Lead generation, the act of identifying and cultivating new potential customers, continues to be a key focus for businesses and marketers right now. B2B lead generation is never an easy task to accomplish.
Are you able to generate interest for your B2B product or service?
Getting prospective clients to purchase your products takes some necessary skills or better still guides to follow. There are several business growth strategies to adapt to be successful. Which is why, in this article, we shall enlighten you on some B2B marketing strategy, as well as discussing on how to do it right. To this effect, it is important that you keep on reading so as to gain more insight on being successful in lead generation.
61% of marketers rank lead generation as their number one challenge
Lead generation isn’t as easy as it once was and . According to a report from Hubspot, 61% of marketers consider generating traffic and leads to be their biggest challenge.
Generating traffic is a constant challenge
what are your company’s top marketing challenges?
Generating traffic and leads
Proving the ROI of our marketing activities
Securing enough budget
Managing our website
Identifying the right technologies for our needs
Training our team
Hiring top talent
Targeting content for an international audience
Finding an executive sponsor
Other, please specify
How to do B2B lead generation right?
Identify your Ideal Customer for your product or service
53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation. So, every entrepreneur should be highly focused on their prospective customers. The ability to find a customer for your business, sell your product or service to that customer, and satisfy the customer so that he buys from you again should be the central focus of all. The greater clarity you have with regard to your ideal customer, the more focused and effective your marketing efforts will be.
Everyone is in the business of customer satisfaction in one or the other way round. The most important thing is to clearly identify the best customers for your product or service the buyer persona, and then focus on all marketing, advertising and sales efforts.
What is a Buyer Persona ?
A buyer persona is a model of the customer you wish to target. Personas represent the needs, goals, behaviors and concerns of the audience you intend to reach. They are an indication of how your audience thinks, what drives them to buy and why they buy in the first place.
Despite being so effective for generating leads, LinkedIn looks relatively underutilized. Only 47% of marketers are actively using LinkedIn, despite the fact that 45% of them have gained customers through the platform. (Source: Quicksprout)
Steps To Carry Out B2B Lead Generation Correctly
The following are some of the lead generation steps to take to come out on top.
Step 1: Discover B2B leads
The first line of action to take is to search for the contact information of prospective buyers. Without buyers then the aim would be defeated. So, getting the contact information of prospective buyers can be gotten from several means, or better still, get from a third party.
Step 2: Get in touch with leads
Another important trend to take note of is the importance of rapid follow-ups. A 2019 study from Ziff Divas found that following up with online leads in less than 5 minutes makes them nine times more likely to convert into paying customers. (Source: Ziff Davis)
Leads are 9x more likely to convert when businesses follow-up within 5 minutes
After you have successfully discovered some quality leads, then it is expected that you reach out to leads. As you know, there are several ways to get in touch with or reach out to leads. Some of the prominently used ways are through social media, or if you prefer you can try cold outreach.
So how do you make sure you are responding within 5 minutes? Well, automation might help. Modern AI-powered chatbots and CRMs are capable of automatically responding to your customers for you, offloading this task from your sales team and helping you to drive those conversions while spending less.
Step 3: Know the stages leads are
This is the most important step and one that shouldn’t be taken for granted. It is important to know the stages of leads. There are about three stages; the research and awareness stage, which happens to be the stage where customers are curious and want to carry out more findings before committing. The consideration stage, which is a stage where customers are not fully committed to the product even though they seem interested in it. Lastly, the third stage is the decision stage, as it means the customer has gone through various vendors and he or she is convinced that this particular vendor offers the right product and they would want to purchase it.
Step 4: Closing leads
This is the final step and one which usually transcends to success. This step invariably means the prospect is not only satisfied but also would want to close up the deal.
So, having given the right insight on the steps to carry out lead generation, the next area to focus on is some of the best practices of B2B lead generation. Interestingly, there are about six practices we would focus on.
6 B2B Lead Generation Best Practices
1. Create urgency with countdown timers
Some b2b marketing strategy to take is to create urgency with countdown timers. As you know, customers or clients are not always precise with what they want, and they tend to take a considerable amount of time before committing to a product. Now, with countdown timers in place, it could hasten a customer’s decision as they come to terms that they have a limited amount of time to make a decision. Countdown timers are seen as a motivating factor for prospective clients and hence, making it one of the best lead generation practices to include.
2. Social media marketing
One process that helps you with your lead generation is the use of social media. One effective social media network that helps in generating leads is LinkedIn. This assumption is gotten from a high percentage of marketers who over time have been left impressed by the use of LinkedIn. Aside from this platform, other prominent platforms can help in generating leads, such as Facebook, Twitter and not to mention Instagram. These platforms are effective to generate leads even though you have to come up with a good strategy to achieve your aim.
3. Through backlinks
You would agree that when people rave about your product, it does not only create a feel-good factor but also brings about added trust to your business. Referrals are an important way of getting leads. However, another kind of referral that businesses thrive on is through backlinks. With backlinks, other websites would help you generate leads as they send customers or clients in your direction. But, it is important to know how best to build backlinks. Some of the prominent ways this is done is through:
- Creating content that people would find interesting and would want to associate with. Having a quality content would invariably lead to backlinks
- Help other companies in writing blogs.
- Ensure other websites have your content shared
4. Entice hesitant buyers
Some companies may seem interested in buying your product or are interested in signing up. As you know there are a couple of constraints that can frustrate b2b lead generation. For example, a company might need to verify if they can afford the offer being placed, even though they may be interested. This is why, you shouldn’t leave things stagnant but rather, focus on rebranding by offering more enticing offers when clients who may have shown interest resurfaces. So, in essence, another b2b lead generation best practice would be to keep hesitant buyers in the loop and interested.
5. Select a lead magnet to use
When trying to do b2b lead generation right, it is always important to use a call to action (CTA) which is a lead magnet. The interesting thing about lead magnets is that they come in various forms. It can be through checklists, locked content on your blog, it can be through infographics, and lastly, even though ebooks to name a few. The essence of lead magnets is seen as a form of exchange. Whereby, for you to have prospective clients’ emails, you would have to issue them something in return. Lead magnets are an impressive way of building your contact list. Having your lead magnets focused on your target audience can not be overemphasized. However, there are a few questions you might want to ask yourself before having a lead magnet created for your business. For example: Is the company large or small? Is the budget sufficient or not? Of what use would the product be to a business?
6. Use more long-tail keywords to boost leads
Long-tail keywords have minimal search volume. They are usually more direct, even though they may be three or more words long. A lot of times, users underestimate the importance of having long-tail keywords. This can slow the process of getting more leads and shouldn’t be ignored. However, it is of utmost importance to focus on the right long-tail keywords since it invariably leads to boosting sales and does require much SEO effort.
7. Outsourcing lead generation beats handling it in house
According to Fearless Competitor, outsourcing lead generation generates 43% better results than in-house lead generation. In light of those figures, it might be best to leave your lead generation to an agency and let your in-house team focus their efforts on other important marketing tasks.
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Conclusion
It is important to know that there are different b2b marketing strategies that one can apply to his or her business as it would be of huge benefit towards generating leads. Also, a lot of times people do not know how to do b2b lead generation correctly. This is why, we have carefully given a thorough breakdown of the steps to carry out b2b lead generation, as well as giving you a proper insight on some of the best practices.
Lastly, b2b marketing is one process that should be carried out as it would expose your business and help you in generating leads.
Great article thanks!