ShivaniToday, the best marketing strategy is the one that works as per the customer needs & industry norms, along with your product and company objectives. Therefore, before we learn effective B2B lead generation strategies, it’s essential to make sure that your company objective is clearly defined.
10 Exclusive B2B Lead Generation Strategies.
1. Build Irresistible Lead Magnets
First of all, you need to understand the process of lead generation; it’s a trade of information among your organization and website visitors – your motive is to present information about your offerings in exchange for their contact details.
You have to make sure that there must be a win-win situation for both parties because what the visitors gain from your trade forms the foundation of belief and reliability with your company.
And it is where Lead magnets come. You can offer helpful resources to a prospect in exchange for their contact details like an email address.
To build an effective lead magnet, you have to concentrate on your buyer personas and amplify resources that address the difficulties that they have at various touchpoints throughout their journey around your company ecosystem.
An efficient lead magnet is one that your prospect can use in their organization. Some of the most effective convertible lead magnets are –
- Case studies
- Webinars
- Research Reports
- Comprehensive “How-to” Guides
2. Publish SEO-friendly blog posts
Many B2B companies make one of the most common mistakes that they did not make their blog posts Search Engine friendly.
You have to understand that Google is a primary platform where every B2B buyer searches for potential vendors or solutions for their problems. If you aren’t visible there, you are hidden from your most valued customers.
In this strategy, you are already investing your time, effort, and energy in creating blog posts for your website, but you’re avoiding the most critical component of it that can help you make the most out of it – SEO.
To produce SEO-friendly blog posts, you need an efficient content strategy that targets your primary keywords and addresses prospects’ doubts at different marketing funnel stages.
3. Add dynamic CTA at the end of your blog posts.
Since now you have SEO-friendly blog posts that drive loads of traffic on your website from search engine results. Now, it’s time for your blog posts to be the first touchpoint of your customers on the website. Once a visitor arrives on your site, you need to convert them into a lead. By adding dynamic call-to-action at the end of the post can be proved useful for lead generation strategy. If a visitor remains occupied with an article till the end, there’s a high possibility that they can be converted.
However, the CTA has to be particular to the blog topic, category, and audience.
For example, a blog post titled “The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing” targets those users who might be new to email marketing, which is why CTA gave an email marketing planning template that can assist them in getting started with it.
The importance of what you give to your readers is very important for better conversion. You can utilize the CTAs like “Book a free consultation,” “Request a demo” on blogs targeting the most likely customers. At the same time, in other circumstances, you can allow the most suitable lead magnets.
4. Use Exit-intent Popups
Exit intent popup arises whenever a visitor is about to leave the site, i.e., whenever the user’s cursor leaves the browser window by clicking on the back button or changing the browser tab.
But you have to implement it in such a way that the exit-intent popup should not arise to every visitor because ultimately, they have to leave your site, and not every visitor is your potential customer.
You have to be very strategic in displaying the popup and with what message – keep it very personalized based on your site’s interactions.
For example, if a visitor already completed the lead generation cycle, you don’t need to display an exit-intent popup. In contrast, if a visitor spent longer than a specific time duration and explored product pages, then a popup with a case study download would be much more effective than a generic newsletter subscription or free ebook. Here’s how an exit popup looks like –
Remember, exit-intent popups should be your last chance to convert an engaging visitor into a lead – not everyone who lands on your site. For better conversion, you can use an exit-intent popup for the visitors who –
- abandoned lead generation form
- spent more time on site but didn’t submit any form.
- Multiple pages but didn’t convert.
You can use OptinMonster to target visitors with personalized exit-intent offers based on their behaviour and interactions on your site.
5. Retarget your website visitors
This is another classic B2B marketing strategy that I use to stay connected with prospects at every marketing funnel stage. A lead management system can further streamline retargeting efforts by organizing and tracking lead interactions effectively
And this strategy helps me convert over 50% of the visitors who leave the website without leaving their contact details.
I have audited hundreds of B2B websites to date, and in my experience, almost 95-98% of the website visitors leave the site without sharing their email on their first visit. You don’t have to trust my words for this; analyze your website analytics data and see how the number looks like for your site.
Now, retargeting those lost visitors and potential customers on other channels like Facebook and LinkedIn allows you to establish communication with them and offer them something relevant to get them back on your site for conversion. You can also leverage Google Ads to target your visitors via display ads.
Remarketing campaigns on other channels enable you to create multiple touchpoints for prospects at different stages of the funnel to keep them engaged with your brand until they are ready to take desirable action on your site.
6. Target your competitor’s keywords on Google Ads
This is another lead generation strategy that never failed me. This strategy directly targets your competitors’ main keywords or brand name on Google search ads.
If your competitors have already figured out the keywords that generate leads and done hard work in building brand awareness for their brand keyword, you can take advantage of it for your business.
Using the SEMrush Advertising Research tool, you can see what keywords your competitors target on Google Ads. For example, in the image below, you can see that SendInBlue is targeting their competitors brand keywords on Google Ads.
Once you have identified the keywords, your competitors rank for or target Google Ads, running a PPC campaign targeting those keywords on a small scale. Now, see how many of them attract sales-ready customers for your business and then execute the campaign on a larger scale targeting the most relevant keywords.
Here’s how SendInBlue is targeting the “Aweber” keyword on a search result-
7. Publish videos on YouTube
YouTube is another marketing platform that you don’t want to leave out of your lead generation strategy. Here’s why-
- YouTube is the second largest search engine.
- YouTube is the 4th most used social site right after Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The fact that I want to show you is that no matter who you are targeting, there’s a high probability that your target audience is available on YouTube searching for possible solutions to their problem. And you don’t want to miss the opportunity to help them and introduce yourself as their saviour (really, saviour?)
Also, to create videos on YouTube, you don’t need to invest in expensive equipment and studios to impress your viewers. Your viewers want information that you can offer them by merely repurposing your existing content in explanatory videos like Moz.
You can also create a different type of video content to keep your viewers engaged. Here are few ideas for your YouTube channel-
- Interview industry leaders
- Share Customer testimonials
- Host live events.
and more.
8. Utilize FB targeting options
When it comes to paid advertisement, most B2B marketers ignore Facebook or don’t take it seriously.
I was also among such marketers until I ran a campaign on the platform for one of my clients. The result I gained from it changed my opinion, and I have put Facebook Ads in one of the top-performing lead generation platforms for B2B brands.
Here, the game is you cannot use Facebook like a B2C brand and expect results. For B2B marketing, you have to take a different approach considering your customers’ behavioural aspects and how they use Facebook in their day-to-day routine.
Facebook Ads offers few B2B-targeting attributes like job, industry, employer, interests, and more that enable you to target them more effectively.
You can also use Facebook website retargeting ads for remarketing to website visitors. Because trust me, no matter who you’re targeting, they must be using Facebook at least once a week (if not daily), and you don’t want to miss that opportunity to convert them into a lead.
9. Leverage LinkedIn to target high-value prospects
After Google Ads, LinkedIn is my best performing lead generation platform in terms of the quality of leads you can attract.
LinkedIn is a professional networking platform that enables you to reach out to the target companies ‘ decision-makers directly. But the real challenge is in converting those potential customers into leads.
To achieve that, you have to offer something unique and valuable in which CXOs and other high-level professionals would be interested.
Here’s my secret to success on LinkedIn Marketing – Industry reports work well when it comes to grabbing industry leaders’ attention and successful companies’ executives. Try it, and you’ll thank me later!
10. Host webinars
If you are not using Webinar as a lead generation material, you leave many potential leads for your competitors. Here’s why-
- 73% of B2B marketers and leaders in sales see Webinar as an effective way for high-quality leads.
- 20% to 40% of webinar attendees eventually turn into leads.
- 91% of B2B professionals prefer Webinars as educational content.
There’s another reason why hosting webinars is one of the successful lead generation strategies (and you’ll agree too) – people see how you or your product can solve their problem in real-time.
Using webinars, you can showcase your expertise in the field, which ultimately helps you build trust and credibility with your target audience, leading to conversion.
B2B Lead Generation: Quality and Quantity
As a B2B marketer, a lot depends on how many and the type of leads you can generate. If you produce tons of leads, but the sales cannot close most of them, your leads’ quality is low, whereas if you provide the high-value leads, but you’re keeping the pipeline dry, you’re doing no good for the business.
The B2B marketing and sales cycle is quite long, and that’s why you have to always keep the quantity and quality of leads in your mind while building a B2B lead generation strategy for your business.
