Everyone is talking about lead generation services these days. Everyone from company board members to random bloggers. Does the phrase send shivers down your spine? Does it make you shake with anxiety and stress? Are you left wondering what exactly lead generation services are and why they cost so much? Let me answer all of your questions in a way that’s easy to understand.
DEFINITION
Lead generation is a marketing activity that results in acquiring information useful for building a list of potential clients.
Today, the key channels for lead gen can be divided into two: online and offline. Some examples of online lead generation channels would include your blog and website, ads and SEO. The more commonly used offline channels are direct mail, trade shows and cold calling.
But before we get to talking about lead generation channels and strategies, let’s take a brief look at the importance of lead generation.
Last updated: November 30, 2021
I’m going to let you in on a secret: if you’re looking for B2B lead generation strategies, well, there’s no magic bullet. No button you can push. But you already knew that.
You’ve probably already read a handful of articles, giving you lists of things you can try, without much context. Well, you’ll find a list here too, but I want to try and put things into context a bit, before diving into the list.
If you’re a B2B marketer, or salesperson, feeding the lead machine probably keeps you up at night. Sales-qualified leads are the lifeblood of nearly every business, both online and off.
P.S. Find a TL;DR summary in the end of the post if you’re in a rush.
What is lead generation?
To start with the basics, let’s get the definition of lead generation out of the way. According to Webopedia:
DEFINITION
Lead generation is a marketing activity that results in acquiring information useful for building a list of potential clients.
Today, the key channels for lead gen can be divided into two: online and offline. Some examples of online lead generation channels would include your blog and website, ads and SEO. The more commonly used offline channels are direct mail, trade shows and cold calling.
But before we get to talking about lead generation channels and strategies, let’s take a brief look at the importance of lead generation.
Lead generation is key to business success
In a recent research report, Copper and Outfunnel asked B2B sales and marketing leaders what they consider the key metrics for business success.
The number 1 metric? Quality of leads.
But where do B2B companies get high quality leads?
The state of lead gen in 2021: what are the best sources of leads?
Everyone in B2B probably spends a lot of time in meetings, on Zoom calls, discussing where to get more high-quality prospective leads. Or where existing leads are coming from.
But want to know another secret? Even the biggest names in the business don’t really know where their leads are coming from. Take a look at the graph below. It’s no surprise that all forms of inbound marketing do well for generating B2B leads, with email marketing and SEO (organic search and content marketing) leading the way.
Then cast your eyes to the right. “Other” is a semi-scientific way of saying: “Erm, we don’t know”.
Long story short: if you don’t know where your leads are coming from, you’re not alone. The blurriness of today’s digital landscape can make attribution really hard. Different devices, people logged in or not logged in. Using different browsers on different machines.
This makes it easy to get lost in a time sink where you’re endlessly hunting for total clarity when, really, your time is better spent planning your next move.
And remember, effective B2B lead generation is the sum of many moving parts, relying on planning and, frankly a ton of effort. For every story you hear of explosive, overnight growth from a single landing page or marketing campaign, there are a million more success stories that have been the result of consistent hard work.
And besides, those “overnight success stories” are very rarely as instantaneous as we’re led to believe. As this long process of B2B lead generation is all about hard work and trials, a business process management discipline would be really helpful to analyze, improve and automate it.
So, with this list I’m not saying “do all of these things and $$$$”. I’m saying build your lead generation strategy around your target audience, ability, and budget.
Without further ado, let’s jump in and look at online B2B lead generation ideas.
Online B2B lead generation strategies
Looking for leads online? Here’s some ideas to generate leads in the digital world. And while some of them may seem obvious, sometimes it’s worth reminding ourselves that the answers are less complicated than they might seem.
1. Good ol’ email marketing
I have a lot of conversations with business people who are looking for some input on their marketing and, generally, it goes something like this:
“I don’t really have enough time or money for marketing, what can I do to get more leads without having to drop a lot of cash?”
My response: content and, most importantly, email.
According to Emma, 59% of marketers point to email as being their best channel for revenue generation. Okay, if you have someone on your email list of subscribers, they’re already potentially a lead, but email is vital for establishing (with little hands-on sales work and lead scoring in place) whether those marketing leads are actually viable.
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Content brings in the volume, email helps you sort the wheat from the chaff. And, yes, you can use cold email outreach to generate sales leads. Done properly (read: not spamming people), it can absolutely get those leads flowing in.
And, speaking of cold emails.
2. If you do cold email, put in the effort
Cold email is probably the most abused channel these days. Smart email marketers know to put in the effort, if and when they use cold email.
The first thing to work on is building a quality list of email addresses. You can use a tool like Voila Norbert for that or explore other ways to find people’s email addresses.
And then comes the crucial part: properly cleaning the email list before even going near any email sending tools.
In fact, the only way to get good results with cold email is to first build a high-quality list. For example, Outfunnel recently launched the company’s first cold email campaign and the 33-51% open rates and 3-6% engagement rates (respectable results, no?) were direct results of the effort that went into cleaning and vetting the list.
Then, your emails need to stand out. In Outfunnel’s cold email experiment, personalization proved to be effective but at the minimum you can be “creative”.
Don’t be afraid to be different. Unusual, even. I would much rather drop in some quirkiness and have someone message me back, calling me out on using “quirky lead generation tactics” than be lost against a background of beige noise.
In this particular example, I said “let’s have a 26 minute call” to the cold leads, rather than a round number, and ended up getting called out on it. But the overall response rate went up by around 10-15% versus the “let’s have a quick call” version.
Don’t let the MBA write your cold outbound emails. Not that there’s anything wrong with MBA’s in particular, it’s just you often find a certain type of cold email, full of “synergizing business goals” and buzzwords coming from MBA-types. Let your creative people get their hands on the email copy and let them be creative.
Use images, gifs and experiment with pattern interrupts, something that breaks the regular pattern of a cold email and grabs the attention of cold leads.
3. High quality content marketing (think eBooks, whitepapers and webinars)
Valuable content can be awesome for B2B lead generation, but it comes with an armful of caveats. Good quality content arguably requires an order of magnitude more planning, resources, and just hard work than, say email.
High-quality case studies, infographics, eBooks and white papers can sometimes take months to put together, if you include the time it takes to gather data, analyze it then package all your findings into something actually useful.
Not to mention webinars or podcasts!
I’m not trying to scare you off using content to generate inbound leads, you absolutely should be doing it. Just spend a little bit more time planning it. Think “would I hand over my email address for this?”. Ask other people the same question.
A particular favourite is taking some data that you may have within your business, anonymizing it, then doing a deep dive analysis.
Another favourite is taking whaterver original know-how you have and turning that into a resource. For example, Outfunnel’s CEO created a B2B email marketing course last year. He has 20+ years of experience in B2B marketing, and from customer interactions, it was clear that many need guidance.
While the course did take several weeks to put together and polish, it does serve two goals really well. First, Outfunnel’s customer success team can share it with all the users who have less experience with email marketing, helping them win more. And second, as word about it spread, it delivered more than 400 highly qualified warm leads in just a few months.
And if you think all of this sounds too daunting or you don’t have resources available in-house, reach out to some freelancers and ask for help. There are armies of stellar marketers out there just itching to help you.
4. Better blogging
A common complaint I hear, mainly from sales-focused people is that their blog doesn’t generate enough leads. Either it’s not getting enough traffic, or it’s getting traffic that’s not converting into business results.
Well, here’s a slightly unhelpful, but somewhat necessary tip for you:
Be better.
Have a plan, and execute it well. Stop regurgitating other peoples’ opinions and start sharing your own experience. Write posts as a person, to be read by other people.
Great content doesn’t happen overnight, but with persistence it really can be the pillar of your B2B lead generation efforts.
A well thought out content marketing plan featuring an SEO-optimized blog will bring you the traffic and help them towards the bottom of the funnel at the conversion rates you like. Just don’t forget to plug in some CTAs to help convert visitors into leads.
5. Tap into online social media communities (Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Reddit)
Generally speaking, social media marketing has a bad rap when it comes to B2B lead gen.
The truth is, social networks can be a great source of leads if you know where to look. And I strongly recommend looking into online communities on social media platforms where your target customers hang out.
More often than not though, a lot of these groups will forbid directly promotional content — always check the rules before posting something (on Reddit you can take a look at the sidebar, usually).
So how can you use these online communities for lead generation? Well, hunt down a few groups that seem relevant to the problem you’re trying to solve. Think “where do my prospective customers hang out?”. Take a look, go through the post history — make sure it’s not all spam, for example.
Then get subscribed and start engaging. Post questions, answer other people’s questions. A lot of groups you will actually find decision-makers posting looking for exactly the kind of thing you’re offering. Just direct message them (and make sure to reply to them in the comments, otherwise — on Facebook at least — they might not see the message).
Let’s take Web Design as an example.
I threw “web design and development” into the Facebook Groups search and these are the groups I found:
Best Web Designing & Development in WordPress And OpenCart
Web Development & Web Designing
There were a couple more but they were private (always worth asking to join though). Of those two, within the last 24 hours (at the time of writing) there were 4 different requests for web design and development services.
Literally, potential leads, just sitting there.
6. Build your own online community
Not only can having your own social netowork community bring in business leads as prospective customers, it also allows you to really cement yourself as a thought leader.
My biggest piece of upfront advice here though would be—if you’re looking at this as a lead generation tool—don’t approach it from a branding perspective at all. Name it something not linked to your company at all.
Post as yourself, build your personal brand. Your own community is the perfect place to share unique content and target people who are likely having the specific problem you’re looking to solve.
What’s more, if you’re an early-stage, SaaS-type business, it’s often the perfect way of nurturing early adopters than you can later become your “brand champions” or influencers.
A word of caution though; communities like this will take time to grow. They, much like the content you will need to produce to feed them, are an investment in their own right. And once they get to the sort of scale you need for them to become a legitimate source of leads, you might even need to have a dedicated person to manage the community itself.
Although the amount of detail lead generation services give away in their branding varies, there are a few common denominators that most quality companies offer their clients. Here’s a breakdown.
1. Database marketing
Sheer reach is the primary value proposition that lead gen agencies offer to in-house marketing teams. Any agency worth your time will have massive databases of business and professional information. These information resources arm lead generation vendors with the means to target and personalize marketing campaigns on a level that’s simply out of reach for most in-house marketers.
As a result, lead gen agencies can customize campaigns they run for their clients using a relatively vast range of criteria, which translates into precise targeting.
Traditional inbound programs produce an amalgamation of opportunities and then use lead nurturing and other marketing techniques to obtain the information needed to identify leads who fit the right buyer personas. The databases lead gen providers have at their disposal expedite much of this information gathering and jump right to identifying which leads have buying intent.
How did these agencies obtain all of this information?
According to John Fedrick on Quora, lead generation services build their databases from a variety of sources, including social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and list acquisition.
2. Content syndication
So if the database does the targeting, then what actually makes people convert? This is where content syndication comes in.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, content syndication is essentially pushing your content to other channels in order to increase brand awareness and drive traffic back to your own site.
Traditionally, this has been accomplished by taking posts that have already been published on your site and partnering with other blogs to get them to post the piece. RSS feeds are another common medium for syndication, but these are done with the hope that larger sites will find the content interesting and pick it up.
But even if you do get your content published on a partner site, there are still several degrees of separation between the blog post you’ve syndicated and the action you want visitors to take.
Also, you may be able to broadly ascertain the readership of the blog, but you’ll still need to put up sorting mechanisms (such as progressive profiling) to separate leads who will never meet your criteria from those that do.
Lead generation services may use some of the previously mentioned syndication techniques, but they’ll likely use email to disseminate your content throughout their gargantuan network. And each email campaign will be hyper-targeted—thanks to the powerful data infrastructure these organizations bring to bear.
Why do they use email? Because it’s still one of the most effective mediums for generating leads.
Via The 2020 Chief Marketer B2B Marketing Outlook Survey
3. Telemarketing
Yes, telemarketing. It may have a less than sterling reputation in the consumer market, but B2B telemarketing is usually viewed in a different light.
While consumer telemarketing is usually predicated on regional and demographic data, B2B telemarketing uses firmographic data to better target leads. In fact, an SCI survey of 200 department managers found that only four percent found sales calls at work to be annoying, compared to 35 percent who found telemarketing annoying outside of the work environment:
The difference in setting heavily influences the respondents’ perspectives. At work, department managers expect to field sales calls, and in some cases these calls may provide new product or industry information the manager wasn’t aware of.
This willingness to participate in sales calls is one of the reasons Marketing Charts ranked phone calls as the second-best way for B2B salespeople to reach prospects besides referrals.
The goal of telemarketing campaigns can vary, but the most common goal is to set appointments for conversations with your sales team. The scripts and processes associated with telemarketing programs are typically proprietary, so you’ll need to talk through the details of this strategy with your service provider.
4. Lead nurturing
The previous two strategies, telemarketing and content syndication, are both outbound strategies, but that’s not the only type of outsourced lead generation available. Certain lead generation vendors have inbound programs set up that nurture leads from the top of the funnel to toward the buying stages at the bottom.
Again, the details of lead nurturing programs are less clear, because agencies may use these programs as a means to develop leads to sell to their clients or they may simply do lead nurturing for their own internal purposes.
However, if you find a vendor who does offer this service to their clients, then you’d be wise to learn more about their product offering, because nurtured leads with detailed contact information are much more likely to convert than leads at the top of the funnel.
Of course, these four offerings only scratch the surface of what the outsourced lead generation market offers. However, they do supply you with a solid framework for understanding the types of services in which these organizations specialize. Make sure to develop standards for ROI and test the ability of a company to work within your specifications when choosing a vendor.
Here are the five steps to more effective lead generation:
1. Acquire Leads
“The lead generation process starts by finding out where your target market ‘lives’ on the web.” – Wayne Davis
Begin by attracting leads to your website by generating engaging content that can be shared throughout your various marketing channels. Create content about your business in the form of eBooks, blog posts, white papers, photos, infographics or whatever else that would fit your business and your audience. Distribute this content across your blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare, other social channels, email and where ever your potential customers are active.
Some of your content should be short form, like blog posts, tweets, photos and short video clips, that requires no barrier to read, view or consume, while some of your content should be longer form that requires a sign up form to access like an eBook, free course, whitepaper, infographic or an instructional video. Once a lead has made it to the point of interest in viewing a long form piece of content, they fill out a sign up form becoming a part of your contact management system, email list or both. This visitor is now a newly acquired lead.
2. Nurture Existing Leads
“Making your prospects feel like they have an exclusive membership in a club makes lead generation a positive customer experience.” – Eric Brower
Once a lead is a part of your lead management system or email list, it is important to continually nurture them to ensure they move through the sales funnel when the time is right or to encourage another purchase. Retaining their interest in being part of your email list is vital. It’s time to work to build this lead into a long-term relationship that involves both trust and loyalty with your business.
Setup email autoresponders that trigger customized emails to send to a lead if they download a certain amount of content from your website, try a product trial, after they make a purchase, if you are offering a daily deal or any other interaction a lead might be having with your website and its content.
The entire process of nurturing a lead could take anywhere from a month to more than 12 months to convert them into a customer, if not longer. Take your time with building the relationship over the phone, through email and focus on when the customer will be ready to take the next step with your company.
3. Score Each Lead
“It’s important to decide on what types of leads you want at the middle and bottom of your sales funnel.” – Chris Knipper
Scoring leads allows your business to understand which leads in your system are more valuable than others. A valuable lead is one that is interacting more with your business online whether they are downloading more content or viewing more web pages as compared to other leads.
By progressively profiling your leads over time you can build up a clear picture of who your lead is and how qualified they are to make a purchase. Moving leads through lifecycle stages from subscriber to lead, to marketing then sales qualified helps you to visualise your sales funnel and segment leads for better targeting of your communications.
Focus your teams efforts on nurturing better quality leads that will have a greater impact on your sales since these leads are already interested in your content and services, closer to converting to a customer than other leads with a lower score. Analyze the rise and fall of your lead’s score to better understand what stage in the process most leads begin to fall off and how can this be corrected, as well as when most leads are ready to be passed off to sales.
4. Pass Along Leads to Sales
“Lead generation is a fairly core activity to marketing.” – Chris Brogan
Setting the different stages in your own lead management process is important for the continually flow of leads from beginning to end of the sales funnel. The lead generation process of reaching leads, retaining interest, nurturing leads to prevent them from dropping off and establishing their desire to interact with your company is the focus of the marketing team.
The sales team should focus on moving the desire a customer has, that was originally spurred by the marketing team, to action in the form of a conversion. Once a customer has bought from your company, it is the sales team’s responsibility to enrich the experience with existing customers and retain them overtime.
Look at your leads and create definitions for a lead ready to be passed on to sales as opposed to a lead that still needs to be nurtured by the marketing team. Some common ways to define a sales ready lead is if there is a healthy profile created about them from different data points, their lead score is high, certain behavioral attributes show there is high interest, they appear to have a budget, the authority and need of your services and lastly, their timeline implies that the entire buying process must be expedited.
5. Evaluate Lead Generation Process
”Constant analysis is key in successful selling and when included as a best of practice and performed as a routine, many low producing sales months can be avoided.” – Steve Cunningham
The entire lead generation process should be under scrutiny by your team to ensure that it is as effective as possible in bringing in new leads, nurturing them, converting them into customers and retaining those customers overtime.
One of the most successful ways to have a measurable impact on your lead process is identifying where your leads drop off and attempting to resolve the issue, while learning how to recapture the leads that were lost. Many leads drop off before they are passed to sales because there was an interest in your company but it did not develop enough to move from an interest to a desire. These warm leads can be recaptured, but this costs more time, money and effort from the marketing team, which is why it’s important not to lose them in the first place.
Marketing analytics can also help your team continue to understand if certain benchmarks are being reached such as an increased flow of traffic to your website, if more visitors are signing up to your list, an increased conversion rate, more time spent on your website etc. Monitor these benchmarks and more to determine whether they are directly impacting a leads journey through the funnel and helping to prevent them from losing interest in your business. Constantly experiment and test out new iterations of the process to understand what works best for your organization as a whole.
Aligning content to your lead’s goals
Generating and nurturing leads requires that you have content that is of interest at different stages of your customer’s buying journey. Don’t forget that what you are doing is solving a problem for your customer, and as they get closer to making a purchase decision, they are learning better questions to ask in order to make a sound decision.
Spend time understanding your different customer types and the specifics of that they are aiming to achieve. Are they novices or professional buyers? Are they buying for themselves or making a recommendation? Is it an emotional or a rational purchase? Clarity on these points will help guide you in creating content that is effective at addressing your lead’s needs.
Aligning content to your lead’s sales stage
Nurturing your leads is an education process which can be neatly mapped to your sales funnel, giving you a shorthand for the type of content you need to deploy at each stage.
1. Top of Funnel
“Top of Funnel” content is designed to generate interest and attract visitors to your website or landing pages with the aim of making a first conversion to lead. This type of content lays down the key reasons your potential customers need your product.
You can publish top of funnel content in many ways, the key is to make it available to the people that would make good future customers – wherever they may be online.
The types of content you might consider for this activity are:
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Email newsletters
- Ebook guides
2. Middle of Funnel
“Middle of Funnel” content is designed to build the relationship between you and your lead. They are aware of you and have shared their contact details, it’s time for you to nurture that relationship by building trust and positioning yourself as the ideal solution to their needs.
You need to support your lead’s evaluation of your product or offer. You have a direct relationship with that person at the very least via their email address, here is where the use of activity based alerts and autoresponders can boost your attentiveness automatically – allowing you to scale personalisation.
While your lead is evaluating you these types of content can help:
- How to content
- Case studies
- Demo videos
- Product info and specification sheets
3. Bottom of Funnel
“Bottom of Funnel” content is designed to trigger your lead’s decision to buy from you. Leads at this stage in your funnel are educated and ready. Content that would support their decision to buy from you is a good idea at this stage. And ensuring your sales team is on the case.
Great bottom of funnel content includes:
- Reviews
- Testimonials
- A strong sales follow up
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Managing your lead generation Process
It’s important to ensure that you have an agreed organisational process for your lead generation, particularly when you are relying upon teams working together and leveraging marketing automation. While marketing automation will deal with the day to day messaging and nurturing, this process needs to be watched and managed.
It makes great sense to ensure there is agreement on how your lead generation will be run, some things to consider are:
- Individual roles and responsibilities.
- Agreement on how lead stages are defined and when handovers occur.
- What KPI’s and benchmarks are being used and how often they are evaluated for teams.
- Required reporting and stakeholders.
CONCLUSION
There are many kinds of lead generation services that operate with the intention of generating more business from the companies. The process involves the company providing the contact information of the person or company that is involved in offering products or services. The people are frequently involved in updating their contact details and verify their details for a rightful result.
Not all businesses need lead generation, but if yours does, you probably have a few questions about how to get it. Lead generation services are great for businesses that are just starting out, or for those whose growth has plateaued. If you’re ready to learn more about the benefits of lead generation, keep reading.