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What are the Benefits of B2B Lead Generation?
Modern times have made prospects more intentional and careful about their purchases and whom they collaborate with. In other words, your prospects conduct intensive research to determine how much value your products or services will add to their business and if it will be worth the investment.
B2B lead generation has been on the upswing, and investing in it will help you create a strong sales pipeline that rewards you with more closed deals. Here are some great benefits of B2B lead generation that will help you scale up your business.
Increased Awareness
B2B lead generation brings what every business owner wants: visitors. Increased popularity among target audiences leads to more sales and referrals from existing customers—which is excellent for your business growth. You can boost organic leads and improve brand awareness by implementing a well-thought-out lead-generation strategy for your business.
Get Reviews
The more people utilize your products or services, the greater the likelihood of receiving reviews—reviews help build a reputation and attract other prospects. But all these depend on lead generation to be effective.
Guiding potential customers through the awareness, consideration, and decision stages will help convert them into sales leads. Still, they will likely leave a review if they have a positive experience with your products or services and feel confident enough to recommend you to others.
Generate Quality Leads
B2B lead generation ensures that you channel your efforts toward reaching your target audiences, generating organic traffic, and connecting with intent-rich prospects to drive sales.
After securing the right leads, you must inform them of the benefits they stand to gain from doing business with your company. If a lead forms a favourable impression and decides that you’re the right fit for their needs, then there is every chance they will purchase something from you.
Boosting Revenue
Using the right strategy for lead generation can make it easier to communicate with your ideal audience at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Putting them in touch with your sales team or customer service representatives who can convert them into quality leads is also as crucial as the strategy.
When a company can communicate with its customers and convert them into loyal patrons, it gets much revenue in return—often making the investment worthwhile.
How B2B Lead Generation Works
Lead generation is less straightforward than it may appear; you need to attract the attention of your target audience and get them to provide relevant contact information. An attractive landing page with an enticing call to action and required information fields is essential to creating effective sales pages.
When done correctly, B2B lead generation can be a highly effective way to reach prospects who may not otherwise hear about your products and services, improving your business’s returns.
Gaining B2B Sales Lead
The first step to generating leads is identifying your target audiences and researching them extensively. Researching your target market allows you to focus on assisting those who will benefit most from working with you. You can then create a semi-fictional representation of your ideal client—a buyer’s persona, which is an amalgamation of multiple factors.
After finding your target audience, the next step is to use practical tools like informational and educational content and calls-to-action (CTAs) to obtain relevant information. You can then reach out and talk about your services.
Follow up with the Sales Lead.
If you realize that a lead is intent on your efforts, it’s up to you not to let the opportunity slip away by using effective follow-up strategies. One way to do this is by knowing your prospect’s preferred communication channel—email, social media, or SMS text messaging—and reaching out to them using it. You can also nurture potential customers with content that provides insight into more benefits of using your products or services.
You can build customer trust and further their decision-making by sending them direct mail packages containing your product. This strategy involves personalizing your communication by sending emails with a name attached and providing information based on prospects’ activities on your website. This simple approach informs them that you’ve been paying attention, which builds trust—another critical factor in any sale.
Qualifying Sales Lead
This phase consists of a thoughtful examination and analysis of the prospect’s needs. You will need to communicate with them effectively to learn about their problems and what approaches they have taken in the past to tackle these problems. Once you know these things, it will be easier for your team to prioritize its efforts based on those factors rather than jumping into a solution without knowing all the relevant information. A good tactic to employ at this phase is BANT.
Budget: What is your lead’s budget for your services? And what have they previously compensated for similar tasks?
Authority: Who are the primary decision-makers when it comes to budget? Knowing this information allows you to communicate with the right person.
Need – What is the priority status of your lead’s problems?
Timeline: How urgently does your lead need a solution?
Close leads
At this stage, you should have narrowed your list of prospects down to those you plan to pursue and those who will not receive further consideration.
Even the most enthusiastic leads will harbour doubts about the effectiveness of your products or services. To close a sales lead, clarify and eliminate any objections your prospect may have. You can be straightforward with a client prospect, or you might begin by reminding them of your product’s benefits and then deliver a friendly-smart close.
Online and Offline B2B Lead Generation
This marketing technique aims to develop relevant prospects from as many effective channels as possible. The strategy involves capturing your audience’s attention and offering solutions to their most pressing concerns. With this in mind, It’s important to consider all your options when reaching out and looking to convert prospects.
Exploring online and offline methods of lead generation will help you reach every potential client based on their preferred method of communication.
Online Lead Generation
In today’s technological age, marketing has expanded into the digital realm. Online lead generation is a process of generating leads using the internet—your business can implement this method in various ways.
1. Content creation
2. Social media marketing
3. SEO
4. Email marketing
5. Ads
Offline Lead Generation
Many marketers focus on generating leads online and have neglected other, more traditional ways of reaching prospects. Although offline lead generation may seem old-fashioned compared to web-based methods for attracting new businesses, it can connect you with your target audience in powerful and surprising ways—as these examples show:
1. In-person events
2. Direct mail
3. Print ads
4. Outbound sales
Best B2B Lead Generation Strategies
While B2B lead generation boosts revenue, it’s essential to know that the process isn’t always easy. According to HubSpot—an online marketing agency—61% of marketers rated lead generation as their top challenge, so it’s not surprising when some tactics don’t pan out despite your best efforts.
Many strategies generate leads, but deciding which will work best for your business can be challenging. You must take suitable action courses to ensure that your lead-generation efforts are successful. The following section explores some of the most effective ground plans.
Pay Per Click
In pay-per-click or PPC marketing, advertisers pay a publisher for each click on their website.
What is PPC Lead Generation?
Using PPC to generate leads is an excellent strategy for businesses that have identified their target audience. They can perform keyword research and create a keyword list that will direct their target audience to them.
With the help of keywords, your sponsored link occupies a more prominent position on search result pages. It directs users to a site with information about your product or service—which is often more likely to lead them to take action.
Google Ads for B2B Lead Generation
Google Ads is an online resource that provides tools that can enable you to reach high-intent leads when paired with target keywords.
According to WebFX, the average conversion rate of Google ads is 3.75%, making it effective at generating leads and profitable for your business!
Here is a quick guide to setting up Google Ads for lead generation.
Keyword research: Look into the keywords and search terms your potential customers will most likely use and target those in your content. Keyword research will help you find new audiences, improve visibility & rankings, and increase traffic flow.
Choose a campaign goal: Before making your ad, Google will ask what goal you’re trying to achieve with this campaign. Do you want more people to download your app? Or are more visitors signing up for a service?
What type of ad do you want to create: The most effective B2B lead generation ads are responsive search, dynamic search, and text ads. This is because google displays them on the SERP rather than partner websites.
Ads extension: Google ads extension allows you to display other possible actions for a prospect rather than sending them directly to your landing page. There are several extensions that Google Ads supports, including sitelink extension and structured callout snippets. However, your selected campaign goal dictates the number of extensions Google adds to your sponsored link.
Tracking results: After setting up your ad, you can track the results to see how visitors and prospects respond. This information helps determine what action your team should take next—and what aspects of the campaign they need to adjust for future use.
Social Media Campaigns
Social media platforms open up new opportunities to reach potential customers. Most of the world’s population—about 3.1 billion people—uses social media, and 63% of those are active users. Social media is an excellent B2B lead generation strategy because it offers filters that enable you to track your prime audience at a glance.
LinkedIn is a social media service that individuals and organizations use for networking. More than 60 per cent of businesses with LinkedIn accounts report increased customers due to their presence on the site.
When customers consider purchasing products or services from a business, they often look to LinkedIn for more information about that company. To make a good impression, here’s how your business can use this connection:
Set up your business profile: When you set up your company’s LinkedIn page, ensure it includes a logo, banner image, and brief description of your goal. The profile section is where users will go to learn about what makes your business unique—and including keywords in this area can help boost visibility.
Create quality content: If you use your account, fill it with content that will add value to potential customers. Publishing short or long-form written content that educates your audience or incorporating images and videos to provide value is a great way to demonstrate expertise in how you can help them.
Consistency: Publishing content consistently on LinkedIn will drive better results. Analyze your posts’ performance to figure out what works best when reaching your audience, and then optimize the other low-performing pieces by making similar changes.
Engage your workforce: Encourage employees to follow your business page and share more of its goals and recent activities that prospects will find interesting. Having shared connections is another way to generate leads.
Collaboration: Collaborating with other organizations to achieve a shared goal will raise your profile and help you expand the reach of your audience.
Events and groups: Hosting a free event on LinkedIn about an issue or topic your business is knowledgeable about will demonstrate to prospects that you’re an expert in your niche. Creating groups and building communities can also help position yourself as a thought leader within the industry.
While LinkedIn is a place to get resourceful, Twitter is another powerful social media platform you can leverage for B2B lead generation. According to the Digital Media Stream, 82% of social media leads come from Twitter—a statistic that is not surprising given its popularity among people with mobile devices.
Twitter is an excellent tool for generating leads because it displays ads more than any other social media, reaches a wide range of audiences, and works well with almost all businesses. Here’s what you need to know about using Twitter’s paid and free tools—from ad platforms that target potential buyers’ interests to hashtag campaigns designed for B2B marketers—to increase your sales pipeline.
On your profile: The best way to set up your Twitter profile is by writing a business description in only a few words and optimizing it with primary keywords. You should also have a link leading back to a landing page, which might generate more conversions.
Pin a good tweet: Write something creative that your audience would love to see and pin it on your profile; ensure that you include a call to action (CTA) that will entice your audience to visit your website.
Creative tweets: Twitter users love to engage with businesses and brands, so you need to post tweets that keep them talking about your business account. Use a catchy headline, short description, and images or videos to promote your website’s content.
Using hashtags in your tweets will connect you to a community of businesses and individuals around your niche; with your creative tweets, you can build a following and attract quality leads.
Twitter lists: This tool allows you to separate everything you want to do on this platform. If your goal is to learn from competitors and track their activity, then create a list that handles that—and if it’s following influencers of value that are not in any way competitive with you, then make another list for those relationships. This will allow you to keep your Twitter feed organized and make relevant tweets and content easy to find.
Ads: One of the best features of Twitter is that it tailors ads to users’ interests, so if you set up customized ad campaigns on Twitter, people who take an interest in what you’re selling might see it and take action.
With more than 1.2 billion monthly active users, Facebook provides an exceptional opportunity for companies to engage with their customers on a personal level and build brand awareness among specific demographics.
The simplicity of Facebook’s procedures is an upside to using the site, but relevance is the most crucial factor in determining what content gets shared on this platform. You can share a brief excerpt of your content and a link to the full article on your website.
Post quality, engaging videos, and publish short posts on groups with specific audiences. If you consider putting up ads, Facebook is also an excellent place to start—as it helps you reach some of the broadest range of people around.
Free Product or Service Trials
A potential buyer always wants to be able to try a product before buying it. Before prospects invest in your product or service, they need to see the potential and results that it can produce. If you have a digital product that helps people solve problems, consider offering prospective customers an opportunity to try your solution for free.
In this example, we used Semrush’s free trial; Semrush does a great job attracting new leads to their CRM with a simple free trial tactic. Although it’s not the only strategy, it’s still one of the most effective lead magnets.
You can offer a free plan to attract new customers and convert them into paid users as they appreciate how much better your product is than its competitors. Free trials help build confidence in a brand and raise the chance of making a sale.
You can limit free trials to leads that have passed through multiple marketing stages. Qualified leads —people who have read your content, attended events, signed-up for updates or newsletters, and contacted your sales team—are likely to convert into paying customers.
Monitor Visitors Analytics
Analytics can reveal answers to critical questions about your website’s performance—such as what content attracts the most visitors and why. You must create a very appealing landing page with a strong sales letter to keep visitors on your website longer.
These metrics tell you which parts of your website are working well and where there is room for improvement.
Creative CTAs
A call to action (CTA) is an image, line of text, or any encouragement that prompts visitors to take the next step—whether it be making a purchase, setting up an appointment, Etc. CTAs are crucial in generating leads, nurturing prospects, and closing sales. Use a well-placed CTA at the end of blog posts, landing pages, or advertising copy to direct readers to the next steps.
Customize each CTA to fit a visitor’s stage in the sales process.
When writing a CTA, consider how your target audiences will perceive it. A creative approach can often go a long way! For leads who have gathered enough information, you can use CTAs offering a trial, and if completed, the next CTA allows your prospect to contact sales.
SEO Strategies
With so much competition on the web, it can seem like an uphill battle to ensure your website’s content gets noticed by search engines. However, with good Search engine optimization (SEO) strategies—such as keyword research and enhanced metadata— you can secure high rankings for your site. SEO can boost organic traffic and convert visits into leads.
Here are some tactics to help your website achieve a higher search engine result page rank.
On-Page and Off-Page SEO: To improve your site’s SEO rankings by optimizing the titles and descriptions of each piece of content you publish, ensuring that visuals are relevant and adequately captioned, updating outdated contents whenever possible, and ensuring that all text is readable by using tools like Google’s readability index.
Off-page SEO may include competitor analysis and outreach tactics to build your backlink profile.
Incorporating keywords into your landing pages is an excellent choice for better exposure to prospects when they use a keyword specific to what you offer.
Technical SEO: This part of SEO involves modifying the source codes for your site’s HTML to optimize title and description tags, fix crawl errors (problems that prevent search engines from collecting necessary metadata), repair broken links (web addresses where content no longer exists), ensure there is only one version of your website online, getting rid of redundancy—and add some structured data.
Technical SEO is essential in improving user experience, but executing it in a vacuum is impossible: you must implement other optimization techniques.
Provide Informational and Educational Content
Providing relevant informational and educational content for your target audience to digest is a market strategy under content marketing. The ultimate goal of these contents is to EAT.
EAT Principle stands for:
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trust
These are the three main factors that heavily contribute to your search engine rankings.
To maximize the effectiveness of this strategy, publish content on your business website that relates to B2B lead generation. Some examples include case studies, ebooks, tutorials, and guides.
Publishing content that covers every stage of the buyer’s journey helps nurture prospects by providing them with valuable information, building a connection, and demonstrating your expertise.
Effective content marketing relies upon using keywords intelligently. If your content is informational, navigational, or transactional, you should use keywords that relate to that user intent.
Customized Landing Page
A simple landing page is excellent for keeping things straightforward, but a customized one paired with your compelling CTA can help scale up your lead generation game. When customizing your landing page, aim to match people’s moods—relating to problems you help solve by offering solutions.
In addition, a customized landing page with unique features draws more attention than standard templates, and it helps businesses stand out.
Webinars
If a customer has advanced into the consideration stage of your products or services, you need to provide more information. Webinars are one way to give customers that additional content they’re looking for. You can share this publicly on your site or link to them via a communication route.
Leads interested in your webinars have conducted in-depth research on your business and will need a little nudge to proceed further. Your webinar can be educational, discussing a new feature, upgrade or success story.
Gated Contents
Gated contents require leads to provide specific information for complete access, while ungated content can be accessible by anyone who visits your website. Use this lead generation strategy to obtain your leads’ contact information because a high percentage of visitors that fill out this form to access your gated content have taken an interest in what you offer.
Gearing gated content toward leads at the top of a marketing funnel ensures that only sales-qualified leads are more likely to want access to materials like case studies, white papers, and ebooks.
Customer Reviews
The success stories of your existing customers or clients can be one of the best ways to attract new ones. Ask previous buyers about their experience working with you and how they benefited from the results of that work. You can use those reviews to promote your business on social networks or as testimonials on your website.
Reviews are essential for attracting new prospects, establishing your authority in a market, and building trust with buyers. Another way to generate leads through customer reviews is by facilitating referrals. You can request that your previous buyers introduce you to people who might need or want your products or services.
The more reviews you get, the higher your profile as an expert in your field.
Tools For Generating B2B Leads
Generating sales leads can be daunting for any marketing or sales team because change is inevitable in this field. Fortunately, technological advancement has made it possible to focus more time and resources on vital tasks while simultaneously automating repetitive activities.
Your team can utilize several tools for inbound lead generation, outbound lead generation, email marketing, and search marketing. The complete tools for B2B lead generation should have all the features necessary for positive results, be capable of supporting your teams, have reasonable pricing, and integrate easily with your CRM.
Before purchasing and implementing marketing automation tools, you should determine the lead generation strategies that will work for your business and target priorities only. This will ensure you acquire the right tools your marketing or sales staff will appropriately utilize.
With the proliferation of lead generation tools on the market, it can be challenging to determine which ones are worth using. This section offers tips for choosing and integrating effective marketing automation software into your campaign.
Email Address Finders
If you need to acquire the email address of a prospect who matches specific criteria, an email address finder can help. This tool allows you to locate the email address of any individual or organization based on relevant information like an individual name, company name—or both.
This tool is best utilized if a prospect is interested in what you sell but hasn’t provided many contact details, this way, you can reach out to them and guide them through the nurturing process. Using this tool to obtain the emails of individuals who do not need your products and services is invasive and can lead to your business email getting blacklisted.
Here are some brilliant email address finders your team can benefit from:
Email Marketing Tools
Your team’s email marketing software impacts the success of their communications with leads and prospects. The resources under this category can help you create, test, send and manage your email campaigns—to ensure that you communicate with leads in the best possible way.
These tools should help you tailor and send personalized, informational, educational, and re-engagement emails. Our top 5 email marketing software will generate quality leads for your B2B business.
Collect Leads with Chatbots
Chatbots provide a medium to connect quality leads to your sales team directly. They employ artificial intelligence to respond to and suggest solutions to website visitors. Because they’re programmed so that their responses seem human-like, chatbots offer an efficient way for businesses to provide customer service online.
There are three basic types of chatbots;
1. Rule-based chatbots: these are also known as FAQ bots, and they guide visitors through a conversation under pre-defined actions. Their questions and answers are pre-programmed using specific keywords by website visitors.
2. AI chatbots: These chatbots work using a type of Artificial Intelligence called Natural Language Processing (NLP). They are capable of asking and answering questions on their use.
3. Hybrid chatbots: These use a combination of AI and human interaction to provide the best of both worlds. The chatbot answers several questions but redirects the visitor to a sales member for further interaction when necessary.
Rule-based and hybrid chatbots are great for B2B lead generation because they offer better engagement. Here are some of the best software we’ve come across that you might want to try out:
- Tidio: a robust, all-in-one customer service platform that improves your customer service and helps you to generate more leads.
Landing Page Builders
Landing pages are one of the most critical assets in lead generation; they include a CTA. With this in mind, your team must possess tools that enable landing page creation effortlessly when needed.
A landing page builder should be intuitive, include various templates to choose from, integrate with other software you regularly use (such as your email marketing platform and blogging service), and work across multiple platforms. A landing page builder should have an analytics section that provides insights and performance information.
B2B marketers should consider trying out these landing page builders.
Image Tools
People tend to remember information more easily when visuals are included. According to Final International University, the study revealed that using infographics in education positively impacted academic success in four courses.
Images are crucial for long-form content since they break up large blocks of text and make your information visually appealing. However, using mediocre or low-quality images, readers will not appreciate them as much and may even stop reading altogether.
These tools are a must-have for your marketing and sales teams. They help your staff create, edit, and manage unique, high-quality images—which is extremely important when it comes to staying at the top of their game.
- Adobe Express
- Canva
- Stencil
- Pablo
Sales Tools
A high-performing sales force depends on access to large amounts of data, but only by using automation tools can you process the information efficiently.
But while sales is a vast field that encompasses much more than just CRM (customer relationship management), you still need other kinds of tools—ones for organization and managing to get the job done.
Reading further, you will discover some of the best sales tools categorized into four types (4). These tools guarantee productivity and high conversion in B2B lead generation.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- · Insightly
- · Hubspot
- · Zoho
- · Monday Sales CRM
- · Sage
Sales Productivity
- · Calendly
- · Adobe sign
- · Asana
- · Zoom
- · Freshbooks
Prospecting
Data Integrations
How to Find a Good B2B Lead Generation Company?
Lead generation can be a significant problem for some businesses and cause reduced revenue. This is one of the reasons why you may want to do business with an experienced B2B lead generation company if your in-house team needs assistance. An outsourced lead generation company can research prospects extensively and provide you with the right tools for your sales team—without requiring in-house expertise.
However, while outsourcing lead generation is undeniably beneficial to businesses of all sizes, choosing the right B2B company to partner with can be challenging; that’s why we drafted some tips for selecting one.
Proper Research
To make the most of your investment, you’ll want to hire a team with skills and experience that will earn you competitive returns.
Case studies are paramount to your research process. Reading through the case studies of your shortlisted B2B lead generation companies will give you insight into their approach to solving problems similar to those faced by your business.
Reviews and a clientele list are essential to learning more about their previous clients and how satisfied they were with the received results. You can get this information from the company’s website or by making a direct search on Google for its name plus “reviews” or something similar.
You can check out social media pages and the professional certification of a company’s team. LinkedIn is an excellent way to obtain this information. A simple search on LinkedIn will provide you with a list of employees at that company.
Inquire About Lead Generation Practices
To determine how a company generates leads, you must schedule a consultation or contact them via email or social media.
What tools and resources do they use at this company, and why? What strategies have they adopted, and why is it the best? Does your business align with their client or buyer’s persona?
These are some questions a good B2B company should be able to answer. They should spend some time trying to understand what makes your company unique so that they can generate relevant leads and be worth pursuing.
A good lead generation team will have more than enough knowledge and experience in this marketing area and access to tools like CRMs (customer relationship management software) or database marketing systems.
Conclusion
For many B2B companies, lead generation has become one of the most important aspects of a business. You must understand this topic well enough to discern if your in-house team is capable or whether you should hire an outside vendor for help.
B2B lead generation involves finding and converting prospects from your target audience to boost revenue. To be successful, you should be able to tell the difference between the different types of leads you encounter—and know where they are in their buyer’s journey. This information determines how you interact with leads and the tools you can use to further their actions and assist decision-making.
As with other aspects of B2B marketing, the lead generation operation is an ongoing process. Market conditions change over time, and businesses must respond accordingly—with fresh new ideas for generating leads and effective old ones that remain just as relevant today.
For your marketing and sales team, lead generation is a data-driven task that requires the right automated tools to make specific tasks more manageable. It is necessary to conduct further research into whether or not some tools align with your business needs and priorities. If you need an outsourced team of experts who can help you generate leads—or anything else we mentioned here!—you should take a step forward and contact us if you need better-qualified leads.
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