Nadia BolestaDo you want to find more leads for your business? Nearly 91% of B2B companies consider lead generation their main goal.
In case you fall into this category and your answer is yes, then this blog post is perfect for you!
We’ll cover everything from finding the right sources to designing a lead capture process that works for your business.
So whether you’re just starting out or want to revamp your current strategy or generate sales leads, read on for tips and advice that will help you find more leads and close more sales.
We will walk through each step in detail so that you can be sure to get results.
Whether you’re a SaaS company or another type of tech business, these tactics will help you expand your reach, grow your customer base, and convert leads efficiently.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s get started, but at first, we’ll look at the mechanism behind B2B lead generation.
How Does B2B Sales Lead Generation Work?
B2B sales leads are crucial for business development and sales. So, let’s be straight to the point and state how does B2B work?
In the B2B space, you can get leads using distinctive marketing strategies. While planning your lead generation strategies, try to be SMART.
You have to develop a practical approach to get high quality leads, but while working it out, try to estimate your steps using the proven framework.
It is a free tool that could help you develop right steps to get qualified prospects.
Smart Framework
S –Specific.
The lead generation strategy must include a detailed plan that determines where, when and how you will be generating your business leads.
Having a clear focus can help you manage your lead generation strategy better, choosing the most appropriate channels to reach the right clients.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach that is acceptable in the B2B space, because accuracy and concreteness are a must.
M – Meaningful.
Take time to reflect on your lead generation strategy. Think about whether it is appropriate for your specific target audiences.
Describe how your strategies will persuade the potential B2B leads to cooperate with you and show your business beat. Be mindful of the meaning behind your actions.
A- Actionable.
To achieve success, you need to ensure that the strategies you are using will lead to concrete actions.
Thus, it is important to research the specific traits and characteristics of your leads, their pain points, needs, and interests.
An effective strategy requires the evaluation of all factors, but not just the blind completion of the tasks.
R – Relevant.
Make sure that the approaches you use are relevant. In other words, estimate the existing statistical data.
Develop a clear understanding of the vision, mission, and perspective of your lead generation strategy.
The purpose of all your efforts is positive response of your B2B leads, so that you may successfully convert them into loyal customers.
T – Time-Based.
I believe that this is a critical point to consider as you will need to determine the appropriate timeline for each of your lead generation activities.
Whenever you are planning an email campaign, you should think of the dates when you intend to launch it and also think about the frequency of email messages.
This framework will help you to build the efficient lead generation strategy, allowing to generate quality leads and grow your business.
Now, it’s time to turn to the practical part of lead generation process and estimate the existing strategies, helping you to fulfill your B2B lead generation objectives.
Start By Creating Highly Targeted Lists Of Potential Leads
First, you need to create a list of possible business leads. There are a number of ways to do this, and the best thing you can do is start with your existing customer base and then branch out from there.
Make a list of existing customers aand all the companies that could benefit from your value proposition, and then you will know who to contact.
You will find B2B companies using trade shows, direct outreach to decision makers and influencers in B2B companies.
ICP as your lead generation roadmap
There are many companies that fail to realize the effectiveness of ICP for generating leads and promoting the buying process.
Despite it, a well-organized list of targeted leads is important, since it helps you to identify the right people and increase your chances of getting them to respond positively.
You have to develop your Ideal Customer Profile or ICP. It can provide you the real understanding of your target market.
This document will assist you to stop wasting time on contacting people, who are unlikely to respond to you and do not need the service that you are offering. ICP can help you direct the lead generation efforts.
How Can You Use An ICP?
De facto, ICP is your road map. So, it makes sense to draft the ICP carefully, taking into account the details and nuances of your ideal target customer.
For maximal accuracy and client satisfaction, you can develop an ICP form that your clients can fill out.
As the first action taken together, it will be a sign of cooperation. Your clients might also draw your attention to the issues that are most important to them.
Understanding who you’re searching for simplifies the process and assists you to reach a positive result in a quicker and more efficient manner.
It is essential to create detailed ICPs for every marketing campaign to track down quality leads.
Define Your Target Audience
Now, let’s define your target audience.
Stop, we did it, while developing the ICP. Not exactly. The main idea of ICP was understanding your potential customer.
Knowing your target audience is a bit different. You should tailor your campaign or create content taking into account your target audience.
These could be the CEOs, Marketing Managers, CMOs, or somebody else.
Each of these titles involves a specific set of characteristics, which you have to research, identify and include in your campaign.
To find the companies, you may use various lists like Fortune 100, 500, or 1000.
Use Of Online Resources To Get Leads
The next step is to use online resources to find leads. Among these are search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and content marketing.
All of these methods involve creating content that is relevant to your target audience and then promoting it through various online channels.
Make sure that you have a solid lead generation strategy in place to ensure that you are able to get the B2B sales leads that you need to grow your business.
Using these tips will help you to develop an effective strategy that is tailored specifically for B2B companies.
This will help you to attract potential customers who are interested in your product or service.
Research Your Potential Leads
Take some time to research each potential lead on your list.
You can start by looking them up online, but it’s also a good idea to attend offline events like meetings in-person or personal interviews if possible.
It will help you to gain greater insight into your potential prospects. You’ll understand who they are and what problems they may be facing. This information will help you to convert them into paying customers.
When you already got an understanding of your ideal customer, identified your target audience, and developed a carefully crafted list of B2B sales leads, you can start the next important stage of a lead generation process.
You’re ready to turn to the digital marketing stage.
Digital marketing to get more leads
Digital marketing is a great way to generate sales leads. Basically, it involves using different online channels to distribute your product or service such as social media, search engine optimization, and content marketing.
This allows you to reach a larger audience than you would be able to with traditional methods like print advertising. Social media provide perfect opportunities for starting the lead generation campaign.
Using digital marketing is the most popular method that B2B companies use to get more leads .
In this case, you have a list of prospects and target them with email campaigns or other online ads.
You need to make sure that it’s in their interests and they will be impressed by your product or service.
The main aim is to get their contact information, so you can continue the sales process.
Use of social media and lead generation
Now that you’ve identified your ideal customers and learned more about their business pains, it’s time to start reaching out!
The most common ways of doing this are through inbound sales.
It can be effective, but it’s important to make sure that you’re using the right channels for each lead.
B2B social marketing is a new approach that combines existing marketing strategies to help organizations to work smarter instead of working harder.
When social marketing strategy is executed wisely, it helps to cut costs, grow lead volume, and provide a clear and measurable return on investment for your marketing dollars.
Social Media And B2B Companies
Social media marketing is at your fingertips. Social networks might be perceived as specific lead magnets, helping you not only to find high quality leads, but also to convert leads into paying customers.
There are nearly 4,5 billion of social media users worldwide.
Imagine using the efficient lead generation tactics and social media strategy to convert at least part of this audience to your business leads.
It could help you to boost your business and achieve immense professional growth.
Social media marketing is perfect for B2B companies. In the B2B space, there exists clear understanding of the customers.
B2B companies possess clear understanding of buyer personas they want to reach.
Having this level of familiarity is useful for social media marketing, as they can develop successful lead generation campaigns.
Social Media As Lead Magnets
Social media provide a perfect opportunity for increasing prospects’ insights.
Social media helps to reduce cost per lead, generating more leads with fewer marketing budgets.
B2B is all about relationships, and social media facilitates that process.
Social media provides a great opportunity to increase marketing ROI, attract new site visitors, and get prospective customers.
Social Media Strategy To Generate Leads
Gathering leads on social media will allow you to find those prospects, who could become your loyal customers in the course of time.
The next step is to nurture the potential leads. To warm leads, you have to take them through the marketing funnel and explaining the benefits of your partnership.
Social media has a number of platforms, which you can use to generate leads. The top three include Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Among B2B marketers, LinkedIn turns out to be the most efficient network for generating leads. Studies show that 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn (Ruler Analytics).
You can grow your lead base using each of these platforms. The most important part is establishing the right lead qualification process and using appropriate call to action to get qualified prospects.
SEO As A Tool For Generating Leads
SEO is one of the most popular B2B lead generation methods.
What is SEO and how it can help you to leverage more leads?
SEO might be defined as Search Engine Optimization.
Why do we need it?
SEO strategy aims at improving the rankings with search engines like Google.
The properly optimized data appear on the search engine every time, when a person starts searching for something related.
Here is the trick. The more people will see your content, the more leads you can generate.
If you rank higher in search engine results, you are more likely to come up on top when prospects are searching for a product or service like yours.
This allows businesses that don’t have much brand recognition, but offer valuable solutions, to be seen by B2B companies that are looking for the solution they provide.
B2B lead generation uses SEO less frequently, but it can still be an effective way of getting leads if done properly.
Doing some research on SEO best practices will help you get started on creating a strategy that will help you increase B to B leads.
Using SEO is a great way for B2B companies to generate more leads without having to do much legwork themselves.
As long as they are targeting the right keywords, it’s something that can be easily automated and scale with little effort on their part.
Content Marketing In The B2B Space
Simple and engaging content is a great helper to create the brand identity and voice.
Nowadays, content marketing is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have for every B2B company. But what is actually content marketing?
Have you ever picked up the company’s brochure or flyer? Most of them are uninteresting. You grab them, look through, and they end up in the trash.
But there are some rare cases, when you take a flyer, start reading it, and become engaged by a comic strip, great depiction of specific pros and cons of the service, or unusual choice of words.
Instead of just skimming through the leaflets, you start thinking about the content. This is exactly what content marketing stands for.
Content Marketing As A Lead Generator
Content marketing is one of the most popular methods of B2B lead generation.
Nearly 80% of B2B companies use content marketing to fuel the lead generation machine (Content Marketing Institute).
Why do people like content marketing so much? Because it allows them to write about whatever they want to!
It gives you the freedom to discuss professional topics using your knowledge, experience, and possibly sense of humor.
It is true that your primary task is to create a piece of valuable content for a specific B2B topic.
However, you have a chance to choose the style and manner of your writing, and add the shades of your personality to it.
Content Strategy And Its Effect On Your Leads
Choosing the relevant content strategy helps to generate more leads.
But don’t think that your personality is the center of B2B content. The high-quality content serves a key marketing purpose.
Your witty and fun content will attract the attention of your readers, enticing them and turning them into leads and potential customers.
Content marketing is a great way to show off your products or services.
It gives you a chance to show others the great sides of your offer using simple, clear, and understandable words without complicated terms and graphs.
You need to create relevant content that serves marketing goals by showing B2B sales leads how the buyer’s journey works using appealing colors and motivating them to participate.
A further challenge is that the message must be simple and friendly, promoting B2B sales lead generation.
Leonardo Da Vinci told centuries ago that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
He wasn’t talking about content marketing, but there was a grain of universal truth that we should consider when writing content.
The Goal Of Content Marketing
The main goal of B2B content marketing is to attract both existing customers and high quality leads, who are interested in your product or service.
You can create a blog and host it on your website, but you can also share the link across various social media channels like Twitter and LinkedIn.
Content marketing should be used as a way to boost brand awareness and market B2B products.
It’s also important that you create valuable content that people will want to share across various social media channels, which is another benefit B2B companies can take advantage of.
As we talk about high-quality content, we cannot avoid the topic of blogging, which is a crucial aspect of content marketing.
Blog Post
B2B blog reflects your knowledge, expertise, skills, and qualifications. It allows you to stay in touch with your readers, engage them and track your leads.
While writing your blog, try to switch on your extrasensory skills, as one of your duties will be foreseeing the themes, which your potential leads will be searching for on Google and other search engines.
You must not only write your article, but also optimize it for the keywords. A higher Google ranking will make it more likely that readers will find your article.
You’ll have to write about the issues, which are topical for your audience.
Show that you understand their pain points, problems, and develop solutions tailored to their needs.
Your task is to get the readers and encourage them to share your post.
I already mentioned that simplicity is important for content marketing. It is even more important for blogging.
Audiences are tired of complex terminology, sophisticated words, and other ways to convey the expertise of professionals.
Describe the key factors of B2B in your blog in the form of an engaging story.
A blog should be more than content, but the catalyst for immediate action. The following strategies can help increase the chances of your blog’s success.
Blog Writing Tips
First, try to write on unique topics.
You should fill in the knowledge gap of your readers with your blog.
If they can find data about the topic everywhere, then you’ll have to use the top of writing craftsmanship in order to catch their attention.
But what should you do when you cannot find the unique topic. It is a challenge, I understand.
In an era when millions of blogs cover everything (I found nearly 12 thousand articles on how to train your dog to bark), it is important to create unique and understandable content.
When you create a blog, you need to keep your prospects and their needs in mind. Think about their questions and give answers.
Getting it right will make you look like a knight in shining armor. But, if you fail, you will still be Mr. Invisible. Which role would you rather play?
First one seems to be better. It definitely is. So, make everything possible to make your blog interesting and up to the topic.
My advice is to try to add shades of humor to your blog.
Reality may be harsh, and that is why we value things that make us laugh, or at least smile. Injecting humor into your blog will add a shade of your personality.
Follow Up With Leads Regularly And Keep Track Of Their Progress
There exists a common myth that a task of B2B companies is to keep track of buyer’s journey only. However, it is also important to pay attention to leads.
They represent the lifeline of your company.
Tracking that lead generation process assists not only to understand the value and efficacy of the marketing strategy, but also to gain insight into what works in the sales process.
A lead generation tactic is tracking leads in the sales funnel process.
It is one of the best lead generation strategies that will keep your pipeline fresh and help to prevent lead stagnation.
Market research and lead tracking may help to understand whether you’re targeting the right people or wasting your resources.
Benefits Of Lead Tracking
Lead tracking helps to achieve the following outcomes:
Make more accurate financial predictions: lead gen helps to estimate the volume and quotas.
Estimating the number of current customers and sales leads will help you to determine the fluctuations in performance and more efficient strategies to generate qualified leads.
Tracking sales leads also promotes the optimization of the sales process: Some leads will drop out, as it is an inevitable part of the sales cycle.
When you notice a serious lead drop out, it will be the sign of performance problems or inefficient marketing campaigns.
Following the lead generation process helps to lessen lead leakage: the analysis of the sales funnel could help to understand the existing bottlenecks hindering healthy leads conversion.
Estimating the buyer’s journey will help you to find out the existing pain points in the sales funnel and giving your sales reps better chance to work out more efficient lead generation strategy to grow more prospects.
Adjust Your Approach As Needed Based On The Results You Achieve
Finally, it’s important to adjust your lead capture process as needed based on the results you achieve.
After you capture your sales leads, nurture, and even turn some of them into your customers, you need to take a minute to evaluate your lead generation approach.
This means tweaking things like the channels you use, the content you produce, or even who you target. The only way to get the results you want is by constantly testing and refining your approach.
What is the point of those tests? What data they can bring you?
Testing And Improvement Of Lead Generation Tactics
You’re not the only one asking such questions. Most companies, to be exact, nearly three quarters of businesses are not aware of how to measure their lead generation efforts.
Lead generation is not just about estimating the success of your campaign, but about knowing what steps were effective and what to avoid in the future.
It can help you to streamline the lead generation process.
It is vital to track the following lead generation metrics:
- Click through-rates;
- Conversion rates;
- Time to customer conversion;
- Cost per customer.
You can design your landing pages as the lead magnets if you understand the most effective lead generation tactics.
You will know exactly what things should be present in your email campaign and what features to take into account when creating the content.
So what are you waiting for? Try these strategies out today, and watch as sales leads come pouring in!
Brightest Minds And Lead Generating Secret
The most important thing you can do is make sure that your company has a clear message, an authentic voice, and a target audience who will be interested in what it offers.
Once these are squared away, start thinking about where existing and potential customers spend their time on social media or online.
This will help you identify which platforms might work best for your brand’s goals of lead generation.
We at Brightest Minds dedicated years to developing new strategies helping our sales team to generate leads faster and more efficiently.
Lead generation is a complex task demanding industry research and immense efforts of the marketing team.
You should work hard to create a never-ending pipeline of B2B sales leads and drive revenue.
In the pre-digital times, this task was more tedious, but definitely simpler.
In order to generate quality leads, you didn’t have to use digital technologies, look at innovative lead generation strategies, but could turn to offline events instead.
Lead generation requires immense marketing efforts today.
The main objective of the B2B marketing is assisting the sales team to find the qualified leads.
Brightest Minds developed its unique strategy to generate leads.
Our marketing team performs accurate industry research and careful ICP forms.
We use the lead-oriented approach to create content and analyze every single step using testing systems to streamline the lead generation process.
Sales reps nurture leads through trustworthy, goal-oriented communication.
We understand that the key to success is the right strategy and utilization of appropriate resources in order to find and reach leads.
Years of experience have shown us that lead generation is the result of strategic tactics and well-plotted choices.
Lead generation success does not happen by accident; rather, it is the result of systematic evaluation of the buying process, marketing efforts, and the need to continually progress in order to fuel the lead generation engine.
Brightest Minds
Anthony Infiesto
admin
