The first Thanksgiving was a three-day festival held in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to celebrate the harvest of autumn 1621. After a particularly harsh winter the year prior, the English settlers were especially grateful for their yield, and shared the feast with the Wampanoag people who taught them to hunt and fish. Now just as then, Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on and give thanks for the things that sustain and enrich our lives.
What are you most thankful for this year?
In the world of B2B marketing, we can all take a second to be thankful for qualified leads. After all, leads are the foundation of customer relationships and business growth.
In the spirit of the season, Thanksgiving is the perfect time to give thanks for best leads you’ve gathered in the previous year, and start exploring new ways to harvest even more.
Here’s how to generate and nurture leads you’ll be thankful for:
Optimize your digital and web presence to attract leads. 
A festive, yet admittedly cheesy, B2B marketing poet once said “Prospects are like falling autumn leaves, and landing pages and forms are like rakes B2B marketers can use to collect and organize them.”
A beautifully branded, easily navigable landing page encourages prospects to engage with your site, and a short form with only a few fields makes it simple for them to enter the lead information you need.
Search and social media are two other essential parts of the online lead generation equation. After all, they’re what brings traffic to your landing pages and forms in the first place. With Pardot, you can analyze the impact of your search engine marketing and search engine optimization efforts to really understand how web visitors find your site. You can also automate your social media content, and leverage marketing content that inspire more prospects to visit your site and fill out a form.
Segment your best leads, and engage them with personalized content. 
Leads in general are good to have, but what you really want are qualified leads with genuine customer potential. As your collection of leads starts to build, Pardot can automatically segment the best ones for your business according to their score and grade.
Once you’ve identified your most qualified leads, you can use prospect data to deliver personalized customer experiences that truly attract and maintain their interest. You can create dynamic email and web content that displays targeted offers based on set criteria. And with Pardot’s Demandbase integration, you can take personalization for your key prospects even further with advanced account-based marketing capabilities.
Turn leads into customers with automated nurture programs. 
The leads we’re all most thankful for, of course, are the leads who become customers. But turning a lead into a customer takes time and effort. Nurturing a lead is like preparing the perfect Thanksgiving turkey — it takes time and effort, but it’s always worth it in the end.
With Pardot, you can create robust nurture programs that are automated and personalized based on prospect behavior. Not only are these nurture programs perfect for qualifying hot leads, they’re also great for re-engaging dormant leads with compelling content that will inspire them to seek out your B2B brand again.
Happy Thanksgiving from your friends at Pardot! 
Here at Pardot, we have so much to be thankful for, including all of our our amazing customers and Trailblazers in B2B marketing. We’re also thankful for all of the exciting product innovations we’ve seen throughout the past year. Check out our Winter ‘19 release notes and the announcement of our integrations with Demandbase and GetFeedback.