For a business to gain more customers, B2B lead generation strategies must be planned and implemented in order to attract them. This is the essential function of B2B lead generation. There are various marketing channels that a business can use to reach out to potential consumers.
Social media posts on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, search engine optimization (SEO) and sending e-mails are just some of the options that can be utilized in creating leads.
What is B2B Lead Generation?
B2B is an abbreviation for business-to-business. B2B Lead Generation is the offering of products and services from one business to another, instead of to the general public or consumers (B2C). Leads are the personal information, gathered from research, of future customers.
E-mail addresses, business names, titles, etc. are acquired through thorough investigation of potential customers to tailor marketing strategies that targets their needs in order to sell their products.
B2B Lead Generation Strategies That Really Works
Ways Content Marketing Create Leads for B2B
Before delving into specific B2B lead generation strategies, let us breakdown how content marketing leads to leads (pun intended). According to CSO Insights, 70% of B2B customers depend on the knowledge gained through independent research of a business to determine if they want to use their services or not.
That means that not only do businesses research potential customers, customers research businesses for their potential to meet their needs.
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Make and utilize a mechanized webinar strategy
Webinars are basically information focused videos that help business professionals keep up to date with what is happening in their respective industries. In fact, SEJ states that 91% of B2B professionals prefer the content channel of webinars to get insights about an industry.
By mechanizing the way that webinars are created, B2B’s can have a strategy that allows them to easily create content, so that all they have to do is focus on monitoring its performance with customers.
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Elevate simple blog entries into longer, specialized guides
Another content channel that can be used to gain leads is the blog. Businesses usually already have a website, social media accounts, and blogs to try to engage with potential customers. With blogs, they can be recycled and combined to create long-form content on an already popular topic, such as guides, which could gain more traffic for a business’ website.
This creates more opportunities to share this information on other digital platforms, such as social media. That can then lead to potential consumers following a business’ Twitter page or being able to download links to a page in exchange for an email address.
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Include effective call-to-action (CTAs) incentives to blog entries
The purpose of this strategy is to create leads within blog entries about a topic by including downloadable links that goes straight to longer, specialized guides about the same topic.
If potential customers are interested are interested on certain topics, they will create traffic by visiting and reading various blogs on a company’s site. But, in order to establish them as leads, CTAs can be used to lure customers to the guide links and encourages them to click and download the content.
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Create email leads from views of video content
Potential customers watching videos about a business’ products and services is a great way for them to learn more about what the company has to offer. But, just interacting with digital content is not enough.
To acquire customer info like email addresses, a company might place a CTA in the beginning, middle, or end of a video by asking for your name (first and last) and email address. The incentive to a potential customer giving out this information might be that they can be the first to receive any beneficial offers or sales for engaging with the content.
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Section and dissect your content plan
By conducting more in-depth audience research of potential customers, that goes further than the typical demographic details (age, gender, etc.), a business can breakdown and analyze their specific needs for tailored marketing strategies.
This can be done by monitoring keyword searches and activity on social media platforms using Google Analytics or each platforms’ own engagement systems.
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Conduct and write new research that brings customers to you
When customers are doing research about various businesses services online that can meet their needs, try to become their main source of information. By conducting surveys with customers, interviews with industry leaders, and creating content with popular influencers a business can become the top source for a specific topic.
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Start campaigns based around competing keywords
Learn what keywords that your competitors like to use in their content for backlinks. Then use SEO analysis platforms (Ahrefs & SEMrush) to focus in on similar content and keywords to attract more traffic and potential customers to the company website.
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Enhance long-form keywords to attract more important leads
Keywords made up of 3 or more words can be used to increase potential customers researching a very specific need, leading to more potential buyers without relying heavily on SEO strategies.
Social Media Strategies to Generate B2B Leads
Marketing through social media is a must in this digital era, which shows how much it has grown from its humble beginnings of connecting with friends and keeping up to date with relationship statuses. By the year 2017, 83% of B2B strategists used social media platforms to connect, interact, research potential customers.
How social media can work to generate leads
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Lure social media traffic to the main website
A visitor to a social media platform does not become a lead until they are lured onto the main website through links, where they are often met with CTAs (lucrative offers, email sign-ups, etc.).
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Have sign-ups for newsletters on Facebook page
This is an easy way to gather potential customers email addresses and gain more traffic to a company’s online content.
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Utilize the call to action
Providing links that lead to the main page of a company website, offering customers a chance to provide feedback, or asking them for advice not only promotes a company’s product and services; it also gives opportunities for that company to gather crucial information about potential customers.
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Utilize LinkedIn
Having the highest generation lead value, LinkedIn as a platform is considered as more of a professional, business friendly space compared to other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Here is what you need to make it work:
- Engage and interact within the platform
- Ensure that your company has a strong & unique presence on LinkedIn
- Connect with groups
- Participate in conversations
- Ask around for help
- Utilize LinkedIn’s lead collection tool
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Advertise lead generation materials on Twitter
While Twitter is a beacon in the pop culture scene, this platform also serves as a place where insiders stay in the know about industry updates where B2B businesses can connect with like-minded communities and potential leads.
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Take advantage of Facebook’s targeting tools
Facebook is on top when it comes to social media advertising due to its ability to gather, compare, and analyze loads of data user information that is given away every time the app is opened is like no other platform experience.
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Utilize YouTube
Use a link to the company website within the description of a video, including CTAs, to get leads to your landing page.
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Utilize Instagram
Include a link by using the “Link in Profile” tool to generate traffic and leads to the main website.
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Establish your own digital community
Earlier on this list, it stated that it is imperative to join online groups within social media platforms. However, it is also important to establish online groups as well to offer important insight and information about a topic to create more leads.
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Load your content with information & accessible ideas
Using links, fill your content with various numerical and anecdotal information, including references, to help it rank higher on Google’s search engine algorithm.
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Refresh old content
Outdated information, lowered SEO ranking, and inactive links are the main reasons to keep your old content current with frequent updates in order to keep potential customers coming to your website for accurate industry insight.
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Take advantage of Gmail ads to focus on your competitors’ audience
While email as a channel seems ancient compared to social media platforms, it is still the most utilized lead generation channel being used by 77% of B2B marketers, according to SuperOffice.
Gmail Ads works together with your Google Ads strategy by allowing businesses to focus on specially on potential buyers have received emails from top competitors. This allows a business to display how they do things differently than the other guys and how it can benefit the buyer.
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Tailor landing pages to complement search intent
With high traffic coming onto a company’s website, thanks to targeted Google ad strategies, the content of landing pages needs to match up with the keywords used to search for them. This increases the likelihood of a business’ site being the top search result when researching a topic of interest.
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Build remarketing strategies to keep potential buyers engaged until they become leads
Revamping a business’ marketing strategy ensures that users can stay interested in the content longer, which increases the likelihood that they will take the next step into becoming a potential customer by taking action.
Email Marketing Strategies to Generate B2B Leads
This channel has been around for over 20 years and is still the most used in reaching out and connecting with potential customers by B2B marketers.
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Mechanize lead generation & email marketing strategies
Mechanized marketing is a way to lessen the manual labor of creating and organizing sectioned and dissected lists of specific user habits online and other tasks in order to heighten sales.
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Create a price-free tool to attract leads
These free tools can range from CRM (customer relationship management) sign-ups to CTA (call to action) incentives for better website performance by providing an email address.
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Free giveaways
Offering users incentives to keep interacting with your content is a sure way to gain more leads that turn into potential buyers of your product or service.
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Gain even more email leads by making referral strategies
Encourage already established leads to recommend your business to other friends, family, and acquaintances through deals and rewards. This leads to new potential customers interacted with your content and giving away their email addresses, creating new leads.
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Make re-engagement & customer keeping strategies
Whether it is sending emails to users who have not used your service in a while or updating an article on the company website, incentive’s users to re-engage with content not only encourages old leads to come back, but it also keeps them coming back.
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Conduct an A/B test on specific pages
Tweak key pages by changing the background page, redesign the landing page, or just changing the color of the search bar. Analyze user and lead engagement of content by comparing how those changes compared with the original page set-up by conducting a A/B split test.
Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies to Generate B2B Leads
The ultimate goal of a lead generation strategy catered to the B2B market is to convert visitors and users of online content into leads and potential customers.
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Enhance web forms
Clean up email signups, guide downloads, and CTA interfaces to ensure that a user can become a lead by making multi-step interfaces on web forms. Leadformly is an easy to use platform where you can build and monitor customizable web forms to see how well users engage with the content.
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Pop-Ups
Yes, they sound annoying and distracting. But, if used correctly, a focused exit pop-up offers users an incentive (a free guide or a promo) to stay on a business’ web page after interacting with related content.
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Utilize heatmaps to uncover conversion barriers
Heatmaps monitors where users move their mouse, where they click, and where they scroll to understand behavior and discover conversion barriers, or distractions from intended attention-grabbers on the web page.
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Conduct a test of important elements
Analyze and test different versions of web page content to decide which one conveys the message of your business brand the best to potential customers.
Focus on the content before deciding what color you want a sign-up button to be. Use this time to also reduce conversion barriers (unappealing interface, difficult navigation, slow loading time, etc.).
Final Thoughts
B2B lead generation strategies help businesses to turn users into leads and leads into potential customers. When discussing customers in relation to a business selling a product, it is often consumers who are the main subject of this topic. But, when your customer is also a business, then your content must meet great standards to attract their attention.
Accuracy, relevance, and engagement are the main characteristics of the content B2B businesses must have in order to be a top competitor of industry information and insight. When researching a specific topic to solve a problem or to service a need, potential buyers look for reliable and professional sources that can solve their problems.
These strategies listed assists B2B operations in using lead generation channels like emails, socials media platforms, and SEOs to implement the best possible ways to reach out to users online so that they can interact with the content on a company’s website.
This creates leads, from gathering personal information. Then, if they like the content and it addresses their needs, they become potential buyers interested in the products and services that that business has to offer.
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Kierra Benson is an alumnus of the University of North Texas at Dallas with a Bachelor’s degree in Communication and Technology. She previously completed an internship at a local newspaper and worked as a content creator for a small online business. Her goal is to work in the media industry in writing/editing and advertising. She has always been fascinated by how messages are marketed in the media to influence the masses and sell products. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
