Lead acquisition is one of the most important aspects of a business. However, it is not easy. Especially when it comes to B2B lead generation techniques, there are a lot of processes and tests that are involved. Your marketing team might be doing a lot of planning and strategies for lead generation. If it is not optimized properly, those strategies have no point. B2B sales are tricky as the client base is limited. While doing this, you also have to stay ahead of the competitors.
All of this might seem a bit tough for the organizations that are in the B2B space. But fret not. We are here to help you. We list the ten powerful techniques essential for B2B lead generation and tracking.
- What is B2B Lead Generation?
- B2B Lead Generation Process
- Techniques for B2B Lead Generation
- Lead Tracking with Office24by7
What is B2B Lead Generation?
B2B (business-to-business) lead generation sector includes companies that offer their product or service to other businesses. In the B2B arena, even though the clientele is limited, the income from that clientele is huge. Convincing a business owner is not as easy as convincing a normal consumer. If you want a business to invest in your product, you must make them trust you. Garnering this trust is not an easy task.
B2B lead generation involves collecting particular details like lead name, company details, official email, job title, etc. Using these details, you can send customized sales ads, pitches, etc. The targeted customers for B2B and B2C are present on different platforms. B2B customers are aimed at social media platforms, while B2C customers can be reached via traditional advertising techniques. It is important for companies to ensure that they are not interchanging these platforms.
Apart from platforms for lead generation, companies should also realize that lead nurturing is also done differently. However, let us discuss lead generation in this blog and leave nurturing for future blogs.
B2B Lead Generation Process
The lead generation process for the B2B arena will be quite different. Multiple stages will be covered here. The lead generation process must be quite intense to generate more leads. You must ensure that the marketing and sales teams align effectively to generate leads.
Let’s take a look at the different steps involved in lead generation.
Find B2B Sales Leads
This is the first step of lead generation. You have to find the contact information of leads and trust me, this will not be a cakewalk.
Companies usually employ myriads of strategies, and some such strategies are to provide gated content filled with a lot of information in exchange for customers’ contact details.
Businesses can also use different lead-generation tools to gather contact details. It is important for companies to remember that they opt for only legally bound methods for lead gen rather than purchasing the leads, etc.
Contact the Leads
Now, it is time to reach out to these leads. There are multiple ways to get in touch with them. Ranging from sales reps contacting the leads to email marketing, etc. It is important to keep this outreach as subtle and simple as possible.
Qualifying the Leads
In the B2B arena, high-quality leads will make a difference. Every lead is valuable, and you just cannot waste your time on the leads that are not of high quality. There is a sales funnel, and understanding at which phase a particular lead is present will help pitch and qualify the lead.
- Research and Awareness- The customer learned about your brand via research and knows that you are offering a tool that might solve their issue. Whenever they start consuming your blogs, whitepapers, or any other content on your website, it is called awareness.
- Consideration- The lead has a complete idea of their desired product or service. They are done with the research stage and are seriously considering purchasing.
- Decision- Now, the lead is in the decision phase. Pushing out the content that will help them move forward with their decision will impact them here. Depending upon the stage where a lead is in, the marketing team keeps sending them content.
- Closing the Deal- Sales reps do the lead-to-deal conversion. After discussing with the reps about the product, the lead finally purchases the product. The sales reps can upsell or cross-sell after this.
Do read our Comprehensive Guide to Marketing Automation.
B2B Lead Generation Techniques
Want to generate more leads for your business? The best way to do that is by having the right kind of lead generation techniques. You must tailor your techniques to the industry, buyer, and product.
This personalization is important, so we will focus on learning about different B2B lead generation techniques in this blog.
Conduct A/B Tests
Landing pages are used a lot for lead generation. They play quite an important part. If you create a landing page for your brand, you can play with colors and do an A/B test on the key aspects.
For example, there is a landing page in gray color. It has 68% of conversions. Now, the color of this background is changed to white; the conversion rate increased by 8% and reached 76%. This is called A/B testing. Right from the background color to fonts or images along with content, you can change anything on the landing page and push it out.
This way, you will get an idea of what attracted the audience and what not. It is important for businesses to conduct the A/B tests frequently. A small tweak on your landing page or homepage might increase conversions. You never know!
Offer a Free Trial
When you are in the SaaS or technology field, giving a clear idea of what you offer customers is important. To give a clear picture to your customers, is there any way other than free trials?
When you offer these free trials, your customers will know how your product will be. Trying before buying will ensure that they keep trusting your brand. Ubersuggest, an SEO tool, offers free web analytics reports, and LinkedIn offers a one-month free premium for users to get the gist of their paid platform.
Likewise, offering a free demo trial period will make customers realize how effective your tool is, and once they get used to your offerings, there is no going back.
Leverage Quora
It will not be easy to know what your customers are searching for and what questions they are asking related to your product. Quora is a social Q&A site where users learn about some burning issues, get their queries cleared, etc. Companies can focus on leveraging Quora to their best and make the most out of it. Getting the content in front of users has never been easy, and B2B marketers should be present on this platform.
Search for the questions your targeted audience is frequently searching for, answer them, and link them back to your website. One fact is that this backlink will be a no-follow one, which means that it will not increase your visibility. However, it will help you by attracting prospects and generating quality leads.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is another way to approach your customers. COVID has made many businesses work remotely, increasing the importance of emails. Most company staff are now checking their emails frequently, and being in their inbox will help you.
You must ensure your content is interesting and keeps them hooked to the email. The attention span for anyone will be some seconds only, 5 seconds to be precise, so the first thing they will see is the subject line. Keep it interesting.
This should be followed by the email content, where you can use images or graphics. The email should have a personalized touch.
Host a Free Webinar
When you showcase the industry expertise that you have, it will help your target audience to trust you. The business owners should get an assurance that you know your work and can deliver what they want.
You can prove this by offering a free webinar. In this webinar, you can discuss many things, ranging from the product or service to the after-sales service you offer. Address the problem your clients face first and provide your service as a solution they would want.
The webinar must be engaging and prove your expertise.
Publish Original and Informative Content
According to a study, B2B buyers read at least 13 content pieces before purchasing. Here, the content starts from the website content to in-depth reports, case studies, and more.
The industries have to leverage this and improve their visibility. Here’s how-
When business owners are looking for content that can provide them with some value, you have to offer it to them. You can start with trends, industry-related information, data, thought leadership articles, etc.
These will assure them that you know properly about the industry and have done your homework. The thought-leadership blogs will help in
- Proving you are a respected authority in the industry
- Generate strong SEO backlinks
- Provide PR coverage
- Deliver value to high-quality leads
In-depth YouTube Videos Will Help
B2B content must be repurposed, and the best way to do this is by publishing YouTube content. Do you know that 90% of marketers agree with this? YouTube is the second largest search engine, standing right next to Google, and having your content up there will be quite helpful.
You don’t have to create videos featuring actors or something. Various companies use whiteboard videos or animated ones that read out the script, which is just a blog.
The way you design this video will have a great impact on YouTube. You just have to repurpose the blogs you create, make them conversational scripts, and publish them. The process is as simple as that.
Videos connect you with the buyers, and that is something that you need.
Create Powerful Lead Magnets
Lead Magnet, without a doubt, is the main part of the entire lead generation process. The lead magnet can be anything you offer your target audience in exchange for their information.
The lead magnet must be so powerful that it prompts the visitors/ audience to share their contact information with you, such as their name and email. To make your lead magnet more powerful, you have to work on creating buyer personas. Once you finish this, you must focus on delivering value according to that.
Most of the businesses are making one particular mistake lately. They offer the most basic content easily available in a blog, called gated content. Do you think a user will exchange their information for something already available on the internet for free? No, right!
Until and unless you are confident that your content will come in handy, you shouldn’t make it gated. Here are some of the types of gated content that you can offer to your users.
- Comprehensive how-to’s
- In-depth guides
- Resource libraries
- Detailed case studies
- Templates
- Workbook or checklists
Experiment Lead Generation on Different Platforms
Lead generation is a hit-and-miss technique. One thing that works for one business may not work for another. This is the reason why it is important for businesses to try out different lead generation techniques. LinkedIn and Twitter are some of the common platforms that businesses usually use.
Change the technique and push out content on Instagram or Pinterest. You may wonder why anyone would read business-related content on apps like that, but here is a twist. Robin (workplace platform) has leveraged Instagram and generated more leads than usual. Instagram is all about aesthetics, and Robin made the most of it. Likewise, you can select a platform suitable for your business and leverage it fully.
Use Long Tail Keywords for Effective Lead Generation
Long tail keywords are very specific and niched down. Only people who have that particular requirement are going to search for it. So, it is important to optimize your website accordingly.
Lead Tracking with Office24by7
Increased traffic or higher SERPs don’t mean the business is booming or sales are increasing. Conversion of website visitors into potential leads can significantly impact a company’s success. This marks the importance of having an efficient CRM like Office24by7. Our functionalities like visitor tracking, visitor-to-lead tracking, and lead tracking help you in this process.
Visitor Tracking
You can turn an opportunity into a prospective lead with Office24by7 by tracking their details like:
- web page visited,
- time spent on particular web pages,
- no. of times visited,
- location,
- the browser used (Safari, Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, etc.),
- and device used (mobile phone, desktop, laptop, or tablet).
Visitor to Lead Tracking
Once you get visitors on the website, prompt them to turn them into leads. Office24by7 CRM provides you with various types of prompting:
- Virtual Number – for inbound calls and missed call software
- Chat (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.)
- Gated Content (ebooks, case studies, infographics, etc.)
- Contact Form
- QR Code
Lead Tracking
Office24by7 CRM automation tool provides some popular lead tracking CTAs you can embed on your website, like cookie preference notification (push notification), virtual number (inbound, outbound, and missed calls), SMS (inbound and outbound), chat, downloads, QR codes, short URLs, long codes, etc.
Office24by7 social CRM will help monitor all the traffic from various social media platforms.
Read our blog on mobile sales solutions.
Winding Up
Office24by7 is an effective lead tracking software with advanced technology that helps know different parameters related to website visitors, etc. Lead tracking is as important as lead generation. So, know more about our lead tracking software by contacting us at +91 7097171717 or emailing us at sales@office24by7.com.
