B2B lead generation is all about strategy. Companies that nurture their leads receive a 450% rise in qualified projects. Companies that nurture and grow their customer relationships experience 50% growth in sales at a 33% lower cost.
It is crucial to nurture those leads that are still not ready to buy. Once nurtured, 15 to 20% of them will convert into customers. What’s more, they will eventually make 47% more purchases than the leads that were not nurtured.
The mistake
B2B marketers usually spend time generating more traffic to their websites. Instead of fixing the sales funnel, their focus is primarily on getting more traffic to meet the numbers. As a result, focusing on getting traffic – and not conversion – leads to inflated acquisition costs and a poor result.
When users visit your website, they see your landing page and forms. It is important to create an appealing and informative landing page.
Forms are important because they are the gateway to your mailing list. The way forms are designed can have a huge impact on your conversion rates. Therefore, if you have not optimized your landing page and forms, you are probably wasting money on traffic.
Only when your sales funnel is optimized and you are confident that your landing page is convincing enough to acquire leads for a good cost, you can go ahead and send traffic to that page.
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel, or marketing funnel or lead magnet funnel is the path that any prospect takes through the site to ultimately convert into a paying customer. As the amount of traffic to a website can be large, prospects dropping off is completely normal. However, the folks who make it to the end of your sales funnel are the ones producing revenue for you!
At this point, you must determine why some people drop off. What are the chokepoints?
There may be several reasons ranging from disconnects between the ad and the landing page to technical errors and beyond. As a result, your bounce rate will increase and your conversion rate will drop.
As the sales funnel is being built, you would be able to pinpoint minor technical errors and fix the leaks so that more visitors convert into loyal customers.
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Lead generation tips
1. Educate your visitors
Do not try to persuade your customers. Instead, educate them.
When people visit your site, they are looking for solutions. They are ready to get involved in the process of discovering something that’ll impact them and their life. They want to learn what is available and what you can do to help them. You have to prove that you are worth the time they invest by illustrating your business expertise in such a way that is knowledgeable and helpful without being too pushy.
This clearly means that you should fill the top of the sales funnel with highly appealing and educational content, like a downloadable lead magnet. Do not expect the prospect to opt in the first time they hit the page (although as our clients tell will tell you, our landing pages convert at 40%+)!
You want to make sure that your site is easy to discover… Through video, podcasts, engaging blog posts, done for you lead magnets, or infographics; make sure to provide all the information, in a nutshell, keep them digging deeper.
So, what kind of information should you send?
Only relevant information about the benefits of the product/service you are offering is enough. Do not beat around the bush with company information etc.
2. Use email marketing
Email marketing is a time-tested channel that builds relationships. In fact, this 23-year old strategy still hits the chord with very few missed. It is the best strategy for B2B marketing.
With email marketing, you can begin the initial outreach to your potential prospects and customers. Build a targeted list of prospects in a specific niche and reach them out personally with an email to start a journey.
Source: lucidchart.com
A trending strategy in email marketing is marketing automation. You can utilize these tools effectively to connect with the CRM and enable automatic email sending to targeted and personalized leads.
A small example – when Thomas Reuters adopted marketing automation, the company’s revenue increased by up to 172%.
Traditional email marketing and newsletters are still important. However, if you want to capture more leads and user data using various triggers, this is the way.
3. Start with content marketing
Needless to say that content marketing is everything in this dynamic digital world.
A public accounting firm, Crowe Horwath, created 48 infographics, videos, and blog posts with Q&Q targeting its C-level prospects for a market cap financial institution. It generated revenue worth $250,000 through content marketing alone.
There are many of these types of examples of tremendous growth with content marketing, email list building, and outbound sales. Your strategy should be diverse and you should experiment to understand the biggest opportunities for growth.
Source: Curata.com
Whether you are using blogs, microsites, infographics, or research reports, you must test what works and what does not. That is the only way to refine the process of lead generation over time.
4. Social media marketing
Social media scored well on various studies. You can find plenty of reports rating social media channels as the best and the most effective of all marketing strategies. The opposite is also true.
The bottom line is – you cannot call social media a poor channel for lead generation. Though it may be poorly rated, the strategy in itself is not wrong. The implementation goes wrong. Ill-fitting policies and execution are sore.
Source : Buffer.com
While several thousands of companies create self-promotional drives, a small segment of businesses uses this strategy to generate as well as nurture leads worth millions of dollars. In such cases, it is wiser to follow the minority rather than going with the crowd.
There are several social media channels for generating leads. LinkedIn is the best choice for B2B lead generation whereas Facebook works for most of the categories.
It is important to consider that social media is an indispensable part of content marketing as well as search marketing. Would your infographics and blogs succeed if there were no social media followers?
5. Focus on networking
Both social and email marketing are excellent. These two combined form one of the best ways to establish communication and build trust with your customers.
However, there is the off-line world too. Besides attending various network events, you have to consider volunteering for such projects. Some events offer an opportunity for companies to present their products or service within a span of 10 to 15 minutes. Such presentations usually lead to direct sales and second-hand recommendations from people who saw your presentation.
Networking also gives you a chance to consider one-on-one follow-ups, which opens new opportunities to learn about your potential clients. As a result, you gain trust and your clients are likely to get back to you.
6. Re-design alluring offers
You may have considered and held sales, promotions, deals, and discounts to incentivize new customers, but you may have to redo it. With so many deals and offers given by businesses, it is definitely worth upgrading your business with new local and national opportunities.
Our customers want “exclusive”, “limited period” and “in high demand” offers. These words trigger their physiological reactions and make the ads more appealing.
To help them overcome their concerns and doubts, add value to the offer in the form of a joining offer, free trial, white paper, sales promotion, download, or membership. Make it as irresistible as possible.
7. Build lead-swapping relationships
Share leads with related businesses (not competitors, mind you). It is a unique way to generate leads that you can marketing to for a long time.
For instance, if you share a friendly relationship with a business targeting the same clientele, swap leads from time to time.
However, to make sure this technique works you must digitize the swaps and use them appropriately. Here, small business CRM’s may be useful to track individual leads and nurture them through your sales process.
You may also want to consider the big data approach to get more phone numbers to cold-call.
Conclusion
The ultimate road to success is to integrate all these strategies. Outstanding lead generation results come from persistent willingness to explore and experiment with various tactics, combine them across diverse channels, and see the results.
Only experiments and split tests can help you to identify what works and what doesn’t. The quicker you test, the quicker you can start to stitch together campaigns that’ll bring you massive results.
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