Lead generation strategies are the most crucial ingredient for the success of the business. However, the process of choosing a lead generation strategy can be challenging. It requires businesses to design a stellar lead generation process, which varies from industry to industry. Once the lead generation process is in place, the key is to build trust with potential leads, a vital step that reassures them about your business.
Painstakingly, B2B lead generation is an elaborate process, which is why 61% of marketers consider it a prominent problem. That is precisely the reason why we have put together this blog. It contains all the vital information related to lead generation strategies B2B needs to beat competitors and grow.
What is B2B Lead Generation?
B2B lead generation is a process of luring the target audience (organizations) to develop an interest in your products/services so that they get induced to make a purchase and end up as your prospective customers.
B2C lead generation revolves around luring customers (individuals) to develop an interest in your offerings, eventually enticing them to make a purchase and become loyal customers. You can see there is a fundamental similarity; however, when you dig deeper intricate details it differentiates B2B lead generation from B2C lead generation.
Let’s find out the differences between the B2B lead generation and B2C lead generation from the below table.
Hopefully, now you have a clear idea of what is B2B lead generation and how it differs from B2C lead generation. The next question in the row for any B2B organization is where they will find their B2B leads.
Voila! Ideal Customer Profile:
Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP) are prospects your organization wants to attract the most to sell your products and services. It is a very commonly used term in B2B marketing, and in the context of B2B, ICP refers to the “company profiles”. For instance, our organization provides industry databases, with accurate and reliable company profiles for B2B companies.
According to research, organizations that have created an ICP have experienced 68% higher win rates than organizations that haven’t. Find relevant information for the following criteria to create your organization’s ICP.
- Company size and industry your organization wants to target.
- Job title of professionals who will make the purchasing decision.
- Average time taken by the professionals to complete the decision making process.
- Average sale cycle length for a prospect to make an investment.
- What types of technology and software are used by the specific key professionals?
- Specific legal implications followed in the particular industry your organization is planning target.
- Pain points experienced by your target audience.
The above mentioned aspects will help enterprises find one or more ideal customer profiles. Strive to come up with multiple ideal customer profiles, because no organization can outrun their competitors with a single ICP (Single ICP caters to one particular job role and set of demographics).
With multiple Ideal Customer profiles, the possibility of reaching out to a vast demographic multiply. Thereby, it won’t limit your organization in the search process of finding worthwhile leads for your organization.
Readers you have reached a pinnacle point, as from here on till the penultimate topic we discuss about the best lead generation strategies B2B companies need. Given the fact that, 50% treat generating leads as their top most priority.
What are the Best Lead Generation Strategies B2B Companies Must Leverage?
When you narrow down multiple ICPs for your organization, it will help you understand that a universal lead generation strategy won’t initiate a steady lead flow. Two different approaches are necessary to meet the desired objective of an enterprise.
Two Types of Lead Generation Strategies:
- Inbound Lead Generation Strategy
- Outbound Lead Generation Strategy
What is Inbound Lead Generation?
Inbound lead generation is the creation of campaigns that attract traffic to your website and convert it into leads. The essential part of inbound lead generation is that the prospective leads control when, how, and whether they want to interact with your content and provide the necessary contact information.
Five Striking Inbound Lead Generation Strategies:
1 Content Market:
A. Creating High Value Content:
Content is the driving force for a successful inbound campaign. Publishing blogs, whitepapers, case studies and videos at a regular interval can help you get 50% more clicks, at the same time educate your prospects about your products and services. So ensure you provide content that delivers value for prospects to stay engaged, support growth of your brand and driving opportunities.
B. SEO & Organic Traffic:
Creating valuable content is a must, but one cannot avoid the significance of SEO as it helps the content to rank. Did you know 95% of the search traffic goes to the first page of the SERP? Blog like the one you are reading now is a great way to be found on SERP. Secondly when you use SEO, attracting and converting inbound prospect becomes cost effective.
The below image provides insight about how your organization can refine SEO practices.
2 Email Marketing:
A. Grow your email list:
Many businesses consider email is an outdated technology, but it’s a misconception, because for every one dollar spent, email marketers make an ROI of $42. Therefore you can say an email list is the most valuable strategy for inbound lead generation. Don’t miss out to glance at the image below, it has few valuable tips to grow your email list.
B. Nurturing Your Leads:
Once your email list is prepared remember you don’t want to spam your prospects by flooding their inboxes. Instead, the emails must add value to their business objective. How? By engaging your prospects with factual content and enticing them with right offers, will encourage your leads to interact with your brand further. Making the leads familiar with your brand is one of the first steps for lead generation.
Remember, nurturing leads with emails is a continuous process and when done the right way it get 10X response rate, compared to stand alone email blast. Here are some tips to nurture your leads with the best email practices.
3 Social Media Marketing:
A. Building Brand Presence:
The social media platforms your business leverages should be fully optimized with the right keywords and hyperlinks to redirect users back to your website. It is one of the crucial inbound lead generation strategies B2B companies need, as 60% of B2B marketers consider social media a vital component for business growth. Utilize it to communicate and engage with niche audiences, helping your business stay relevant, drive traffic, and also gain insights about prospective clients.
B. LinkedIn & Other Platforms for B2B Lead Generation:
LinkedIn has become the most trustworthy platform for the B2B sector, as 4 out of 5 leads come from this platform. The very reason why 65% of marketers have expressed that they are willing to increase their LinkedIn usage, as it drives lead gen.
Apart from LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube also add value to lead generation process. So post relevant tweets and video content on Twitter and YouTube respectively. Ensure the post on the platform is properly linked back to the website to bring in a steady flow of traffic.
4. Webinars and Other Virtual Events
Educational Webinars:
Educational Webinars allow organizations to connect with the audience and engage on a personal level. It can help you establish yourself as a thought leader with expertise on a particular topic and, in addition, boost website traffic by more than 100%. Webinars have the potential to be promoted through emails, social media, and other channels. Can also be embedded on your website to give a quantifiable push to the traffic generation.
Apart from webinars, take part in and organize other virtual events, such as conferences, summits, exhibitions, and online trade shows. These events enable your organization to reach out to a vast number of ICPs; it’s cost-effective and also flexible.
5. Word of Mouth:
A. Encouraging Customers Referrals:
As an organization when you want to generate lead through referrals, the core part of the process depends upon the WOM marketing. In other words you have to ask your satisfied clients to promote your business within their network. If you haven’t yet probed your loyal clients to promote your business, it’s high time to urge them to do so, because 78% of the B2B marketers consider that referral program generates good or excellent leads.
B. Leveraging Reviews and Testimonials:
92.4% of the B2B buyers is more likely to make an investment, when they read a noteworthy review. That’s why not having a review is as bad as having a lot of negative reviews. Therefore, urge your clients to put forward genuine reviews of your products and services.
Additionally a good review can be converted into a testimonial. After choosing the right review, you will have to seek permission from the concerned person to use their words and name online. Testimonials can be created in a video format, as in recent times, 79% of the people watch testimonial videos and learn about different product and services.
These are top five effective inbound lead generation strategies B2B companies should focus on to achieve desired business goals. To wound-up we have provided a case study below that show cases the significance of inbound lead generation strategies.
Case Study:
Problem Statement:
Intuit Inc. It is a multinational business software company in America, and its area of specialization is financial software. Designed an Intuit Website Builder and needed help marketing it to the right audience.
Idea:
Intuit Inc’s collaboration with Single Grain, a digital marketing agency, added 3.08M impressions to Intuit’s website using the right SEO strategies.
Solution:
Single Grain implemented a few result-driven SEO strategies, helping Intuit market its product to the right demographic. Find out more about it in the table below.
What is Outbound Lead Generation?
Outbound lead generation is all about how you leverage the interest of potential customers by reaching out to them through effective strategies such as, cold calling, advertisements, cold email, etc. Therefore outbound lead generation is also referred as “interruption lead generation”.
Three Striking Outbound Lead Generation Strategies:
1 Cold Calling:
Cold calling is an outbound lead generation technique that has been around for years, because it’s a tactic which works really well. It is a sales practice to contact individuals how have not shown interest in your products and service. 49% of buyers prefer initial contact via cold calls, most likely because these calls are done after heavy research about the prospect. When done the right way a sales representative gets to learn a lot from just from one call, and at the same time book a demo or a meeting with a prospect.
2 Paid advertisement:
Paid advertisements are run on several platforms: email, social media, websites, and other channels. The advertisements intend is to spread awareness by promoting the organization’s message to a wide range of prospects. As you must note, 15% of the website traffic comes from paid search.
Many organizations attest that LinkedIn ads have been quite fullfilling, pushing the purchase intent by 33%. The below image highlights the benefits of LinkedIn Ads and takes you through different types of LinkedIn Ads.
3 Cold Email:
Cold email is sometimes referred to as outbound email. The sales or marketing representative send outbound emails to prospective clientele to increase conversations and engagement. The organizations whose outreach efforts are executed with the help of an email list are able to attain quantifiable results for cold email campaigns.
It is one of the positively impactful ways to generate leads, as 23% of the executives are more likely to answer emails. Which is why so many organizations depend on cold email to generate potential leads. The marketing and sales representatives have to remember that the best kind of cold emails are the ones from which prospects can benefit. So, if you are drafting a cold email, ensure it resonates with the prospect’s needs, showing how your product or service can add value to your prospect’s business.
These are the three outbound lead generation strategies B2B organization can leverage. Let’s understand this better with a case study that highlights the significance of LinkedIn paid advertisement.
Case Study:
Problem Statement:
ESCP is a French business school founded in Paris. Established in 1819, it is considered to be one of the world’s oldest business schools. It struggled to generate the right number of scholarship applicants.
Idea:
ESCP Improves Lead Generation Strategy via LinkedIn Ads:
Solution:
With LinkedIn Ads, ESCP was able to generate a conversion rate of 14%. Find more details in the below table.
Here we have covered up the two main sub-categories in lead generation strategies. The leads generated through any of the pipeline are either marketing qualified lead (MQL) or sales qualified lead (SQL). Below we have described in brief MQL and SQL in the image, please have a look.
Tracking down the category where the leads belong is a useful insight for both sales and marketing teams, as the conversion rate goes up by 73%.
So, is that all when one talks about lead generation strategies B2B companies need to know? In a nutshell, Yes! With strategies mentioned above, organizations will be able to generate good quality and quantity leads.
Our step-by-step procedure, comprehensive guide that covers every aspect of the lead generation process. It starts with defining your ideal customer profile, then moves on to choosing strategies to kick-start your lead generation process, and finally, it guides you through lead qualification and ongoing prospecting efforts, ultimately leading to a successful deal closure.
Best Lead Generation Tools:
76% of the companies used marketing automation tools in recent times, typically because it optimizes the process of attracting potential clients. Below is the list that can help analyze the type of tool you will need as an organization, how it will benefit you, and where to look for it.
| Category | Best For | Tool Names |
|---|---|---|
| Email Follow-Up Tools | These tools will help you to keep track of your outreach efforts. | Boomerang for Gmail, HubSpot Sales, Yet Another Mail Merge |
| Email Marketing Tools |
|
ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, Brevo |
| Social Media Tools |
|
Vyper, Gleam, Rafflecopter, RafflePress |
| Landing Page Capture |
|
Unbounce, Instapage, Leadpages, ClickFunnels, SeedProd, WPForms |
| Scheduling Calls and Meeting Tools | Help you organize and streamline your meetings and calls | Calendly, Doodle, Limecall |
| Website Visit Identification Tool |
|
Overloop, D & B Hoovers |
| Complete Marketing Automation |
|
HubSpot, Adobe Marketo Engage, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), Keap, SharpSpring, Constant Contact |
| Survey Tools |
|
ProProfs Survey Maker, Crystal, Qualaroo, Survicate, Google Forms, Extole, Survey Monkey |
| Sales Process Automation Tools |
|
IFTTT, Zapier, OnePageCRM, Nimble, HubSpot Sales, Pipedrive, LinkedIn Sales Navigator |
| Live Chat Software & Live Chat Tools |
|
Intercom, Tawk.to, Acquire, CallPage |
| Sales Lead Generation Tools | Responsible for collecting emails on your site to build your email list, either for future drip campaigns or content promotion | Snov.io, Global Database, Sumo, ConvertPlus, LeadQuizzes |
Future trends in Lead Generation:
Lead Generation will always remain a critical aspect of B2B business, but with advancement in technologies, lead generation techniques should also improve. Some of the promising trends in this domain is artificial intelligence, big data and augmented reality.
Future Role of AI in B2B Lead Generation:
- Artificial intelligence has already established its significance in the world of business; 35% of the companies globally use AI. So there’s no doubt that lead generation can enhance with AI.
- AI can upgrade the lead scoring process, then AI can heighten the chatbots performance. Not only can it be used for 24/7, but it can provide instant responses and, at the same time, capture lead information efficiently.
- As per statistical forecast 55% of the B2B marketers in US were able to generate new leads with the help of chatbots. These chatbots in future powered by superior AI, will be able to provide personalized responses and capture leads information. The natural language processing capacity will enable the nurturing of lead without human intervention.
Future Role Augmented Reality in B2B Lead Generation:
- The user penetration rate of augmented reality (AR) is estimated to be 5% by 2029. Why if you are wondering? AR is an interactive experience that combines real-world and computer generated 3D content, increasing the relevancy of a product or service to an infinite level.
- In future when business start integrating AR it will deliver immersive and interactive experience giving the lead generation process the necessary boost of 40% conversion rate.
Future Role Big Data in B2B Lead Generation:
- Data is the new gold as it provides means to identify new opportunities and trends proactively. Big data can use various data sets to create reports, graphs and other visualization.
- The top benefits of Big Data offers businesses the following benefits: better strategic decisions (69%), better understanding of customers (52%), and improvement in operational process by (54%). As for the organizations that can analyze their big data report (10%) cost reduction and (8%) revenue boost.
Conclusion:
We hope our article helps you crack the code of effective lead generation strategies B2B companies require. However, figuring out the plan that will work the best for the organization will need your endless patience and dedication. Most of the time, organizations have to opt for a multifaceted approach, as there is no one solution to lead gen woes.
Why not put the strategies mentioned above into practice and measure the results for yourself? Optimize your content on the website, refine your email marketing campaigns, be available on social media, conduct webinars, and ask your loyal customers to promote your brand. Don’t miss out on incorporating cold calling, paid advertisement, and cold email. Analyze the results obtained through these lead generation strategies to discover areas of improvement and then refine the tactics as required.
