Introduction
Lead generation is the fundamental key to success for any B2B business and the most important part of a company’s marketing strategy. B2B lead generation holds paramount importance as it is what helps you in identifying your ideal customers, and then attracting them to buy your products and services.
Since lead generation strategies keep evolving every year, marketers are constantly looking for new strategies or opportunities to create a pipeline of prospects and stay relevant in the market.
According to HubSpot’s marketing report, over 61% of marketers find it challenging to generate traffic and leads. These lead-generating strategies are what help businesses have a continuous flow of qualified leads.
Establishing a continuous flow of leads will allow you to maintain a steady growth rate and will increase your revenue. However, you should know that B2B lead generation is not as easy as generating leads for your B2C company.
To generate B2B leads, you have to identify and research a variety of decision-makers, as each company will likely have several layers of team members weighing in on whether or not to buy your products or services. Once you have these details, you can market your business by reaching out to your prospective customers to send emails with messages tailored to impact each person involved in the process. Check if they are qualified, and only then convert them into clients.
Companies with an effective lead generation strategy are said to earn over 133% more revenue compared to others. With 2022 in full swing, marketers of B2B businesses need to come up with a future-forward lead generation plan.
The lead generation strategies below will help enhance your brand awareness, broaden your reach, generate high-quality leads and increase your sales.
Top 10 B2B Lead Generation Strategies For 2022
1. Generating Leads By Marketing Your Content
Content Marketing is one of the most effective B2B tools for lead generation. Customers prefer purchasing from brands that provide them with interesting yet engaging content. That is exactly what content marketing does, it attracts the attention of customers by providing insight and value through informative and useful material.
The value is clear in this stat from Content Marketing Institute’s annual B2B Content Marketing Report showing B2B 66% of brands plan to increase spending on content marketing.
This form of marketing focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing content to add value for your target audience on various online platforms. Many marketers make use of blogs, eBooks, whitepapers, social media posts, images, podcasts, websites, graphics, and videos to increase engagement with their leads. The main role of content marketing is to persuade a potential customer into taking an action that the marketer wants.
Traditional forms of marketing are becoming less effective day by day which is why many marketers are coming up with innovative techniques to use in their marketing strategies. So instead of pitching their products and services to their customers, marketers are now providing relevant content to their leads to help solve problems.
Many companies like P&G, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems, use content marketing techniques like product tutorials, product reviews, expert interviews, customer testimonials, and case studies on different platforms to generate more leads.
2. Arranging Many Events, Networking And Conferences
In the B2B space, it is very important to build trust and authority, and one of the best ways to do that is through event networking or attending conferences, seminars, workshops, etc.
These networking events are a place where you can meet people, make connections and generate leads. Many companies are conducting networking events based on their location, industry, and target audience to generate more leads.
A pro tip on attending these events is that you should have a sales pitch ready to share as an introduction for the people who want to know more about your product or services. People also exchange their business cards or contact information with other attendees. After that, you can follow up with leads through email or a phone call.
Webinars, Conferences, and Podcasts are another great opportunity to talk about your business and what it offers. You can also answer customer queries and share your content across your platforms.
For example, a marketing or advertising firm could hold a networking event on social media advertising to find clients wanting to outsource social media posting and ads.
3. Optimize Your Website And Content With SEO
SEO is known to be one of the few lead generation strategies that give the highest ROI. Website optimization helps increase visibility and online traffic through organic search engines like Google.
Another main benefit of optimizing your website is that it improves the ranking of your web pages and draws in not only B2C customers but also B2B clients.
The reason behind SEO’s success in lead generation is that Google is among the most trusted brands in the world. Searchers trust the results Google delivers, and if your brand appears in those results, you’ll get an instant bump up in credibility.
By using transactional keywords, you will be able to reach your target B2B clients. But, the process of ranking on search engines has evolved over the years, where you need more than just keywords to grab the top spot on the search engines. As search engines are a major marketing channel for B2B businesses, you need to focus on context and intent as well as add appropriate keywords, and create a solid user experience.
SEO also helps you in link building where you can increase your brand’s exposure. Website optimization allows you to drive organic traffic and boost conversions on your website.
4. Email Marketing Is King
Email marketing is a popular marketing strategy wherein you send emails to a group of leads or potential customers. However, B2B email marketing is not limited to just sending emails, as you are also required to convince them to make a buying decision quickly. According to Salesforce, over 72% of B2B customers expect vendors to personalize engagement based on their needs.
B2B customers are similar to B2C customers as they want personalized marketing communication that will help them reach their needs. Many recent studies suggest that email marketing is the most effective B2B lead generation channel as content marketing and social media marketing follow closely behind.
This is because B2B email marketing has many advantages such as ease of implementation and cost-effectiveness. You should make sure that your B2B emails have an interesting subject line, engaging content, and a call to action in the right places. You can automate your B2B email campaigns according to your specifications; this way you save time and focus on closing deals and providing service to existing customers.
5. Try Out Pay-per-click (PPC)
Paid Advertising is another great lead generation strategy that is highly effective for websites that are doing online lead generation. There are many PPC platforms like Facebook, Google, Bing, and Instagram Ads that are designed to help B2B companies in lead generation.
This strategy comes with advantages like reaching a highly targeted audience with click-worthy campaigns, faster results, and cost-effectiveness (if you target accurately and write actionable copy).
Have you ever seen a website with a tiny little word, “Ad” next to them at the top of your search engine? Yes, that is exactly what a PPC is capable of doing. All you need to do is set your target parameters, set landing pages, write a compelling ad copy and watch your business generate more B2B leads in a short amount of time.
You will find PPC campaigns on Amazon, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as on search engines like Google and Bing. With the right target audience and specific keywords, you can attract B2B businesses that are interested in the types of services you offer. Do your research and remember to bid on certain keywords to get leads for just a low cost per click depending on your industry.
As you can see, not all industries are created equally when it comes to CPC. Fortunately, you can use a tool like Semrush to analyze particular keywords and target high-volume keywords at a lower cost.
6. Use Influencers For Marketing
Influencer marketing is one of the top marketing strategies that employ leading social media content creators for endorsing your brand’s products or services.
The advantages of Influencer marketing are that it helps in improving brand awareness, increasing traffic, and reaching your desired target audience. If you search well, you will find content creators who already target the same audience as you but on all social media platforms. This is why you can leverage them to endorse your products or services and expand your reach.
Influencers are known to have a high level of knowledge or social influence in their field and also have a high level of trust with their audience. This is why recommendations from them can help you get more leads and build trust or relationships with them.
A study also concluded that over 56% of marketers who invest in influencer marketing work with micro-influencers. Micro-influencers may have a smaller following but have a higher level of engagement.
7. Guest Blog Posting
Guest blogging is a tried-and-true SEO tactic, and it’s also a solid piece of your lead generation strategy that is used by B2B marketing professionals to increase their referral traffic. Posting articles on third-party site’s blog pages is a great way to generate organic traffic, conduct link building, and increase leads.
Finding guest posting platforms or websites is easy. You just have to bring the right knowledge and then reach out with a well-developed pitch to get the publication to accept your content. Not only does this help in terms of link building but also brings you more exposure.
The goal of guest blogging is to attract new website visitors by publishing an article or blog on big third-party websites. Make sure to reach out to the sites that already generate a lot of traffic or the ones that have a huge social media following.
The readers will then visit your website by clicking on the backlinks that you have added to your blog. Even if your blog gets published on a popular website, the biggest boost of traffic will only last for a few days as there is a constant inflow of new content that takes center stage.
This is why it’s a good practice to also opt for small to medium-sized niche-specific blogs with the occasional post aimed at large blogs
8. Create Social Media Campaigns
Social media is known to be one of the most valuable lead generation channels. This is because over 3.6 billion people use social media around the world.
Social media is also the perfect channel for reaching out to other businesses and attracting leads. You need to apply the right tactics at the right time to catch your audience members’ attention. Social media campaigns are an essential part of any business strategy due to their success rate.
Hootsuite found that more than 90% of businesses use multiple social media platforms to increase brand awareness. Another option to get more leads is to create a post and then pay to boost it on the social media channel’s PPC platform. This will allow you to generate more likes, clicks, or even comments, and eventually more leads.
9. Story-Driven Content Visualization
Data-based storytelling is slowly gaining importance as a successful marketing trend. This strategy requires you to convey the message or meaning of the data in a way that is compelling and relevant to the target audience.
You can turn raw data into a piece of content that is easy to read and understandable to the audience consuming the content. This helps you simplify complex data and turn it into interesting stories that will grab more attention. Story-Driven Content Visualization can be done by adding visuals like images, videos, charts, tables, infographics, dashboards, and other visual elements.
This technique will help marketers in getting higher engagement from the B2B target audience, trigger emotions, and enhance decision making. Many studies have also proven that more than 75% of people learn better if it is visual.
Research has shown that customers prefer visual content over plain text as it is more interesting. Perhaps the biggest example of this is Instagram. You can really showcase the personality of your brand using Instagram.
Intel is a great example of a B2B brand using social media well. In this sample, you can see they highlight the use of platforms like Teams and Zoom, which has taken over the business world since 2020.
B2B leads can be attracted by using highly-visual interactive emails. Your touchpoints must induce B2B’s target audience to create a positive story in their minds about your brand.
10. Lead Generation Software’s And Tools
Lead generation software involves platforms designed to help businesses automate lead generation activities such as contact management, lead segmentation, customization, surveys, social media marketing, and other repetitive tasks. There are numerous tools or software that will help you achieve a high number of leads automatically from specific channels.
Here are a few of the top lead gen platforms for you to check out.
- Linklead.io – start with 100 contacts per month free
- Leadfeeder – highlights companies visting your website
- Vainu – real-time sales data platform with lead gen insights
- Aeroleads – helps find business email addresses
- LeadFuze – prospecting tool for business leads
The above tools offer five great lead generation platforms for you to review. Make sure you understand your specific needs before you sign up, as each platform is slightly different. Make sure the platform you choose aligns with your objectives.
Some platforms also offer lead generation and marketing automation solutions for your company. Lead generation tools help you capture leads from sources including company websites and social media. The main goal of lead generation software is to save time, track your progress, and increase marketing efforts.
Final Thoughts
Generating business-to-business (B2B) leads is a lot harder than generating B2C leads. Since many channels are now evolving and changing, we should also update to new strategies to keep ourselves updated.
Many companies are now shifting toward digital marketing solutions and are looking for new marketing strategies that will allow them to improve the customer and buyer experience and expand their reach. I hope this post helps you find new strategies to generate your B2B leads and stay ahead of your competition.
Related posts:
- Top 10 Effective B2B Lead Generation Strategies for 2022 - March 16, 2022
