What are the best lead generation strategies in B2B marketing?
Companies can take advantage of several strategies to develop their business, each with a specific, targeted goal. And here we ask: what are the best lead generation strategies for B2B?
B2B lead generation includes the set of targeted marketing actions that have the goal of generating and acquiring contacts from other companies who are interested in the product and service offered.
Acquiring new contacts, those who are qualified and on target, is a key operation that organizations must grow.
It’s well known that lead generation isn’t easy; it’s the area of marketing where more energy and budget are invested, precisely because it is more complex.
That’s why we will dedicate this post to the best lead generation strategies for B2B.
Let’s consider some data here to understand the lead generation situation in companies. Here, we see that:
- 91% of marketers say that lead generation is their most important goal (source: Ruler Analytics).
- 53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation (source: BrightTALK).
But doing lead generation is not enough, because, particularly for a B2B marketing company, it is critical to have high quality leads, in fact:
- 37% of marketers said generating “quality” leads is one of their biggest challenges (source: Ruler Analytics).
Since we’ve already discussed lead generation in a B2C context, now we’ll turn to it in a B2B marketing context.
So, before we talk about the best lead generation strategies for B2B, let’s take a step back for a moment and ask ourselves a similar question: What is B2B marketing?
What is B2B marketing?
“B2B (business-to-business) marketing is the promotion of products or services to businesses or other organizations.” (Source: Salesforce)
Unlike the B2C marketplace, where the exchange is between a company and a consumer, here both sellers and buyers are companies and organizations. These markets are called inter-organizational and can include both multinational companies and microenterprises.
The B2B market is certainly more complex, where the exchange between companies can take many forms: from the purchase of a product to a partnership between companies or institutions.
In the book, Business Marketing Management, Hutt and Speh propose a classification of products or goods for B2B markets, which can help to get a clearer picture of the exchanges that take place in these markets:
- input goods: raw materials, semi-finished goods, materials, components, and all goods that will be part of finished products;
- capital goods: plant or machinery and all goods that support production and logistics processes (think of buildings or desks and computers, for example);
- facilitating assets: these cover both support of organizational processes (such as paper, for example) and maintenance and repair of assets (such as computers or machinery), but also consulting services and staff training.
In short, lead generation for B2B marketing can be much more complex, precisely because the buyers are businesses. But how is the sales process structured in a B2B marketing context?
B2B lead generation: a sales process
Learning how to get B2B sales leads is only part of the process.
Increasing sales requires an intensive lead generation process where marketing and sales teams need to align, providing a clear framework to follow.
What are the steps that make up this process?
- Finding Leads
The first step in lead generation in B2B is getting the contact information of potential customers.
2. Contacting leads
With a list of contacts, sales representatives can reach out to leads through email marketing, social media, or newsletters.
3. Qualifying and prospecting for high-quality leads
During the interaction with leads, sales representatives measure the likelihood that the leads will proceed to purchase. They will do this by considering the stage where the leads are in their customer journey. These stages include:
- Awareness: the customer is aware that they need to find a solution to their problem and will consume a certain type of content to do so: blog posts, whitepapers, infographics.
- Consideration: the lead begins to learn about the product/service that might be useful to him. He will begin to inquire in more detail before approaching suppliers, perhaps by reading an ebook.
- Decision: this is the stage when the lead prepares to make his choice. He will read case studies, contact different suppliers, and evaluate different proposals.
Depending on the buying stage a lead is in, marketing teams will initiate campaigns dedicated specifically to them.
4. Close the leads by making a sale
After multiple meetings with different suppliers, the potential customer chooses you and the deal is closed.
This helps clarify how B2B marketing works; now we can move on to the best lead generation strategies for B2B.
B2B lead generation strategies
The best way to do lead generation is to customize the strategy according to the target industry, the product, and the buyer.
Marketers must always be ready to experiment and implement new ways to acquire leads, and staying up to date is critical.
This also means trying multiple strategies to see what works and what doesn’t. And why not start right from a test?
Content marketing strategy
Another lead generation strategy for B2B involves focusing on content marketing. What is content marketing? It’s the distribution of curated, relevant, and valuable content to attract businesses and buyers.
Obviously, content marketing also requires a strategy, as your potential audience comes from different industries and therefore has different needs. Therefore, the reasons they choose to buy from one company versus another will also be different. This means that you’ll need to make sure that the way you convey your content, whether for a product or a service, must adapt and adjust to your target market.
An aspect that both B2B and B2C marketing share in common is the need to create engaging and attractive content.
Let’s look at some data:
- 43% of B2B marketers have a content marketing strategy, and this increases to 60% for the most successful B2B marketers (source: Content Marketing Institute);
- 69% of marketers actively invest their time in SEO (HubSpot);
- 60% of marketers say content marketing generates demand/leads;
- 70% of marketers say content marketing helps educate audiences;
- 60% say it helps to retain existing customers (Source: CMI).
What are the points to follow for an effective content marketing strategy?
1. Set content goals: what you want to communicate, the questions do you want to answer;
2. Identify and understand the audience: before selling your product, you need to sell a story. Targeted, quality storytelling creates engagement.
3. Enhance the customer experience: use content marketing to differentiate yourself from competitors and offer customers and potential customers a unique experience. The content you create is not only important because of the message you want to promote, but it must make businesses/companies/potential customers take a path that gets them from point A to point B and to a conversion.
4. Develop multi-layered content: don’t just rely on written text. Incorporating images and video into your strategy is critical, and numerous statistics prove it:
- 94% of marketers say video has helped them increase the understanding of their product or service;
- 86% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads;
- 81% of marketers say video has helped them increase sales;
- 49% of marketers say video has helped them reduce support calls (source: Wyzowl).
Don’t neglect social: LinkedIn
Among the various social platforms available, the one that is best suited for a B2B company is LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is the right place for valuable B2B lead generation, and the statistics support this:
- 80% of online B2B lead generation comes from LinkedIn;
- 43% of marketers on the social network say they have obtained at least one customer using the platform;
- 79% of marketers believe this platform is a great lead generation tool (source: LinkedIn).
Competition on LinkedIn is significant, and the click-through on ads is higher than on other platforms; the trade-off, however, is the ability to hyper-target your audience.
Remember, however, that if you are going to advertise on LinkedIn, you need to make sure you offer valuable, targeted premium content. Remember, this is how you can get potential customers to “arrive” on your landing page.
LinkedIn members are known to be career and skill oriented. If you offer content that can help them, you’re likely to get better returns from your ads.
Email marketing
Another lead generation strategy for B2B involves email marketing. B2B email marketing aims to boost relationships between companies, both potential and actual. It’s also useful for attracting their attention, helping them progress through the funnel, for building loyalty and for increasing brand reputation.
While some may think that email is an outdated, obsolete method for campaign communication, the data proves otherwise:
- 29% of marketers rate email marketing as the most effective marketing channel (25% for social media, 22% for SEO, and 25% for content marketing);
- 93% of B2B marketers use email for content distribution;
- 72% of customers prefer email as their main channel for business communication (source: snov.io).
When using email, you will want to propose valuable information and share content that is relevant to your target audience. To do this, you need to have in-depth knowledge of your target audience in order to understand their preferences, their opinions, and what they consider valuable.
Of course, an email is not made up of content alone but also of headlines, graphics, colors, and a subject line. Each of these elements impacts the open rate and CTR of the email.
An attention-grabbing headline, text composed of simple, direct, and relevant sentences, brand colors that are recognizable, and eye-catching graphics are all crucial to the success of your email marketing campaign.
Another aspect that should not be overlooked is timing: the day and the time that you send your emails. What are the habits of your target audience around email? Testing can provide you with an answer.
With A/B testing, you can administer two different versions of your email to a defined audience. In doing so, you’ll want to consider these essential points:
- a measurable objective
- the test subject;
- how to administer the test to the target audience. The most classic test is to send one version to half the audience (original A) and the other half to the variant B;
- choosing the variant element of the test;
- the duration of the test.
This can be an effective way to create a successful email campaign!
Call to action and landing page
Calls to action and landing pages are the two main ways to get potential leads to leave their personal information. They are key tools:
- A captivating call to action is key to attracting visitors’ attention and for inviting them to click to “land” on the various landing pages.
- Landing pages: web pages created with the intent of offering premium content to leads (ebooks, reports, case studies, whitepapers) by entering their data.
Remember that data entry should always be followed by an incentive or some sort of reward, which can be premium content.
These elements facilitate the transition from a mere contact to an actual lead, and you can promote them using various digital channels, such as social media or email marketing. The next goal is to convert these leads, but that’s another story!
An effective B2B lead generation strategy can help build your contact database organically and allow your business to grow.
