21 B2B Lead Generation Tactics
“If people like you they will listen to you, but if they trust you, they will do business with you.” – Zig Ziglar, salesman and motivational speaker
When it comes to B2B lead generation, trust is the name of the game. Without developing trust during every step of the customer journey, potential B2B leads will look for other ways to spend their money.
In today’s omnichannel marketing space, B2B marketers must work hard to attract and nurture prospects throughout often complex funnels. What’s more, they need to customize and hyper-personalize the marketing funnel to speak the language of the customer and grab their attention. Hence, customer intimacy and trust are imperative to the success of B2B marketers.
Sounds complex? Let’s get back to the drawing board with practical, actionable advice for how to generate B2B leads.
Here are 21 ways you can boost your B2B lead generation efforts:
1) Website & Landing Page Optimization
Good website design brings more traffic and better engages potential leads no matter how they got to your site, both organic and paid. Furthermore, relevant content that directly appeals to the viewer’s interests and addresses their pain points is imperative to the success of your website. Landing pages must also be optimized in terms of messaging and design, with the proper placement of the Call-To-Action button playing a crucial role in generating leads. Here are some tips for creating optimized landing pages.
2) Paid Advertising
Employing paid search for lead generation ensures that more traffic arrives on your website, via display ads such as Google, native ads like Outbrain, and social media ads via platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Reddit.
A key aspect of paid advertising is utilizing advanced targeting tools, such as interest targeting, to ensure you are reaching the most relevant audience and maximizing the ROI of your advertising spend.
3) Email Marketing
According to the latest statistics from Wordstream, email marketing is the third most popular source for B2B information, after colleague recommendations and industry thought leaders. For B2B marketers, email should be a staple part of their lead generation efforts.
Check out these tips for writing great B2B email subject lines.
4) Integrated Content Strategy
A successful B2B content strategy must be tailored to the needs of prospects at various stages of the marketing and sales funnels. This means that marketing and sales teams should work together to develop the most impactful silos at every stage.
Here’s how content marketing brings results in the B2B arena:
- Building a respectable online presence and brand identity
- Offering prospects relevant, valuable information that solves their pain points
- Providing a variety of content types targeted to relevant audiences at different stages of the funnel: native ads, e-books, webinars, blog posts or social media posts
- Generating leads by engaging audience members and instigating Calls To Action
5) Influencer & Micro-Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing is important for B2B as well as B2C companies, as it generates referrals and positive word-of-mouth interactions that are imperative to online engagement.
B2B marketers should research and engage with influencers in their industry across multiple channels. Influencer marketing is a powerful way to reach large, relevant audiences by positioning the influencer as an advocate of your B2B brand.
Micro-Influencer Marketing is also making gains as a popular marketing channel. Rather than focusing on celebrities or big-name influencers, companies are now partnering with micro-influencers in their specific niche, or even using colleagues, business partners and satisfied customers to help increase brand awareness and conversions.
6) Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing or key account marketing is a tactical approach wherein the marketers communicate directly and in-person with an individual prospect or customer account, oftentimes with the key decision-makers.
According to ITSMA, 77% of B2B marketers say that ABM marketing has brought success to their target accounts. The biggest advantage of account-based marketing is that it allows marketers to expedite the sales funnel and helps them to optimize the total number of conversions by focusing specifically on highly-engaged accounts.
7) Search Marketing
According to a study conducted by the Joal Group in 2019, the businesses that show up on the first page of the search engines manage to amass about 90% of the relevant customer traffic & Google holds about 92.42% of the total share of the total search engine market as of April 2019.
Ranking high on Google for relevant keywords helps B2B brands get discovered by potential customers. The race for ranking high on Google though is fiercer than ever.
Healthy SEO practices, effective social media marketing and native advertising strategies, and relevance to the search queries of prospects are keys to ranking high on Google.
8) Social Media Marketing
According to pureb2b.com, 94% of B2B businesses say that LinkedIn is the best social media platform for qualified leads.
Defining social KPIs for measuring Return on Investment (ROI) from the campaigns on social media lies at the heart of impactful B2B social media marketing. As B2B marketers become more acquainted with the methods used to track and quantify the success of their social media marketing campaigns, they are using it more and more for their brand marketing.
9) Video-based Marketing
According to research, 72% of potential buyers prefer to receiving branded content in video format over text.
Furthermore, a report by the Content Marketing Institute showed that 60% of B2B marketers are using video in their content strategy.
It’s not just capturing and engaging the audience that’s important – it’s also keeping track of your video analytics to make sure you keep up a standard of success.
10) YouTube Video Marketing
85% of internet users in the United States watch video monthly on any of their devices. And, YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google. Engaging users on YouTube helps marketers boost their organic SEO rankings. Besides, promoting a YouTube channel helps to establish brand equity and engages users with relevant video content about the company’s products and services.
YouTube Analytics can be used to measure the total number of conversions and leads generated via YouTube advertising.
11) Segmenting the Target Audience
Potential leads can be segmented into different clusters based on demography, geography, intent signaling, psychographic data and past purchase behavior. Segmenting the target audience based on their current and past research methodologies, and leveraging cookie-based data, not only facilitates targeted advertising across several clusters but also facilitates retargeting.
12) Real-Time & Contextual Marketing
Once you have defined your customer personas and segmented them into clusters, you can target prospects and generate leads with the help of contextual marketing. Target prospects based on job title, demography, purchase history, company goals, and more. When audiences specifically get tailored solutions to their pain points in the form of products, their experiences are improved and conversions on the website are optimized.
13) Chatbots
According to Business Insider, 80% of companies will want to use chatbots by 2020.
Chatbots have revolutionized customer support and lead generation by engaging customers in real-time when they visit your web pages. When operating on AI-based algorithms, chatbots can help deliver a fast and tailored messaging solution to capture audience attention and drive them down the funnel.
14) Data Analytics & A/B Testing
Businesses today must rely on data-driven decisions. Data analytics examines online trends and customer behaviors and utilizes them to develop strategies and activities aligned to your business’s measurable KPIs.
A/B testing is an integral part of optimizing website design and function so that the ultimate goal of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is achieved. By enhancing the customer experience (CX), website conversions and lead generation will benefit.
15) Automated Social Media Sharing
In a dynamic B2B industry, content needs to be showcased and promoted across multiple social media channels. Yet the various platforms have different times that are ideal to reach your audience and generate leads. You can use third-party posting and scheduling tools such as Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Buffer to streamline and automate your social posting calendar.
16) Reputation Building & Management
Encouraging customers to leave positive reviews on your website, Google, social media platforms and third-party websites, such as Yelp, not only fetches a considerable amount of website traffic through referral channels but also helps in establishing brand equity in the long run.
Authentic word-of-mouth recommendations are imperative for generating leads.
17) Offline Events
Sponsoring and attending real-life events helps build relationships with people in your particular business niche. Attending business events gives marketers new insights about their businesses as well as acquainting them with the latest perspectives.
Sponsoring events gives businesses a chance to promote their brand and strengthen their brand value among the audience. Depending on the type of customer you are trying to attract, you can choose to sponsor different events and at different times.
18) Benchmarking the Competition
Analyzing the best practices of competitors in lead generation is essential. Benchmarking the competition gives marketers a chance to examine their strategies and make meaningful changes in line with current industry and competitor practices.
19) Personalization via Omnichannel Marketing
Relying just on a fixed number of marketing channels for lead generation is an outdated practice. Marketers nowadays need to engage customers by omnichannel marketing at multiple touchpoints.
According to a Salesforce study, 57% of customers were willing to disclose their data in return for meaningful and hyper-personalized offers.
Addressing the personal pain points of customers is an essential prerequisite to converting them.
20) Retargeting
Retargeting potential buyers across multiple channels can help accelerate conversions and generate new leads. You can retarget customers via native ad campaigns, email campaigns and social media.
Retargeting is an excellent way to reach out to potential buyers who have already expressed interest in your business by visiting your website. Check out this beginner’s guide to retargeting.
21) Neuromarketing
Neuromarketing is the study of how emotions and subconscious affects purchase decisions. Along with data gathered from other sources that explain more explicit signals from customers, implicit neuro-based data analysis can give marketers valuable insights about the deep, true buying intent of potential customers.
To Sum Up
Building a strong B2B lead-generating pipeline takes time and demands impactful strategies. The 21 tactics listed above are a comprehensive overview of the ways that B2B marketers can nurture prospects down the marketing funnel so they can emerge as qualified sales leads that will surely convert.
Check out our new guide to online video advertising!