Leads aren’t random clients. They are potential customers who are just one step away from converting. For that to happen, you need to grab their attention, provide them with value, and show that your service will solve their issues.
Generating high quality leads is a vital part of a B2B marketing strategy, and establishing a good level of leads will help you maintain steady growth. If you’re looking to build your client base online, read on to find our top tactics for generating B2B leads.
1. Develop a Consistent Content Marketing Plan
Content marketing is a vital part of marketing and a great tactic when conducting lead generation for B2B. In fact, 91% of B2B companies use content marketing to gain new customers.
So how can you generate leads through content marketing? There are a few ways that we recommend:
- Blog: Easily the best way to build your content is through the blog. With a well-planned blog, you are more likely to appear at the top of search results than any other form of content. It’s important that you build your name in your industry online and gain recommendations from those opinions that matter.
- Video content: Videos have the potential to become viral and gain popular appeal. YouTube is also an incredibly popular platform, with people enjoying more video content than ever before. If you’re neglecting videos, you are missing out on one of the best sources for generating leads.
- Host a Webinar: If you’ve got a topic that is popular in your marketing segment, you should plan a webinar around it. These aren’t created to sell a product or service, but create something your audience is already interested in. It’s a great way to get your message across to an audience which attracts a lot of leads.
- Publish Research Papers: If you’ve been gathering data for articles, publishing your findings can help in generating leads. It can help gain new connections from quality leads.
These content marketing techniques can work together. For example, the results of your research report could be placed on your blog. You can take a video extract from your webinar and publish it online for users to access. Your blog can also be used to advertise your upcoming webinars. By combining these approaches, you can help generate leads.
2. A Detailed Social Media Strategy
Social media provides you with a way to define your lead generation process as you can create a more targeted approach. According to Kinsta, 62% of marketers believe that social networks like LinkedIn are effective for generating leads. It also provides businesses with a place to engage with potential leads.
Paid social media campaigns are also incredibly effective because most people in the world have a Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account. Targeted ads on these sites can be set up with information such as age, location, gender and interests. With a strong, targeted campaign, you can generate a lot of leads through social media.
For B2B marketers, LinkedIn is the premier social platform. It is home to a huge gathering of professionals across every industry. Gaining leads from any social media platform isn’t easy and requires careful planning, but by following these tips you should see leads coming in.
- Remain present and active on LinkedIn: People need to know you’re there, so you need to build your social media presence. Get on LinkedIn and remain active. Connect with people in the industries you’re targeting to build your pot of potential leads.
- Have a well-maintained company profile: Your presence online should be clear. Ensure your account is clear about who you are and what you do. It’s vital that this differs from your personal profile for generating B2B leads.
- Join groups: LinkedIn has a wide range of groups that you can join where you can find professionals that could become leads.
- Join conversations: There’s always a conversation happening on LinkedIn which you could get involved in. Having an active presence in these conversations means you have a better, stronger marketing presence.
- Ask for help: You can encourage leads by asking for help. By finding qualified people who can help with a project, they could become useful leads down the line.
- Create Lead Generation Forms: With paid campaigns on LinkedIn, you can create a lead generation form that targeted users can fill in. If you’ve got a product, service, downloadable or webinar coming up, directly target those people who will be most interested.
3. Pay Per Click Marketing
SEO and content marketing strategies are effective but can take time. One of the fastest ways to get results is with PPC. If you know exactly who your target audience is, it can be incredibly effective. However, in competitive industries it can be quite expensive.
You can post adverts in various ways online through Google Ads, Bing Ads and more with different routes available:
1. Online Search Network
Adverts appear at the top and bottom of Google search engine results. One advantage of the search network is that the search intent is there. Unlike social media advertising, if someone is searching for “SEO company”, they are most likely looking to work with an SEO agency.
2. The Display Network
Display adverts appear on sites that allow Google to serve adverts to visitors. These adverts are visual and are created through the Google Ads advert generator, which saves you time creating ads for multiple sizes.
3. Remarketing
This is linked to the display network, however, these adverts target people who have already visited the website. We sometimes refer to it as retargeting. This type of marketing offers higher conversion rates than display ads, as the user is more likely to convert if they’ve already visited the site.
This can be done through Google AdWords and is something you should do 2-3 months after your initial campaign. This will allow you to build up a decent list of people who have visited your site.
Lead Generation Best Practices
No matter the type of lead generation tactics you are aiming to target, there are certain practices you should follow to get results from your hunt for leads.
- Know your audience: You should know who you want to target. In B2B, your audience could vary between departments. Sometimes, you may not have a specific audience but a few micro-audiences that have different interests and pain points.
- Lead magnets: Look to create content or offers that really interest your audience. Offer clear benefits with an emphasis on exclusivity and urgency for instant results.
- Find new channels: If you’ve been marketing down the same routes time and time again with no success, try another way. Search and social media are very crowded, but you could find your audience using a PPC campaign.
- Get the right information: Basic contact information is good to start with (name and email address) as more information will come as the lead goes down the funnel.
- Sort your leads: Not every lead is valuable, so run a lead scoring tool so you can properly segment them. Sorting your leads into different segments can allow you to produce personalised messages and offers to each type of customer.
- Maintain a regular blog: Your web presence matters so regularly posting new content will improve your SEO, web authority, and brand awareness.
- Integrate SEO and PPC: Both marketing channels complement each other when done well. If you’re struggling to rank for organic keywords you want to target, running a paid search campaign can get you noticed.
- Automated marketing: Auto generating leads by capturing leads from your email marketing campaign, scoring them and helping them through the pipeline before you hand them over to sales.
- Mobile marketing: More business buyers now use their smartphones to purchase items. It’s vital that your forms, emails and ads are optimised for mobile and tablet devices.
If you need support with your B2B lead generation strategies, get in touch with the experts at Ricemedia who can help you with your overall digital marketing plans.
