Boom times allow for flexibility. Bad times demand revenue delivery. Over the past couple of years, the weak economy has put lead generation and lead nurturing centre stage. Customers and prospects have been more cautious with their budgets, and vendors have been more focused on generating leads, but not necessarily nurturing leads. In a downturn, you can’t afford to let a single lead go to waste. But too often, leads are left to go cold because the prospect is cautious and doesn’t seem inclined to buy straight away.

It’s never been more important to nurture the leads you generate, providing content, information and assistance to build a rapport and help them come to a point where they are ready to engage with a sales rep.

That means getting the right tools in place to manage your leads all the way through the funnel – however long that process takes. Whether your prospect arrives at your site via an online search, starts following you on Twitter, watches one of your videos, comes to one of your live events or simply calls you up, you need to be able to capture their details, gauge their level of interest and start developing a relationship that will ultimately lead to a successful handover to Sales.

Below are five suggestions for better managing and nurturing your leads.

Today, an astonishing 93% of B2B buying decisions start with online research, but many companies aren’t equipped to capture and profile the search traffic they get. Rather than bringing search traffic en masse to your homepage, use targeted landing pagesto guide visitors to specific products and services. Once they’re there, take the opportunity to learn more about them by offering a relevant download, webinar or video in exchange for a few details.

In a world where most leads are generated online and an increasing proportion are inbound, automated lead management tools can help you to generate, score and nurture leads more cost-effectively. Use lead scoringto evaluate how engaged each prospect is, so you can decide whether they’re ready to hand over to Sales or need nurturing first. By knowing more about each lead, you’ll be able to focus your limited budget and resources on the ones most likely to convert, enabling you to hand over fully qualified leads to the sales team.

In times of squeezed budgets there’s less money for outbound lead generation, and especially for external lists that may be of doubtful quality. Smart marketers will instead look to make better use of existing in-house customer and prospect databases by cleaning up the data, scoring (or re-scoring) old leads, and developing targeted content and nurturing strategies to revive leads that may have gone cold.

Lead nurturing tools can help you to build relationships with prospects who are too early in the buying cycle to be ready for sales. Profiling prospects and delivering regular, relevant content in line with their interests can yield a four-fold improvement in the conversion of qualified prospects into sales opportunities over time. That’s a lot of return on your marketing investment.

Every year brings advances in marketing analytics, and today, marketers can monitor and evaluate the success of each campaign as it’s being rolled out. That means campaigns can be stepped up, refined or discontinued on the fly, to ensure that each one delivers the best value for money. You’ll also be able to monitor in fine detail the returns on your marketing investment – vital information for negotiating additional budget or for demonstrating Marketing’s effectiveness to Sales.

Of course, you need the right content in your lead generation and nurturing programmes, but it is possible to create high-quality, relevant, engaging and targeted content in an era of squeezed budgets and limited resources.

Elizabeth Smyth is marketing director of EMEA for revenue performance management specialists, Marketo. She can be contacted at lizs@marketo.com.