTM motion.

Taking time to think through how the user actually found the page or asset they landed on lets you tailor your messaging and content to meet users’ specific needs at each stage.

By identifying the user’s personal intent (no, not always buying intent) and behavior, you can deliver more personalized and relevant experiences that foster intuitive engagement and slowly establish trust between brand and person.

Different types of pages — landing pages, blog posts, product pages — serve different purposes and attract users with varying intents. For example:

• A user landing on a blog post through organic search may be seeking information. 
• Someone arriving via a PPC ad may have a more immediate interest in your product or service if you’re running those types of ads. 

Regardless, you should always consider what the end user hopes to gain by reading what you and your team have written.

Where do you begin?

To help set yourself and your team up for successful organic nurturing, I recommend starting with the top 10–25 articles that have garnered the highest traffic from specific sources, such as organic search, over the past 90 days. This period balances recency and relevance, hopefully offering a confidence answer if you’re ever asked “why” you’re deciding to start where you did. 

Given how cumbersome these types of projects can be, especially if you’re starting off fresh, it’s good to feel confident in knowing that your efforts won’t be wasted. 

• Step 1: Analyze the content on each page, categorize it by theme and intent and drop it into an organized spreadsheet. This way, you can easily associate one or more pieces of related content based on these two variables.
• Step 2: You’ll want to dive into all the content you have and organize it with a tagging system. If you are simply crafting content and not tagging it in an organized way, either in your CMS or in a simple spreadsheet, drop everything and go do that to save yourself a future headache. These tags should be related to the theme of the content, any specific topics it hits on, the intent level of the piece (education, attraction, product, etc.) and, lastly, tied to some element of your product or product theme. 
• Step 3: Start by going through your top performers, as identified in Step 1, and associating all related content based on common themes and tags. If you nail the above two steps, you can save yourself a ton of time. 

Once you’re done with these steps, you can start to craft the right nurture paths, seeing as you have a better understanding of what types of content you have to support the initial behavior. But before we dive into that, I’d like to hit on a controversial concept of how you can start to capture information from the user to stay in contact with them — without having to pay for it.

Dig deeper: How to create content for every stage of the customer journey

Gating content strategically

The debate around gated content is ongoing, but its success hinges on setting clear expectations around why you’re even asking for someone’s email in the first place. If users know they won’t be bombarded with sales emails and will receive valuable content instead, they are more likely to provide their email addresses. 

For example, on the capture form, blatantly promising to send helpful tips and content pieces once every week — and once a week alone — can foster trust and encourage users to commit to this kind of digital conversation with you. Everything in successful marketing truly lies in setting the right expectations and actually delivering on them. Once the expectation set becomes the expectation unmet, you’re in for some trouble.

Crafting a user-centric narrative

Nurturing is simplified by understanding the user’s mindset and expectations at initial contact and planning logical, relevant steps to keep them engaged with your organization. To build an effective nurture path, you must put yourself in the user’s shoes and remain there until you finish this entire initiative. Empathetically acknowledging and embracing the user’s own individual journey helps in delivering the next piece of content that resonates with their current state of mind and interests.

To get your thoughts out clearer and cleaner, rather than starting with what content you wish to deliver to the user in these flows, start with a true narrative in itself. This will remove the confines of thinking in a limited box and expand your marketing brain to say what needs to be said when it needs to be said. Map out the conversation you think makes the most sense with respect to the initial entry point into your company’s environment. 

You may find that you’re missing key pieces of content that would help support the conversation you’re creating, and that’s OK! This exercise often illuminates the gaps within your content and is invaluable when building a content plan or calendar. 

Even though you’re working for a company, remember the basics of having a genuine conversation. In these campaigns, the organization aims to be seen as a trustworthy source of helpful information. Many marketing teams forget they already have an advantage in being listened to. Successful nurturing guides the user logically through the next steps in their journey by delivering content that builds on their previous interactions. It’s that simple.

Using data to validate your nurture path

One beautiful thing about these types of campaigns is that you’ll be able to see fairly quickly if you’re successfully continuing the conversation in a way that resonates with the recipient. Within a few interactions from users, you’ll be able to tell if you’re heading in the right direction or if you need to shift how the conversation is going. This can mean changing the content type, the order or a mixture of the two should you see a massive falloff at some point in the campaign. 

If you have the luxury of many users engaged with your campaign, you can also A/B test touchpoints based on different documented hypotheses for your nurturing paths. If you’re going to split the test in this way, make sure you have a smooth way of defining your hypothesis, segmenting your audience at random and measuring your results in a specific period of time. 

Dig deeper: How to optimize your content strategy across the customer journey

Creating strategic nurture paths for user-centric marketing

Crafting effective nurture paths requires understanding the user journey. This isn’t limited to email; a good nurture path meets users where they prefer, based on their preferences and behavior. 

By moving beyond the idea that marketing is just for generating leads, we can build long-term relationships and drive sustained engagement. This approach focuses on user benefits rather than fitting them into a predefined process, fostering authentic relationships that keep your brand top of mind when users are ready to purchase.