Lead generation is a crucial aspect of any successful B2B organization. Quality lead generation plays a crucial role in supporting sales teams to drive revenue by providing them with a steady stream of potential customers who are more likely to convert into paying clients.
To attract and convert high-quality leads, it's essential to implement effective strategies tailored to your target audience. Here are 10 proven tactics to elevate your B2B lead generation efforts (plus keep reading for a BONUS).
1. Define Your Target Audience
2. Create Valuable Content
3. Optimize for Search Engines
4. Leverage Social Media
5. Host Webinars and Events
6. Encourage Referrals
7. Optimize Landing Pages
8. Create CTAs that Encourage Action
9. Offer Free Trials or Demos
10. Personalize Your Approach
Below, I explore each of these a bit more and link to additional resources that provide even more insight into these.
Create comprehensive target personas to understand your ideal customer's pain points and needs. Research, surveys, and data can all be used to compile the information that’s necessary for almost every point following this. If you don’t know this information about your audience, you could waste time, money, and resources, spinning your wheels on content or efforts that won’t convert because they aren’t valuable or important to your target audience.
[DOES INVESTING TIME AND RESOURCES INTO YOUR TARGET PERSONA AFFECT YOUR REVENUE?]
Produce high-quality content like blogs, videos, infographics, checklists, and ebooks that showcase your expertise and address your audience's challenges. This content could be educational and answer your prospect’s questions or speak to their desired business results, or informational – sharing success stories or informing them on processes and procedures your business can help with.
Boost your organic visibility by optimizing your website and content for search engines. The more traffic you can drive to your site that’s interested in what you offer them, the more qualified leads you should receive on offer conversions.
Build a strong presence on relevant social media platforms to engage with your audience and share valuable content. Don’t focus on the vanity metrics of social media or spend time on platforms that aren’t popular to your target persona. Instead, focus on providing valuable content and engaging with users through both your brand channels as well as your company leader’s or thought leader’s channels. Share content where they want it... when they want it...and drive them to your site pages where you can convert them into a contact.
Showcase your expertise and connect with new leads and potential prospects through free webinars and industry events. Provide valuable information in your webinar or event that your target persona would exchange their contact information for. Or offer event attendees free resources that you can email them following the event.
Leverage satisfied clients to advocate for your services and refer new leads. Referrals are often your best leads because you don’t have to start from scratch to build trust and credibility. It’s already been done on your behalf. Many companies don’t have referral business because they simply don’t ask for them.
Create dedicated landing pages with clear call-to-actions to encourage visitors to take the desired action. Landing pages should use easily-digestible copy with headlines that stand out and are written directly for your target persona.
CTAs could make or break the visitor’s decision to act on an offer. Good placement, clear verbiage, design that stands out from the page copy, and strategic links and workflow all contribute to effective CTAs as part of a lead generation strategy.
[OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE FOR B2B LEAD GENERATION]
Provide prospects with a risk-free opportunity to experience your product or service. This could be done with an explainer video, a free trial, or in a 15-minute risk-free demo. A lead that’s completing a form to share that they’re interested in this has already deemed your product or service valuable enough to spend time exploring.
Tailor your communication, content, and marketing efforts on each prospect's stage in the buyer's journey and the pain points they’re experiencing. This comes by first identifying and researching your target audience (#1 in this list) to create your target persona, then understanding their buyer’s journey and pain points is another layer to creating content they find valuable at various points along their journey.
[NAVIGATE POTENTIAL BUYERS THROUGH EACH STAGE OF THE SALES PROCESS]
Explore partnership opportunities with other businesses or influencers in your industry to expand your reach. Utilize their audience (which should be pre-researched and confirmed as a valuable target audience to your business). This might be inviting a well-known thought leader to be a guest on your podcast, or collaborating on a product roll-out with an industry expert that shares your audience (but is not a competitor).
Remember, successful lead generation requires consistent effort, adaptability, and a customer-centric approach. It’s important that both the marketing and sales teams continuously monitor and analyze the performance of the lead generation efforts to make improvements as needed.
My top tips to ensure the above strategies are effective include:
Be Human – remember that while we group our target persona and personify them, their role, their industry, etc., at the end of the day, decision makers (and decision influencers) are human. Treat them that way.
Research – never stop learning about your target persona, their pain points, their buyer’s journey, and anything you can related to them. Major events or crisis can cause these to change, and savvy marketers and sellers are on top of this.
Take Advantage of Technology – whether it’s a CRM, marketing automation platform, social media scheduler, AI content generator, or one of the other MANY martech available, use what you can within your budget to automate and enhance your manual efforts.
Analyze – lead generation is not a one-and-done effort. Carve out time to go back and review what you’ve done, what you haven’t done, what’s working, what’s not working, and other opportunities you might have based on what the data tells you.
Use Your Data – Fuel your future lead generation efforts with the data you receive. Numbers don’t lie.
By applying these strategies, you can attract and convert high-quality leads for your B2B organization which allows the sales team to utilize their talents to spend more time selling to qualified leads that are warm leads and less time finding cold leads and starting from scratch.
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At LeadG2, we're obsessed with ROI, and you can tell by the way we focus on getting results from the moment we start working together. From lead generation and new business conversions to strengthening and shortening your sales process, there are a variety of ways we achieve ROI for our clients. But don't just take it from us. See how we’ve partnered with our clients to grow traffic, increase quality leads, drive new business, and generate revenue.