Follow us in this article to learn about lead generation strategies for B2B businesses.
Many small businesses today still struggle with lead generation. Many believe that lead generation has become more difficult as the tools and platforms you can use to market your products and services have increased dramatically over the past decade. Many of the business owners we work with have reported that they have struggled with the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. They feel like they are just shooting an arrow in the dark when it comes to generating ideas. If you’re like many of these businesses, you can’t afford to shoot in the dark or waste your limited time and resources on unproven and ineffective lead-generation strategies or tools.
In this article, we take a look at your lead generation efforts. We also describe each of the main lead generation priorities and show you how you can optimize your results in each area to increase the number and quality of your leads.
Table of Contents
6 priorities for a B2B lead generation strategy
1- Focus on lead quality, not quantity
In the early days, our company helped businesses on all social networks and platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogging, etc. The first thing we heard from most of our clients was, “Can you please help me get 10,000 likes and followers as fast as possible?” Our answer has always been, “How do you think 10,000 followers can help your business?”
Because it’s not about the quantity of your followers, it’s about their quality. Ask yourself this question: “Would I rather have a thousand followers who love my business and know and love me and want to buy from me, or would I rather have 10,000 followers?” I wonder if most of them don’t need what I have to offer?”
It is the same thing in the field of generating leads. Many tools, bots, and gimmicks promise to grow you crazy numbers, like 1000 leads per month, but I guarantee the quality of these leads is worse than awful! Plus, think of all the costs and time you spent chasing down dead-end leads who don’t want to buy from you. Don’t be fooled by the big numbers. In our experience, most B2B businesses can make a lot of progress with only 35-50 quality leads per month.
Important Notes
A quality lead is a lead that has the potential to become an actual buyer of your product or service and therefore generate revenue for you.
Too many low-quality leads will waste your time and money instead of making your sales.
One way to determine what a good lead looks like is to write a descriptive text about your ideal customer. Knowing their key problems and how to solve these problems with your product and service is very important.
2- Increase the volume of leads and improve the conversion rate
Lead generation is like the lifeblood of any business. Without a flow of quality, actionable leads, your business will die. It may sound a bit harsh, but that’s the harsh truth. If you are stuck between good and bad monthly results, it means that your lead generation activities are not consistent and unreliable and thus fail to generate consistent profits.
What is a non-functional lead generation strategy?
Wasting thousands of dollars on Facebook and Google PPC ads. For B2B, this ultimately leads to low-quality leads and high costs.
Using the all-to-one method, sending hundreds of emails or dry or cold messages to everyone. This method is time-consuming and spammy and rarely improves the situation.
Commissioning a secondary company or agency to automate your lead generation is also impersonal, costly, and spammy.
All of these options are a normal part of lead generation and B2B marketing, but that doesn’t mean they have to be effective. Not when to generate leads that convert, all you have to do is try to reach out directly to the people and businesses that need your services and build relationships with them.
The best place to communicate and connect with your potential customers is LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is the only social networking platform in the world where people go to do business and constantly seek to solve their problems. That’s why 80% of all B2B leads on social media originate from LinkedIn.
Increasing the volume of leads and conversions is not difficult. Market in the right places (LinkedIn), in the right way, to the right people and companies, at the right time. When you do all of these things right, you can guarantee that the leads are quality, and relevant, and if they’re not ready to buy now, they’ll remember you in the future. It is very important to remember to make the connection with the prospect the priority when you want to use LinkedIn to generate leads. Give value and help to your leads and focus only on prospects.
3- Improve the ability to evaluate and analyze market impact
If monetization is the most important metric by which your business lives, money is probably hidden or wasted within your marketing budget. It’s important to take a legitimate look at how effective your marketing and lead generation strategy is, considering that it may or may not work. Here are some metrics to consider when evaluating your marketing results.
Return on Investment: This is the most important key performance indicator. This measures the effectiveness of each marketing dollar spent against the money earned and also measures the quality of the leads generated.
Cost per lead: This metric measures how cost-effective your campaigns are and focuses entirely on the leads generated through the campaign. Knowing how much each lead is costing you is important. This is especially easy to find out when you run ads. For example, if you had a budget of $1,000 and the campaign generated 10 leads, your cost per lead would be $100. Then you have to consider the cost of customer ownership. If 5 of those 10 leads buy your product or service, it will cost you $200 to acquire a new customer.
Important Notes:
The most effective lead generation strategy for B2B businesses is to focus on reaching out directly to the people and businesses that really need your services and then taking the time to build a solid relationship with them.
LinkedIn is an effective lead generation and marketing platform for B2B businesses because it is the only social network that people turn to do business with and are constantly looking for solutions to their problems.
Tracking, evaluating, and analyzing the impact of marketing is very important for businesses. A business will fail if it costs more per lead than it earns or is sinking resources into marketing that does not have a positive return on investment.
4- Improve the alignment of marketing and sales
There’s an old cliché among salespeople that says, “Marketing doesn’t send us good leads!” Of course, this may not be very relevant to you if you have a small business without a sales team, but there are probably a lot of empty spaces between your sales and marketing departments. One of the best things you can do for your business is to improve your marketing and sales alignment.
This can dramatically increase your sales and return rates. Organizations that have well-aligned sales and marketing have a 36% higher return rate than other businesses and a 38% higher sales rate than other businesses.
It doesn’t matter if you are a solopreneur or have a team, aligning your marketing and sales activities is critical for you. You can do this in two ways. The first way is to create a clear and accurate buyer persona. These personas represent your ideal customer, whether it’s a company or an individual.
Look at the size, annual revenue, industry, and more to determine if a company is right for you. To evaluate a person, consider their role or position in your company, number of years of experience, and similar things. By creating these segments, you become more focused on finding higher-quality leads that are more relevant to your target market. You will save time and money by avoiding following poor-quality leads in the funnel.
In the next step, it is very important to have a well-thought-out follow-up and sales process so that you can track the status of a target at any time. Implementing best practices for sales and marketing will increase the effectiveness of your B2B lead generation, which will ultimately lead to increased conversion rates.
Important Notes
The marketing and sales activities of a business should be aligned, regardless of the size of the business. One of the best ways to do this is to create a buyer persona that reflects the ideal business customer. The next step is to use this persona to guide both sales and marketing departments.
Successful businesses create a well-structured sales and follow-up process that naturally follows the ideal customer through the buying journey. This includes effective and relevant marketing materials that are created to support the sales and follow-up process.
The best possible activities for marketing and selling a successful business should be on topics such as the following.
- Agree on the ideal customer persona and customer journey map
- Overall content strategy
- The process of following a lead
- Feedback and optimization process
5- Expanding the content library to set marketing campaigns in motion
The founder of Microsoft first coined the phrase “content is king.” in 1996 and it still seems true to this day. Nothing like quality content to engage your prospects, entertain them, and encourage them to do business with you while building your credibility and power.
When you create a wealth of quality content, you showcase your expertise in several ways. You use your content to impress, help, and connect with your ideal customers. The great thing here is that content production has many different forms, some of which you can see in the list below.
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Checklists
- reports
- white pages
- Electronic books
- Videos
- Webinars
All you have to do is find out which form of content you are most comfortable and enjoyable to produce, and which content model your market responds best to, and start producing! When creating content, remember that your readers are always asking themselves, “What’s in it for me?” Answer this question and you will have an engaged audience. Otherwise, they will skim your content to find content that answers their question and is interesting to them.
The best way to create content in our opinion has been to lead the way by providing value and the best tips and tricks, you should do the same. Focus on helping your target market solve their problems before they even have a chance to talk to you. By helping potential buyers by providing them with the information they need to make the right decision, you can not only establish yourself as an expert in your industry but the trust that makes you the natural choice when buying from this company. You have also created people who do.
Important Notes
Modern consumers expect to be educated before they buy. Today, educational marketing is a must for businesses of all sizes and in every industry.
Solving the challenges of your ideal customers through quality content will increase your credibility and create a sense of trust. This is very important because people buy from people they know, like, and trust.
Producing and sharing valuable and strategic content generates quality organic leads for a business.
6- Increase the depth and accuracy of your database
Using strong data to make decisions, win more clients, and close more deals are not the only main goals of large companies like Amazon. Your business also needs to focus on data. Who are you talking to? What are their needs? What problems do they have? In which part of your buyer’s journey do these people fall?
These are some of the questions you need to answer before you start getting more audiences. If you haven’t been collecting information about your prospects in an integrated way, now is the time to start. You’ll be surprised how much easier the sales process becomes when you make data-driven decisions.
Data and analytics are used by companies to increase the chances of making better decisions not only at the aggregate level but also at the individual and individual levels. As a first step to doing this, look at your old data, past leads, opportunities, and sales transactions and import them into CRM software.
Now that all your data is in one place, you can analyze which strategies have worked best for each customer or product category and thus identify trends. This information is extremely valuable because it allows you to make the most of your strengths and minimize any waste of time, energy, and expense.
Important Notes
Businesses benefit from using CRM software because it helps them analyze customers or classify products identify trends and improve their business.
Data-driven decision-making is an activity in which data is collected and analyzed and decisions are made based on the information obtained instead of observations.
The benefits of data-driven decision-making include:
Improved transparency and accounting
Continuous improvement in marketing activities
Formulation of new products and services
Increasing the simplicity of decisions made in business