Lead Generation Tactics B2b

In today’s competitive business world, lead generation is considered one of the most effective and direct ways to find new clients. It provides you with many more chances to connect with a wide base of consumers that are actually interested in your products. And that’s without even mentioning how cost-effective it is.

B2B (Business to Business) lead generation is the exchange of money or some kind of a good, between two businesses with the purpose of satisfying specified objectives in future. This could help your marketing strategy to new heights. Lead generation tactics b2b are essential as 85% leads are generated from internet and therefore need to be generated from your website. These lead generation tactics b2b will make you familiar with tools and techniques that can help you generate business leads for your business.

With so many digital technologies and marketing tools at our disposal, it’s easy to believe that lead generation will be easier than ever. However, without a great strategy, the technologies are useless. For example, if your company is spending money on ads but not getting any new leads, or not enough of them to make an impact on your business growth, then you need to review your b2b lead generation strategy.

B2B lead generation tactics are more complex than B2C. There are a lot of nuances involved in B2B lead generation these days. You need to master the art of lead capturing and conversion. B2b lead generation is how you can get new customers and prospects. If you don’t know how to get new clients or generate new leads, you may want to check out these top b2b lead generation strategies today

What Are the Best B2B Lead Generation Ideas?

It’s time to look for lead generation ideas to enhance your B2B marketing efforts. There’s a long list to go through, so let’s jump right in!

Sometimes, visitors will leave your site before converting. So to help capture their information before they go, you can use exit-intent popups. These appear whenever a visitor is about to click away from your window. The goal is to entice them to share their information before they go. For example, you can offer a free download or discount code in exchange for their name and email address.

2. Use On-Site Retargeting to Re-engage Leads

Another way you can use exit-intent popups is to use retargeting methods. This involves using the visitors’ past site behavior to make recommendations. For instance, when a visitor is about to leave, you can have a popup appear showing a discount for a product they viewed.

3. Automate Your Email Marketing Campaigns

As a B2B marketer, you likely don’t have time to sit around sending out emails each day. And nor should you have to. With email marketing automation, you can drive traffic to your business with little effort. Just take a week to set up segments, write the emails, and choose activity triggers to determine when they send. For example, those who sign up for your newsletter will be placed in the lead nurturing campaign. Then a returning customer may receive an email with a discount code if they abandon their cart.

4. Use Case Studies to Encourage Purchases

Some of your leads are on the rocks about buying your product or service. So what can you do to convince them to convert? One way is to show proof of your product’s benefits. Case studies are excellent tools for proving the worth of your products and services. Consider adding them to your email campaigns, blog posts (as links or stories), and social media marketing (i.e., boosted posts or social ads).

Do you know which social media outlets your target audience uses the most? Then it’s time to take advantage of this knowledge by creating highly targeted social ad campaigns. Develop segments for the personas you’re targeting to create messaging and offers that resonate with each.

Social media platforms are excellent to use because millions of people use them daily. And it’s the same among B2B customers. You’ll find 55% of decision-makers using LinkedIn to vet organizations. So having a business profile filled with helpful posts will establish your company as a thought-leader. This may entice visitors to convert into leads and eventually into buyers.

7. Build a Business Blog to Drive More Interest

Blog content works because, when done right, it helps your audience to make decisions. Educational blog posts, such as how-to’s, tutorials, buying guides, and listicles are widely viewed because readers value them. By offering insights, you can build interest in your brand by becoming an industry expert.

8. Create More Content to Build More Traffic

Focus on generating more content for your blog to drive more engagement. Just make sure not to sacrifice quality and depth. Continue adding value to appeal to both users and search engines.

9. Optimize All of Your Content to Improve Your Ranking

Google and other search engines pick up all sorts of digital content. This includes press releases, blog posts, guest articles, photos, memes, videos, and infographics. Whatever content forms you use, optimize them all with relevant keywords so they’re ranked and found by your target audience.

B2B customers enjoy long-form content because they’re more likely to be highly informative. This is why you’ll find long-form posts between 1,900 and 2,000 words performing the best on LinkedIn.

11. Add Push Notifications to Extend Reach

The beauty of push notifications is it gives brands permission to reach out to website visitors on mobile devices. So after a mobile user leaves your site, you can continue sending notifications about deals and new blog posts to get visitors to return.

12. Write Q&A Style Blog Posts to Build Expert Status

Your audience has questions and your brand has the answers. At least, that’s what you want to portray to build your reputation as an expert. So add Q&A style posts to your lead generation strategy. You can find questions on Quora, social media, comments, and from your customer support team.

13. Perform Market Research to Inform Your Audience

Your audience should turn to you when they want information and advice. By offering market research reports, you can showcase your brand as a trusted industry leader and advisor.

There’s nothing like having social proof to showcase the quality of your products and services. Consider adding testimonials to your email campaigns, website, landing page, and social media profiles.

15. Develop Lead-Gen Offers that Are Irresistible

If you study your B2B audience’s habits and interests, you should know what they need (and want). Use this information to create a lead magnet they’ll want to download (i.e., guide, checklist, template, eBook, course, etc.).

16. Create PPC Ads On Google to Drive More Traffic

Google continues to reign supreme as the go-to search engine. So consider creating PPC ads here to drive more leads to your business. Be sure to optimize your landing pages for each target group.

17. Use FOMO to Entice Leads to Convert

The fear of missing out (FOMO) continues to be a driving force for converting leads. You can do this by adding timers to your emails and website that contain offers. Or you can offer limited-time discounts or products.

18. Run A/B Tests to Improve Lead Conversions

Some headlines, copy, and offers work better than others. The best way to find out is to run A/B tests to see what performs best. Do this for your web copy, ads, email campaigns, and CTAs.

19. Create a Free Course as a Lead Magnet to Entice Leads

B2B customers value education, especially when it’s free. Consider ways to train your audience on relevant topics. For instance, how to achieve a result using your product or service. Or it can be more subtle with your product/service CTA at the end of the course.

You want to collect leads for your email campaign. But to do this, you need an enticing offer. Why should they add another weekly/monthly newsletter to their inbox? If you offer credible insider insights, then that’ll make it worth their while.

What is B2B lead generation, and what makes it different?

B2B lead generation is short for business-to-business lead generation, which describes businesses that primarily sell to (*drumroll please*) other businesses.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And in a typical marketing funnel or sales process, B2B lead generation is that step.

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.

B2C and B2B businesses also find leads in different places — which means if you’re trying to find potential customers with the same strategies as a B2C e company, you’re going to fail.

According to Hubspot, the three best lead sources for B2B companies are SEO (14%), email marketing (13%), and social media (12%).

B2C, on the other hand, gets more leads from traditional advertising, social media, and email.

It’s not just where leads come from — the nurturing process between B2B and B2C is also quite different, which is why marketers have to start on the right foot.

The B2B lead generation process

Learning how to get leads is just one part of the process.

If you’re serious about increasing sales, you’ll need an intense lead generation process. Processes align marketing and sales teams and give reps a proven framework to follow.

We know that B2B lead generation describes the process used by sales/marketing teams to turn prospects into paying customers. But what do these steps entail?

Step 1: Find B2B leads

The first step in most B2B lead generation strategies is finding the contact information of potential buyers. (Luckily, that’s what we’re covering 😏)

Contact information is often sourced in-house, generated by a third-party “lead gen” company, or bought from a lead database (not advisable for B2B lead generation).

Step 2: Reaching out to leads

With a list of (hopefully) high-quality leads, reps reach out to leads through cold outreach, social media, or by replying to inquiries.

Step 3: Qualifying & prospecting high-quality leads

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:

1. Research & awareness: The 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.

2. Consideration: The lead knows the exact service/product that’s needed. They’ll detail their specific needs before researching and “opening up” to vendors.

3. Decision: 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.

Step 4: Close leads by making a sale

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!

Lead Generation Strategies with Examples

What’s a marketing team to do? The lead gen strategies below may be new to you or a simple refresher, plus we threw in some B2B lead gen tips. And as a bonus, a suggested tool for each that can help you pull it all off without a hitch.

1. Create Compelling Content

The first step to creating compelling content is to know your audience. You should have customer profiles or personas to start. Curate the content they want based on keywords they’re already searching. Sometimes it’s going to take more than a well-written article to pull them in, though.

Consider what your buyer needs to make their job easier. What can you provide them that inspires them to gladly fork over their contact info? Make it relevant to them, to your business, and make it irresistible.

Lead Forensics speaks directly to its lead and prospect. The article covers data security, which is important to anyone working in sales and marketing. Oh, and look at that form to the right and above the fold. Nice.

Use this tool: Hubspot. If you’re already using CRM software you like, then ignore us here. But Hubspot is a great all-in-one solution you can use for campaigns, web forms, and a CMS for all the compelling content you’re going to create. Plus, you can create B2B thank you pages that don’t suck.

2. Make It Easier for Leads to Book a Demo

Many B2B buyers have lost a bit more time of their day to all the research they’re doing before they make a decision. To stand out to your leads, do everything you can to reduce friction. Make it easy for leads to work with you—that starts with your first interaction.

As you saw in the strategy above, Lead Forensics went with a classic web form approach, which works well for inbound lead generation. But how quickly do you think someone books a demo after filling out the form? Whatever your answer is, you have to be faster. It’s a race to convert.

Use this tool: Chili Piper’s Concierge turns a web form into a conversation (no, that’s not a typo of conversion—but yeah, that’s where it’s going). A prospect can request a demo from a web form, and Chili Piper puts the power of scheduling in their hands. If they can meet now, great! If not, they choose a time and date that works for them.

3. Collaborate With Like-Minded Companies

When you find a company that aligns with yours, it’s like kismet. You likely share a similar audience, so you can easily create a collaboration or co-partnership that just makes sense.

One of the best examples of this is the partnership between processor giant Intel and PC & laptop manufacturer Dell. The all-in-one computers were easy sells, and the campaigns they launched together created a sense of exclusivity and superiority.

Use this tool: There’s probably a business matchmaking service out there, but honestly, you can’t go wrong with some old-fashioned industry research and networking. One of the best tools we’re all using is LinkedIn.

4. Test Everything—No, Seriously

We already established that you’re doing A/B testing. No marketer worth their salt would stick to one landing page with one call-to-action for all their leads. So, this isn’t a tip to do split testing, rather it’s a tip to split test everything—even the bits you think aren’t worth it.

Swap the color of your buttons; try a different font for your CTA message; change “your” to “my”; resize, recolor, reformat—try and test everything, a little at a time until you find the right combo. It might surprise you what makes a difference in your CTR and demo requests.

Use this tool: Create popups, sticky bars, landing pages and test them all easily with a landing page platform like Unbounce. It’s one of the best demand gen tools you can use.

If you’re going to borrow from the B2C playbook, the social media strategy might be a good one. Social media platforms are great for directly connecting with your fans, prospects, and leads. More than ever, consumers (B2C and B2B alike) are demanding better customer experience from businesses.

Like content creation, you need to know your audience in social. Snark works for some, but could backfire for others. The takeaway is, you should use social media for more than promotion. Use it to build trust and brand awareness (and loyalty for some) with your audience.

Use this tool: Hootsuite makes it easy for you to streamline and automate all of your social media stuff. You’ll be able to add all your profiles and see responses to posts, mentions, and more. You can schedule posts, and respond to people from a single dashboard.

Conclusion

Nowadays, generating leads for your business has become more and more challenging because of the highly competitive market we are in. It can be tough to find new customers and convert them into buyers. Therefore, I’m here to tell you that generating leads is absolutely crucial for your business growth and success. But, not just any lead will do. You need to generate qualified leads that are ready for your sales team to contact so that you can close deals and make more money.

B2B Lead Generation is a specific type of sales process designed with intention to find potential customers and convert them into buyers. There are various steps to generate these target customer leads such as demand generation, lead nurturing, lead qualification, etc. If you have any question or query regarding these B2B Lead Generation topics then please ask in comments.