When it comes to B2B lead generation, the critical thing to keep in mind is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ option you can rely on. Every industry is different, and by extension, the best lead generation tactic for every industry is different.
When you have your ideal customer profile (ICP) ready, it becomes possible to target specific individuals or groups. You can target groups that are most likely to avail of the products and services your B2B marketing team aims to sell. In such a scenario, the number of new leads you generate (say 20% more than usual) can result in up to a direct 20% increase in revenue. This figure occurs when the overall qualifications of your lead match your ICP). Although this would be an ideal scenario that may not be practical in the real world, it goes to show how directly lead generation affects the company’s bottom line.
Information is valuable. Every new piece of information you receive in the form of phone numbers, contact information, addresses, etc. has some value. Some are inherently more valuable than others. For example, email addresses that you gathered through subscription requests on your landing page are intrinsically more valuable. They are more valuable than email addresses that came in the form of lists. The principal reason for this is that the former is most likely to become a paying customer eventually.
B2B lead generation is a significant step to ensure that your B2B business is flourishing. It is the central activity that guides all your other business processes. You shouldn’t skimp on investing time, effort, and resources on lead generation activities.
Here are 10 of the best lead generation ideas to help you get guaranteed results.
#1 – Build Social Relationships
Unlike the B2C industry, B2B organizations are not dependent on the sheer volume of customers to be profitable. Most B2B organizations believe that less is more. They are looking for a few dozen good clients to avail of their products and services. This is why, rather than focusing on the likes and followers on social media platforms, you need to focus on connecting with the right people.
Social media can certainly be a powerful B2B lead generation tool if utilized well. It is a medium that can help you build, foster, and nurture professional relationships. However, the most important thing to do is to stop using social media as merely a broadcasting tool. Shift the focus on adding value to the few dozen prospects that you’re targeting.
Another critical thing to remember is that you should be using the right social media channels. When it comes to Facebook, users are usually engaging with a more ‘personal’ side of their lives. They are more likely to share pictures of friends, family, or share funny content. On such platforms, they may not be very receptive to more ‘professional’ connections. Instead, go to LinkedIn.
With LinkedIn, you have access to people on a 100% professional platform. Moreover, you can also find groups where your prospects might hang out. Industry-related groups are the perfect place to start. Asking and answering questions on such groups can put you in a favorable position. You should aim at building targeted prospect lists in these groups using LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool. By building relationships based on your expertise, referring and connecting people to tools, answers, or resources, you’ll start generating the right leads for your B2B business in no time.
#2 – Purposeful Blogging for B2B Lead Generation
Wherever you go for B2B marketing advice, you’ll be besieged by advice to blog. However, merely blogging with no original goal or aim in mind is a fruitless activity. If you must blog (which you should), do it with intention and purpose.
A blog that presents your business, its strengths, and its benefits to readers, without being too pushy, is the ideal scenario. The easiest way to be in this zone is to answer relevant questions. The easiest way to do that is to review the questions you have responded to from existing clients and prospective clients. Each of these questions can potentially become a blog.
What we aim at doing here is to answer questions that prospects might ask or think of before they become your customer. These blog posts seek to clear doubts. When you clear their doubts, your prospective clients are more likely to consider your product or service as a possible solution to their needs.
Dig up questions related to apprehensions that your prospects might have.
“Can I trust this brand?”
“Have they worked with clients like me in the past?”
“Will they be able to cater to my unique B2B needs?”
The point of purposeful blogging is to make it a reliable B2B lead generation source. By answering these kinds of questions, you’re assuaging any doubts that visitors to your site might have. This activity helps bridge the gap between a prospect to a customer.
Unearth similar questions you’ve been asked before and schedule them on your blogging calendar. You can turn these into a series of posts on your blog itself. Alternatively, you can delve into other forms of content like videos or eBooks.
#3 – Generate Online Reviews
When it comes to B2B lead generation today, online presence has become a significant and integral part of the buying and selling process. As compared to B2C businesses, B2B services and products come with a more significant cost and a greater commitment to investment. This means that a B2B purchase, unlike B2C purchases is not made on impulse. B2B sales cycles tend to be longer and peppered with contracts or subscriptions.
In the case of B2B purchases, decision-makers want assurances that the solution fits their needs perfectly. They want to be sure that any service or maintenance needed is excellent. In this scenario, reviews from third parties can bring in an element of trust and authenticity to the purchasing process.
Estimates state that around 87% of B2B decision-makers browse the internet for reviews before making a purchase. In short, having honest reviews to lean on is integral in pushing prospective clients into making purchases. However, while reviews are necessary, they must be organic. Paid or fake reviews are harmful to your business in the long run. They harm search engine rankings. Such revies could also end up labeling your brand as dishonest or untrustworthy.
#4 – Optimize Landing Pages
Landing pages are very important. Such pages serve as follow-ups to any promises you make in your website content. These landing pages are important when it comes to B2B lead generation as they are an integral step for a person going from visitor to customer. Landing pages help to drive traffic to your website. They also improve overall SEO and are instrumental in building your B2B brand.
This is why it is necessary that you create focused landing pages for all the various verticals your brand offers. By ensuring that all verticals are well-served, you are ensuring that a potential customer who is looking for a particular product or service gets all the relevant information they need in one go. You also ensure that they don’t get side-lined or off-track when they are looking for something specific. For example, if your customer is looking for data cleaning services, they shouldn’t land on a page about online marketing services.
Ensure that you have appropriate landing pages created for all the verticals you cater to. After this, make sure to optimize every one of these landing pages. Ensuring that your site visitors land on relevant pages should be a top priority for your organization. Make this a part of your SEO strategy and see how things start looking up.
#5 – Simplify Forms
When it comes to B2B lead generation, inbound leads are worth their weight in gold. Not only are incoming leads more likely to convert to customers, but the process of conversion is relatively shorter. When it comes to success with inbound leads, the simplicity of forms can make or break your efforts to gain a lead.
The first, most important thing to bear in mind while crafting forms is that they should be prominently visible and easily accessible. Make sure you aren’t coming across as too pushy on these forms. Don’t push your lead for too much personal information in first-level forms. Nobody likes giving away details about themselves so casually and if you come across as someone who is pushy, your leads might be put off. Once you have built some trust, you can ask for detailed information. However, this comes in after you have nurtured your lead.
If your forms are not simple and to the point, there is a high chance that probable leads might find you dubious or untrustworthy. It goes without saying that this would hurt the bottom line. Customer details are very valuable and visitors will always think twice before submitting them to you. By ensuring your customers that their details won’t be misused, you can earn their trust. Whether it is a subscription to a newsletter, pitching for a new product, providing general information, or providing answers to questions, make sure to create simple and clear forms as they help drive sales in the long run.
Often, B2B marketers lean towards systems where you must fill a form to access the content. However, this may be counterproductive. Instead, try and give your content the same treatment as landing pages with a built-in form at the bottom of the page or within the content.
#6 – Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are essentially free pieces of content that are useful to your potential customers. Such material may be in demand within this group. Any videos, articles, series of posts, downloads, or eBooks that have information that may be enticing to clients are a great way to find new leads!
While lead magnets are great, they may not be easily availed by your target group. This is why you should consider creating a series of lead magnets and periodically offer them to prospects. Few things are as exciting as sequential offers that offer something of value to your prospect. You can offer a series of articles, videos, or even checklists and guides that are useful to your leads.
Such content offerings can help your prospect avail increasingly valuable content from you. This is an excellent opportunity to establish or set up a relationship with your lead. The constant proximity will help you become trusted as a valued organization in the eyes of your prospect. So, instead of it feeling like a lead-nurturing relationship, it will feel like you’re working with a client.
By incorporating lead magnets to your landing pages, it makes them inherently more valuable and enticing to prospects. This phenomenon can certainly help your B2B lead generation efforts in the long run.
#7 – Seminars and Webinars
Who doesn’t love free stuff? Well, when you offer free webinars and seminars to your prospective leads, it can seriously boost your B2B lead generation efforts. Unlike YouTube videos or simple content formats, webinars and seminars are a platform for two-way communication. This means that you get to interact with your audiences. This interaction helps you build a rapport with a group of people.
Not just that, hosting webinars or seminars puts you in a position as an authority on the topic you choose to cover. People want to do business with people they trust. So, having your ‘expert’ organization cater to your needs is an enticing offer for your leads. Apart from this, people who opt for webinars and seminars are usually looking for in-depth information on a particular topic. They are usually on the lookout for detailed, high-quality information on the subject. Their thirst for information makes them high-quality leads.
While putting together a webinar or seminar may take more time and effort, it does pay your business back in the end. They enable you to connect with high-quality leads. In the same vein, they also help improve your organization’s reputation and build trusted relationships with new people. From a content creation standpoint, an ongoing series of webinars may prove to be a valuable asset. Such an asset can be leveraged as a trust-building asset or even as a standalone product.
#8 – Referrals and Sponsors
When it comes to B2B lead generation, having referrals is a great way to gain more leads. However, it is not always something that is considered seriously by many B2B businesses.
One way to bring in more leads for your brand is to leverage another successful person’s audience. For example, if you are thinking of holding a webinar, don’t just stick to people on your team. Reach out to influencers and people who are experts on the subject for collaborations. Guest blogging is another powerful tool you can leverage to spread your message to a broader audience.
Once you have your content-rich material ready (eBook, blog post, article, etc.), reach out to other relevant businesses. Alternatively, you can contact other brands and pitch for co-branded work. By offering this resource to another network free of charge, you are in a position to gain more leads. Many B2B businesses have always wanted to work out something like this, but they probably don’t have the time or resources to do so. When you reach out to them, there is a high chance that they’ll pick up on your offer. By asking you could launch a mutually beneficial campaign that helps your B2B lead generation efforts.
#9 – Warm Calling
As the name suggests, warm calling is the exact opposite of cold calling. Cold calling refers to unsolicited visits, emails, or phone calls to people with the aim of selling your products or services. In today’s hyper-connected world, however, cold calling is dying a slow and painful death. With warm calling, you take the time to research relevant information about a prospect thoroughly. You do your homework and generate personalized discussion topics.
However, the trick with warm calling is communication. You should warn the prospect that you will be calling them at a specific time on a particular day. One way to do this is to send them a direct mail a few days in advance for introducing yourself and your organization. Perhaps you can add a few personalized snippets about how you got their information. Drop-in a line or two about what you intend on talking about.
However, as opposed to cold calling, make sure that you don’t come across as someone who is attempting to sell hard. Most importantly, listen and be useful. Keep an ear out for any problems the prospect speaks about. Look out for any issues that your organization, product, or service could solve. However, instead of a to-the-point hard-selling pitch, offer them something. Send an invite to a webinar or provide them with content that can show how your organization can help mitigate their problem.
This approach of intuitive listening and offering specialized solutions to your prospects should be used in all your B2B lead generation efforts.
#10 – Manual Data Mining and Paid Traffic
Most B2B marketers are always on the lookout for strategies that don’t involve payment. However, paid traffic can always help bring in leads. Paid traffic can be optimized when you have done most of the other items on this list before investing in advertising. While advertising is certainly easier compared to any of these other activities, the leads generated from paid campaigns are often unqualified and uneducated.
This is where manual data mining services can come in handy. Rather than blindly investing in paid advertisements, invest in a service that promises to bring in leads that are relevant and interested in your services or products. As opposed to automated data mining, manual data mining services verify contact information. By verifying this and other tags, we ensure that the leads you are provided with are of the highest quality.
When you have a list of such high-quality leads, they can be nudged in the right direction and become ideal clients. You can achieve this by helping them access resources such as webinars, eBooks, videos, or blogs. Articles that take them from clueless leads to more educated and qualified leads are the best. Such things ultimately help in selling to them based on their needs.
With an industry leader like Bizprospex, you can boost your B2B lead generation efforts by availing a powerhouse of relevant, up-to-date lead lists. Through our manual data processes, we ensure that every lead curation happens as per your requirements and that each lead meets your qualification criteria. Also try our pre-scraped datasets such as the AML sanctions list, PEP List, and Global sanctions database. This ensures a higher rate of conversion that rakes in more profits for your B2B organization!
Get in touch with our team now to avail a free sample session!