It’s like an uphill battle to find the right B2B lead generation strategies for your sales leads. When you enter the world of B2B lead generation, you are gonna find a lot of different strategies.
Then you will understand how difficult or rather challenging it can be for you. This is not something for the faint-hearted or someone looking for loopholes.
As a matter of fact, people have often described it as”swimming without your hands or feet, or attempting to solve the Diophantine Equation with limited algebraic skills, wouldn’t be an exaggeration. B2B leads generation is far from a leisurely walk in the park.”
In the minefield of B2B lead generation, you are not only gonna get shrewd and cunning buyers and competitors but a lot of misinformation to confuse you, such as,
When it comes to B2B sales leads, the “Ugly Truth” is,
“You have to tailor your approach to the organization, industry, product/service, and audience. Which often means ignoring self-tooting horns and trailing new waysa to generate leads that work for you.”
“More Leads = More Sales. To Drive growth, you need more leads.”
Here in this article, I am going to discuss about the fundamentals of B2B lead generation and how it can lead the way to successful sales leads. So to know that, all you need to do is keep on scrolling through the article.
“B2B lead generation is short for business-to-business lead generation, which describes businesses that primarily sell to (*drumroll please*) other businesses. It serves as the crucial first step in a typical marketing strategy, marketing funnel, or sales process.
Lead gen involves collecting a potential customer’s information — such as name, email, company name, and job title — and using that information to target them with customized sales pitches or ad campaigns.
B2B is different from business-to-consumer (B2C) lead generation, where products and services are sold directly to consumers.”
“Mastering the art of acquiring B2B sales leads is merely the initial step in a larger, comprehensive process. To truly drive sales growth, you must establish an effective lead generation process. This process serves as the vital link that aligns marketing and sales teams, providing representatives with a proven framework to follow.”
“Generating leads involves a series of carefully orchestrated steps undertaken by salespeople and marketing teams to transform prospects into paying customers. But what exactly do these steps entail? Let’s delve into this process to uncover the key components that pave the way to B2B sales success.”
“The first step in most B2B lead generation strategies is finding the contact information of potential buyers.”
“Contact information is often sourced in-house, generated by a third-party “lead gen” company, or bought from a lead database.”
“With a list of high-quality leads that met all the criteria of your lead scoring system, reps reach out to them through cold outreach (cold calls or emails), social media, other outbound strategies, or by replying to inquiries.”
“While interacting with leads, reps measure how likely leads are to buy.
They’ll do this by gauging the stage leads are at during the buying process. These stages include:”
“The prospective customer is aware of a solution they need or problem they face, and they begin to learn more about it.
The awareness stage is where they’ll consume content like blogs, whitepapers, and case studies.”
“The lead knows the exact service/product that’s needed. They’ll detail their specific needs before researching and “opening up” to vendors.”
“Filtering through vendors that best suit their needs, the buyer will have multiple meetings and check-in with other decision-makers to complete a purchase. ”
“Depending on what stage a lead is at, reps will initiate nurturing campaigns or focus on getting the prospect to book a call or demo.”
“Success! After multiple meetings with different vendors, the prospect picks you, and the deal is done. They’ll now be transferred to customer success for onboarding. Woot!”
“With thousands of website visitors browsing their site for office wallpapers, WallMonkeys used a heat map tool to see where visitors’ eyes landed first on their website. After receiving the results, the WallMonkey team was confident that they could increase B2B sales leads by tweaking their homepage.”
“Putting their theory to the test, they split-tested a new background image and search bar and boosted the conversion rate by 550 percent. Not too shabby. ”
“With less than 100 monthly searches for its target keyword, Snack Nation, an office snack supplier, struggled to increase B2B sales leads through its SEO efforts.”
“Going after a bigger audience that would include their ideal B2B leads, they created an epic post on “employee wellness” — a broader search term that their target buyers use.”
“While producing the post, they took extra care to ensure that it was actually “epic” enough to generate leads.”
Result of the ‘employee wellness’ post.
“The post propelled Snack Nation to the # 1 spot on Google for their keyword.
Despite being over three years old, this post generates tons of traffic and leads for them to this day.”
“Social proof is a powerful part of most B2B lead generation strategies.
Because buyers may doubt claims about your product/service, they’ll look for testimonials to make a more thoughtful purchasing decision.”
“The more social proof you can gather on your site, the easier it is to build trust and increase sales.”
“Consider adding social proof to your landing pages and homepage, sharing reviews on social media, and creating case studies — collecting positive reviews on G2 Crowd is another excellent way to build trust.”
“HubSpot offers a free CRM.
Crazy Egg provides a free Heatmap tool.
Ubersuggest offers free SEO analytics reports.
Notice a pattern?
For SaaS and tech companies, one of the best B2B lead generation strategies I’ve witnessed is a free tool.
Offering a free tool works for B2B lead generation because:
In our early days, we used this exact tactic at Leadfeeder to get users to find and refer leads to us. It’s worked so well that we still offer free trials today!
Also, here you can check 11 steps to set up a lead generation strategy for your tech company.”
Consider DesignRush to learn more about the latest blockchain development companies that can handle your tool-building process for lead generation.
“Using content to educate buyers and answer burning questions is nothing new.
The challenge that most B2B marketers face is:
Quora (or other forums) solves both of these problems.
As a social Q&A site, Quora is an underestimated platform for B2B lead generation. Writer Nicolas Cole, for example, built a loyal following and a solid reputation on Quora by answering questions with detailed and occasionally personal answers.
Thanks to his answers on Quora, he skyrocketed the growth of his 7-figure content agency, Digital Press, within a few years. Find your buyers on Quora, answer their questions, link back to your content, and profit.”
“AlertOps was struggling to identify the company visiting their website. They knew that “warm” leads were leaving without giving contact information.
Integrating Leadfeeder into their sales process helped them identify which companies visited their site — even if they didn’t download a lead magnet or fill out a form.
Within a month, they boosted their sales demo rates by 700 percent. They even landed a sales demo with a Fortune 500 company.
“Leadfeeder plays a huge role in the [sales] system we built to qualify sales leads and schedule demo calls,” says Nathan Rofkahr, Director of Growth for AlertOps.
To improve your social sales, pair Leadfeeder with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can start following or retarget cold visitors as warm connections on LinkedIn and personalize your approach. And if these visitors return to your site, Leadfeeder will let you know they’re from LinkedIn.”
“Case studies should be an important part of your content marketing strategy. B2B buyers are highly analytical, and risk-averse, and often need the approval of multiple ROI-minded decision-makers before purchasing.
And — as many buyers have admitted — this makes case studies actual sales enablement content for the middle-to-end stages of the lead generation process.
Don’t just let case studies sit idle on your website. Shamelessly promote them to skyrocket your credibility. ”
“When High-Speed Training published an in-depth report for buyers in the hospitality industry, they saw massive ROI.
Not only did the report position them as the leader in their field, but it also boosted their site’s visibility and earned coverage from 38 different media outlets.
On average, B2B buyers encounter 13 content pieces before purchasing. Content includes information on a vendor’s website, in-depth reports, and third-party reviews.
You can use this reverence for data to radically transform your inbound lead generation. How?
Become a source for industry-related information, trends, and data. Thought-leadership will help you:
“Everybody loves ripe, low-hanging fruit. When it comes to increasing B2B sales, your landing pages — the most transformative points in the buyer journey — are bountiful trees to source fruit.
Get quick B2B lead generation wins on your landing page by following these steps:
“Website personalization is no longer a bonus in B2B lead generation strategies. It’s a must.
To personalize the buying experience on your site, use dynamic pages and content that adapt to your visitor’s:
ABM efforts add an intimate touch to the buyer’s journey that creates a powerfully personal experience.”
“Lead magnets are the bread to your B2B lead generating butter. Richard Wood, Managing Director at Six & Flow, describes it as, “A lead magnet is anything that you can offer a prospect that has enough perceived value in exchange for their contact information, like an email address.
If you want to create an effective lead magnet, you need to focus on your buyer personas and a specific challenge that they have and that you can address.”
But most companies get the whole lead magnet thing wrong. They offer surface-level content that’s already available on a typical blog post. That’s not really “magnetic,” is it?
Don’t make the same mistake. Unless you’re confident it’s valuable, scrap the high-level content and instead share your detailed, real-world experience in the format of:”
“If you aren’t using videos in your lead generation campaigns, here are two reasons why you should:
The math is both easy and appealing:
You don’t need blockbuster videos. You can simply turn your existing content into informative videos that generate leads, just like I did with the example below.”
“We wrote a guide on selling with video, which prompted the panel discussion — who doesn’t love a theme?
“As humans, we are all drawn to video because of the connections that video allows us to make with buyers. And when we can do that we win more business.”
– Robert Weiss, President at MultiVision Digital.”
“Ash Amibirge, a copywriter at The Middle Finger Project, got a 100 percent response rate by mailing physical roofing shingles to her prospects.
Sales rep Jeremy Leveille rapped a B2B song in his email campaigns to get replies from his leads.”
“With your competitors sticking to boring cold email scripts, a little bit of creativity in your outreach will go a long way with your B2B lead generation efforts. Recently we’ve written about the top creative lead generation ideas with examples, feel free to check them out for inspiration! ”
“LinkedIn is the place to be for “big deal,” high-value B2B lead generation. Advertising on the platform:
While competition is rife and cost-per-click is higher than other platforms, the tradeoff is the ability to hyper-target your audience.
If you’re going to advertise on LinkedIn, make sure you offer:
“Robin, a workplace platform, took a risk by directing their lead generation towards platforms where B2B leads are tougher to find — and it paid off.
Instead of doubling down on conventional channels like LinkedIn or Twitter, they posted user-generated content on Instagram and Pinterest.
To Robin’s surprise, it paid off. The company’s web traffic increased by 50 percent and brought 20 percent more leads to their door.
As Robin’s story shows, even if you’re B2B, that doesn’t mean you can’t generate sales from B2C social channels.
Don’t be afraid to test out new platforms like TikTok. By getting there first, you might just find a diamond in the rough. ”
There’s a reason why Inbound lead generation pros like Hubspot still use guest posting to increase B2B sales:
It’s an underused (and misunderstood) strategy that works. According to a survey by Aira, 42 percent of digital marketers they polled use guest posting.”
“Even though it has a controversial past, guest posting is still the number one link-building strategy SEOs recommend.
As a way to enhance your overall search engine optimization and present you as an authority to a fresh audience of new B2B leads, guest posting is far from “dead.”
“As mobile traffic continues to grow, optimizing for mobile is becoming an increasingly important part of an effective B2B lead generation strategy.
According to DemandGenReport:
They also found that B2B marketers already optimizing for mobile are experiencing “reduced purchasing time and higher customer loyalty.”
Given that it takes seconds to check your site’s compatibility with mobile devices, there’s no excuse for not being mobile-friendly.”
“A long-tail keyword is three or more words long and is very specific. And yes, it usually gets a very low search volume.
But target the right long-tail keyword, and you trade off search volume for extremely high purchase intent that increases sales with very little SEO effort.”
“If your competitors flock to certain sites for backlinks or seem to favor optimizing a noticeable group of keywords, that’s a pretty big deal.
It means they’ve found winning keywords that generate leads.
Using SEO research tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush, you can take advantage of this by targeting the same sites and keywords to drive more sales-ready traffic to your site.”
Tip: “Before you spend time and money optimizing for a particular keyword, run a small paid ads campaign to see if it actually attracts and converts your ideal B2B leads.”
“One of the lead generation strategies is to organize webinars for lead capture. A webinar is an online presentation that’s intended to engage customers, educate them on your products or services, talk about pain points, build trust, and increase your brand awareness.
It’s a great way to reach out to potential clients and build relationships with them before they’ve even signed up for your product.
In addition to reaching out to potential clients, webinars are also an excellent way to attract new leads. If you’re looking for ways to generate more sales leads without paying for advertising, consider hosting a live webinar with a special offer or discount code for your product.
You can also invite other businesses/startups who would benefit from your product or service as guests on your webinar — this will increase awareness about your business and drive traffic back towards it after the event ends!
Remember, if you treat webinars as one of your marketing campaigns, the most important is to give valuable content to your target audience and your ideal customer.”
Well, there you go; if you wanna know more about B2B lead generation, then this is the article for you. Now if you think this article is quite informative for your knowledge, then all you need to do is give this article a like and comment down below.
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Subham Kamila is a published author and Senior Digital Marketing executive On Viacon marketing and technology. He’s passionate about SEO, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, SMM, Google Adwords. He is like to inspire with google, flipkart, amazon, Ahrefs of their marketing strategy.
