Lead Generating Marketing Strategies for B2B Companies

What is B2B Lead Generation?

B2B lead generation is the process of locating and attracting the right prospects to buy your product or service. For B2B sales and marketing teams, it’s a must-do activity. In marketing, B2B lead generation is the process of finding and commencing the interest of potential customers. Or, in other way, it’s the first step any company must take before making a sale. Identifying potential audience entails locating businesses that might be interested in the product or service your company provides.

B2B lead generation refers to a variety of techniques and approaches aimed at increasing traffic, qualifying persons, and presenting “leads” to a B2B firm. People, or in this case, businesses, who could be interested in what you’re selling are known as leads. Because lead generation occurs at several stages of both marketing and sales, there are numerous approaches to optimize it. Similarly, the variety of tactics that could produce leads for you is practically limitless; even conversing with strangers may be improved in a way that can generate more leads for you.

Assuming your product is adequately desirable and suitably priced, and supposing you have the perfect sales team, lead generation is probably the most important variable for the success of your sales campaign; with more leads and better leads, you will close more deals.

According to a study, lead generation is the most significant content marketing goal for 85 percent of B2B marketers

Wayne Davis Quote About Lead Generation — Image Source: bluemailmedia.com

The Lead Generation Process

If you want to increase B2B sales, you’ll need a significant lead generating strategy. This ties the marketing and sales teams closer together and offers salespeople with a tried-and-true framework to follow.

B2B lead generation is the process through which sales and marketing teams convert prospects into paying customers.

Finding B2B Leads

Finding the contact details of potential buyers is the first step in creating B2B leads.

Reaching Out to Leads

Representative’s contact leads via cold outreach, social media, or answering queries with a list of high-quality leads.

Qualifying & Prospecting High-Quality Leads

When reps communicate with leads, they analyze how likely they are to buy.

They will do it by determining where leads are in the buying process. These stages are as follows:

Research & Awareness
The customer is aware of a problem or a remedy they require, and they start to learn more about it. At this point, they will devour stuff like blogs, whitepapers, and case studies.
Consideration
The lead is well-versed in the specific service/product required. Before carrying out research and “opening up” to vendors, he or she would go over their exact requirements in depth.
Decision
The customer will have many discussions and check-ins with other decision-makers to finalize a purchase after filtering through businesses that best fits their demands.

Closing Leads

The prospect chooses you after interacting with numerous vendors and the deal is completed. They will be moved to customer success for onboarding.

What Are The Best Lead-generating Marketing Strategies?

Nowadays, generating leads from B2B buyers is a difficult task. Well-versed in the introduction of the latest tech stacks and continually evolving trends, these businesses are always looking for a better way to evolve and entertain the ones that have a USP or a distinctive marketing strategy.

This ever-changing circumstance has prompted B2B marketers to work diligently to re-define their lead-generation strategies in such a way that they strike the correct nerve with B2B buyers. Some have met their goals, while others are still having trouble generating B2B leads using traditional marketing methods.

Lead generation is considered as the most difficult challenge for 85 percent of B2B marketers

Having a diverse assortment of lead generation methods in your sleeve is essential for a successful B2B marketing strategy.

In fact, 28 percent of B2B marketers say they employ five to nine content marketing methods to generate leads, and 64 percent say they use more than nine

In this post, we’ll break down the most important B2B strategies and look at some of the most effective approaches to generate leads.

Content and Traffic-Based B2B Lead Generation Ideas

Content marketing is one of the most efficient strategies for obtaining B2B leads. Creating content adds value to your audience while also increasing your visibility. You can generate a steady stream of visitors to your website, demonstrate your brand’s authority, and as well as qualify leads depending on the topics you discuss about. You can also put a call-to-action (CTA) in each and every piece of content to invite the reader to become leads by filling and completing a form.

According to research from Cision, compared to traditional marketing, 70 percent of internet users learn from content before purchasing a product

Research About Traditional Marketing by Cision — Image Source: ventureharbour.com

B2B decision-makers no longer depend on advertisements to keep them informed about products, and according to a separate study by CSO Insights, 70 percent of B2B buyers prefer self-education in the early phases of the purchasing process. In other words, the people who decide whether or not to do business with you believe themselves more than any advertisement or marketing message – and your B2B content marketing strategy should reflect this.

Content Marketing Goals and Metrics — Image Source: internetsearchinc.com

Listed below are some of the most effective methods for increasing traffic and generating leads from your website’s content and traffic.

Employ Gated Content

Content is the king every time, but it must be of high quality. Apart from being useful and engaging, evergreen content benefits your SEO strategy. Although gated content is perhaps one of the most effective strategies to detect and target your audience, many marketers are still unclear whether or not they should gate their material. Without a doubt, the gated-content strategy confirms that you are not stumbling around in the dark and that you have a clear lead to follow. Gated content, if created from the scratch, will undoubtedly increase sales and conversions from B2B buyers.

Maintain an Exceptional Onsite Blog

Managing an onsite blog is one of the most straightforward and productive techniques you can take. Publish content on a regular basis on issues that your target audience will find useful. You may utilize your blog content to bring more visitors to your site, convert your readers into leads, and even increase your brand reputation by integrating it with SEO and other strategies.

Optimize For Search Engines

The method of increasing the page rankings of your website in Google search results is known as search engine optimization (SEO). Learn how to improve your SEO by employing content marketing and modifications to your site architecture using SEO software, to increase the visibility of your content.

Offer Premium Blog Posts

People will return to your blog on a frequent basis to read your latest posts once they have been hooked to it. Offering “premium” blog posts—articles that are identical to what you publish on your blog but are longer and/or more detailed—can help you generate more leads. You’ll have a new stream of leads if you gate these postings with a download link in return for some minimal contact details, such as an email address.

Offer an eBook

eBooks might work in a similar way. You might also charge for the eBook, establishing a second revenue stream and a lead creation channel concurrently.

Host a Webinar

Organizing a webinar or a digital presentation on a specific topic, is a trendy way to obtain fresh contact information. Teach them a new skill or a topic in which you are knowledgeable. You can collect personal information (such as names and email addresses) ahead of time and then turn the webinar into a Q&A session once it’s done.

Host a Podcast

Podcasts can be thought of as an audio version of a blog. For the optimal outcomes, you will need to release new episodes on a regular basis and establish a following. Teach people something new or talk about current events that are relevant to your target group, then leave them with CTAs that direct them to your website.

Interview an Influencer

To promote your conversation with an industry influencer, use podcasts, videos, blogs, or all three. You will be able to distribute the credit and use their existing audience to generate new leads.

Plan an Email Marketing Automation Sequence

You can start sending out marketing emails once you’ve started accumulating email subscribers and other soft leads who are interested in your business. Provide your subscribers with exclusive content, appealing promotions, and, of course, CTAs that encourage them to act.

Design an Automated Webinar Strategy

When 91 percent of B2B professionals say webinars are their desired type of educational content, you have to hear to your audience. Webinars definitely top lists of the most effective B2B content formats but running a webinar strategy could really require hard work. Automated webinar strategy is still one of the most effective lead generating strategies to this day. Just keep track of performance, make minor adjustments as appropriate, and wait for the leads to come in.

Convert Your Blog Posts into In-depth Guides

You are already devoting time, effort, and money to develop content for your website, blog, third-party sites, social media channels, and other platforms. You want to get acquire the maximum return on your investment. Simply take that content, organize it into relevant groupings, and then transform it into much broader content pieces. For instance, you could compile all of your blog posts on business management into a substantial guideline to business management that business owners would be keen on downloading.

As these topics are generating traffic, you know your audience is already interested in them. Based on the amount of traffic certain pieces of content generate and the engagement your social posts draw, you can also figure out which of these themes they are most interested in. This insight can be used to improvise the content and target the same audiences on social media. All they have to do now is just provide their email address and click the download button.

Include Dynamic CTA in Your Blog Posts

It’s one thing to write comprehensive guidelines, but it’s quite another to increase the number of downloads. This strategy utilizes the downloadable guides you generated to help you convert more blog readers into email leads. This method is crucial because you want to convert as many blog readers as possible into leads instead of allowing them to return to search or whatever social media site they were using before.

Now add CTAs to your blog entries, encouraging visitors to download your in-depth guide on the same subject. Once again, you’re capitalizing on their expressed interest by paving the road for them to obtain more specific information. Based on the topic/category you define before posting, you can automate this so that CTAs linking to the appropriate guide are automatically placed in each blog post.

Generate Email Leads from Video Views

Another area where you don’t really want potential leads to just view your clip and then vanish is video content. You’ve worked hard to persuade this prospect to watch your video, and it’d be a waste to sit back just let them walk away at this instance.

Segmenting Your Content Strategy

You will hear the term “segmentation” a lot in reference to email marketing, but it’s just as crucial in content marketing. Whether they’re reading a blog post, an email, or a product description, you’re unlikely to meet the personal interests that motivate B2B buyers to take any action if you’re writing generic content for wide audiences.
Develop content that responds to your audience’s requirements, just as you would with any smart email marketing strategy, and develop segmented campaigns to bring them on board. Keyword targeting can help you reach these specific audiences through social sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, which can help you determine the most appropriate audience niches. The tools are now in place; all you have to do now is develop the content and campaigns to get the most of them.

Personalize your Landing Pages

You may enhance the likelihood of generating leads even more by personalizing your landing pages to match the keywords they used to reach your brand, provided your Google Ads campaigns are driving in highly pertinent traffic.

Campaign Based Ideas

Create Referral Campaigns

There’s nothing more rewarding like converting existing leads/customers into new ones, especially if you can persuade them to do all the diligent work for you. Referral campaigns can be extremely effective in this situation, especially if you know how to automate the entire process. The goal is to provide a strong incentive for customers to refer you to their friends or connections. Provide both of them a reward to increase the motivation and urge each customer to tell as many people as possible.

Create Customer Retention Campaigns

Trying to bring dead leads back to life is just as good as getting fresh ones. Most leads turn cold in less than 24 hours, therefore this gives you an indication of how rapidly leads might lose value between successful engagements.

Create Remarketing Campaigns

PPC is excellent for driving high-quality traffic to your website, but no matter how perfect your targeting and campaigns are, the bulk of those visitors will not convert into leads straight away. That’s why remarketing efforts are so crucial: they allow you to keep visitors engaged with your business until they’re prepared to act.

Conversion Optimization for Lead Generation

Most lead generation techniques rely on forms, landing pages, and call-to-actions (CTAs); these are methods to collect information about potential customers so you may follow up with them later. By mastering how you offer these forms and opportunities, you can optimize for conversions.

Create Targeted Landing Pages

Landing pages are wonderful for welcoming traffic and encouraging response, but they only succeed if they’re targeted to a specific audience. Make sure you’re creating unique landing pages for each person based on where they came from and what they might be interested in.

Optimize Your Lead Gen Forms

If your lead generation forms contain fewer data fields, your conversion rate will be much higher. Simply ask for a first name and an email address from consumers, but an email address is all you actually require. Your forms should also be accessible and easy to discover on your landing pages, emails (if applicable), and throughout your website.

Make the CTA Clear

The CTA is the last step in the process of converting a visitor into a lead. It may be a button, a link, or a statement; whatever it is, it needs to be explicit. To increase conversions, make it jump off the page.

Optimize your Site

People aren’t going to remain around if your landing page or conversion form takes too long to load. Check that your website and all of your assets are loading as rapidly as possible. With minor coding optimizations and backend adjustments, you can usually increase speed.

Automate Your Lead Gen & Email Marketing Campaigns

Marketing automation is one of the trendiest technologies in email marketing right now, and it’s delivering amazing results for many B2B companies. You are not sure what all the fret is about with marketing automation. Take a look at this. Essentially, automation eliminates the manual work of maintaining segmented lists, targeting user behaviors, and a slew of other activities that can transform your email marketing strategy from meh into like recovering 50% of abandoned carts or increasing sales by 5X.

Social media marketing has blossomed into a mature B2B lead generating channel, demonstrating how far we’ve come since the early days of Facebook.

According to a study, 83 percent of B2B marketers have adopted social media as a channel, making it the most widely used tactic

Even channels that are strongly correlated with B2C marketing are proving to be effective platforms for B2B marketers, with 66 percent planning to expand Instagram activities in 2019.

Utilize LinkedIn Advertising

Like no other network, LinkedIn Advertising provides direct access to business decision-makers, allowing you to reach out to the people who make the prime purchases decisions. Yes, the advertisements are costly. You choose to target the top spenders so you can earn huge profits, even with the average 6.5 percent conversion rate B2B marketers usually obtain from LinkedIn Advertising.

Facebook’s Targeting Options

Facebook’s targeting capabilities have been critical to the company’s supremacy in social advertising, enabling it to make use of massive volumes of data users give up every time they use the application. It has also been essential in Facebook becoming equally effective for B2B campaigns as B2C.

Quora can be leveraged as a research tool to learn about your target audience’s inquiries and requirements. You may also utilize it to actively communicate with consumers and establish your brand as an expert in your industry.

You can also build your own online community. The significance of online communities is still robust, as evidenced by Reddit and Quora, but this should come as no surprise. Creating groups on networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, which have special methods for this, has resulted in some of the most successful B2B marketing techniques.

Building a positive group on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook is more challenging than it used to be, owing to the saturation of so many themes. However, this does not rule out the possibility of establishing yourself as a useful member of existing groups/communities in order to raise awareness and then establishing your own after you have a following. People will be captivated by what you have to say as long as you have something new and useful to deliver to the community.

Wrapping Up!

You may instantly start employing these 25 lead generating best practices, and where possible, integrate some of them and split test them to determine which ones will help you succeed faster. Even when there is a technological or preferential change, a firm can expand to success if it has consistent leads. This is achievable, however, if one is interested, creative, and perspicacious when it comes to content marketing and placement, as well as social media interactions. You should employ a variety of tactics in order to be effective in B2B lead generation. It’s time to start grabbing potential customers with your content in new, engaging, and powerful ways.