Are you new to B2B marketing and lead generation? If you’re wondering what is the one strategy you need to drive business growth and make stakeholders happy in a B2B organization, then you’ll need to be proficient with Lead Generation.
In this starter guide, we’ll share quick win strategies you can explore to see the short-term powerful impact on lead generation.
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What is B2B lead generation?
The term “lead generation” refers to a specific type of marketing activity. In general terms, lead generation consists of finding prospective buyers and turning those prospects into actual customers.
Lead generation is often broken down into three steps: identifying prospective buyers, qualifying those buyers, and converting those qualified buyers into customers. Many companies get bogged down in the middle step—qualifying—and lose sight of what’s most important to their lead generation strategy.
The first thing you need to do to generate leads for your business is to figure out where people can be found and how to reach them. Nowadays, various tools exist to help you generate quality leads – from social media marketing to content creation to inbound marketing. No matter what method you end up using, you need to ensure that you are finding the right types of people and reaching them with the right message.
In order to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your lead generation efforts, we’ve put together this guide on how to find the best type of leads for your business. In addition, we’ll go over some other tips and tricks that will help you improve your conversion rate. So, let’s dive in!
Why is lead generation marketing important?
Leads are the lifeblood of any business. Without leads, you have no sales and no income. The good news is that there’s a lot of money to be made in generating quality leads for your business.
The bad news is that it can take time and effort to generate these leads. It requires a great deal of research and planning before you even begin. In addition, you need to invest some serious resources into lead generation if you want to see results. Nevertheless, the benefits far outweigh the costs.
Why is lead quality important?
Often, one of the biggest challenges when trying to implement a lead generation process is the difference between the goals and KPIs of the marketers and sales teams.
Marketing teams often set targets for cost per lead (CPL), which incentivizes them to generate as many potential customers as possible within the marketing budgets.
On the other hand, if the sales team is passing through a large number of low-value prospects, then this won’t help them reach their target numbers. Instead, they’d rather be handed fewer but better-qualified prospects.
It’s important from the beginning to work together across departments so that you can clearly define what you want to accomplish from lead generation strategy, and also look at the ratio of leads that are considered “marketing qualified” versus “sales-ready.”
Lead qualification: Methods to identify high-quality leads
There are many different ways to qualify leads. You may use demographic information or behavioral data to determine who has the highest likelihood of becoming a customer. Or you could look at buying history or purchase intent to understand whether they are ready to buy now or not.
Regardless of which criteria you choose, you must be able to measure success so that you know exactly how well your lead generation campaign is working.
How to use Lead scoring for better quality leads
What is lead scoring
Lead scoring is the practice of assigning numeric scores to each lead generated by a company. These scores help sales and marketing teams prioritize their efforts, respond to them appropriately (or not), and increase the rate at which those prospects turn into actual clients.
Lead qualification methods
You can use Madkudu for scoring. With Madkudu, you can easily identify leads based on demographic and B2B attributes, and then link them to your customer base. From there, you can develop a probability of a sale.
They’re able to determine whether a new lead is likely to convert into a customer by comparing their data against the profiles of existing customers who converted.
Moreover, deanonymize your website visitors, leverage qualified tracking tools, and check which accounts visit your website, where they come from, why they meet ICPs, and what marketing activities drive them to your website.
Answering these questions will also help you to ensure your scoring model makes sense.
- What are the different types of people who visit your site? And what type of content do they view?
- Which sources or media were most effective at driving those target audiences to the pages you want them to see?
- As for which solutions they’re interested in, here, it’s very likely that you have a suite or products and multiple target markets and each one could be served by a different product or a separate solution. So, what we need to do is to measure the percentage of qualified leads and see where qualified traffic comes from.
B2B lead generation strategies that actually work
There are a ton of tried and tested strategies but the success rate of each lead generation strategy is fairly dependent on the type of business you are in.
Create useful, helpful, and high-quality content
To attract people to your content, you need to provide them with something they want to see. Your content needs to be relevant to your audience, and you need to include enough details so that readers can understand it. When you’re writing, remember that you’re writing for human beings, not search engines; don’t assume that just because you can’t explain something easily, others won’t either.
If you create valuable, informative, and entertaining articles for your target audience, they’ll be loyal to you. You’ll gain their trust faster if you write good-quality articles.
It’s also important to publish high-value content frequently. Frequent posting demonstrates your commitment to providing useful content for your target audience.
A report from HubSpot found that companies that post at least 16 blogs per month generate four and a half times more leads than those who post fewer than four blogs per month. It also showed that 47% of B2B buyers use blogs for researching and making buying decisions.
Significantly, B2B buyers typically consume at least three to six pieces of related content before reaching out to a salesperson. So leverage this information by creating more content more often so you can cater to their information needs.
Finally, while Moment Marketing is a great strategy to stay relevant or gain traction for a short period of time, coming up with evergreen topics in your niche is the best strategy to be seen by everyone regardless of their current level in the sales funnel.
Evergreen (or timeless) articles help you stay fresh on Google by providing useful, informative, and share-worthy material. They’re also helpful for SEO because they don’t go out of trend.
Use gated content at the right moment
Many marketers don’t know whether they should use gated content. However, using gated content is an effective way to determine which leads are interested in their business.
If you’ve already created some good-quality articles, then put them out for free as ungated first to create brand awareness. This will help you gain new followers who will be more willing to convert for gated content in the future, especially after consuming high-quality ungated content first.
Give away content in exchange for email addresses or personal information.
Use content offers that require user contacts to be able to view them. This will allow you to rapidly grow your email list and start the lead gen process. Give out different types of content including ebooks, guides, white papers, checklists, tutorials, and any other type of resource you can create that provides real added benefit to your audience.
You should use any additional methods for producing content, including newsletters, webinars, etc., but whatever you decide to create, make sure that it is actually helpful in the forms of education, problem-solution, or entertainment.
You’ll want to collect any necessary contact information from your visitors. However, you don’t want to require too many fields. Instead, just focus on collecting the information that your sales staff needs.
If your form is not user-friendly enough, people won’t want to sign up for your list.
Personalizing social media interactions and building communities
Social media isn’t just another way to publish or promote your articles. It’s actually good for business.
You’re now given an opportunity to connect with your audience. People spend an average of 7.6 hours a week on social networking sites, so take advantage of this.
You should be active and consistent across the social media channels you use to promote your brand. Choose at least three or four different social media channels depending on who your target audience is and where they typically spend their time online.
If you want to get started, you can create a Facebook group where you discuss pressing issues relevant to your field. Use hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to reach out to people who share similar interests or concerns.
LinkedIn marketing is so important because this social networking site is clearly the most effective way to reach out to business professionals and tell them more about our company. More than 80 percent of sales leads for companies come from LinkedIn, which shows just how powerful this tool is.
With every other marketeer reaching out on social media, simply connecting to potential customers is not enough. You need to reach out personally and connect with them to get their attention. Find out which communities they are hanging out in and be active in those groups too.
Search Engine Optimization
Is your site on the first page of google? More than 90% of users don’t go beyond the first page. That’s why a first page is a much-coveted place. SEO is all about relevancy and authoritativeness. And that’s how you should address your brand’s online assets.
It doesn’t really matter if there are lots of visitors to your web page initially, but what matters more is how this achievement can help provide greater credibility to you and your brand.
Over time, build out the right keywords
I’ve written more about various in-depth B2B lead generation strategies here
Conclusion
Lead generation is one of the best ways to generate qualified prospects for your business. The biggest challenge with lead generation is that currently marketers are using click-bait, uninteresting, and low-value offers to get leads. That causes a misconception that lead generation does not work, although the real reason is usually a flawed marketing strategy and/or lack of customer empathy.
Here’s a good follow-up on how to build a B2B marketing strategy.
