Lead generation is vital for any business around the globe. Leads help a business thrive.
When we talk about B2B lead generation, it’s all about determining target companies, approaching new prospects and garnering qualified leads. However, you need to know that generating leads isn’t easy and trying to acquire leads in the B2B space makes it all that much more difficult. Here are the best and most effective strategies that’ll help you with an effective B2B lead generation:
Email marketing:
Email marketing means sending a commercial message to a group of people (typically potential or current customers), using email. It basically inculcates the use of email for sending advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. It further means building loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing can be carried out using:
- Transactional emails:
These emails are usually triggered based on a customer’s action with a company. To be qualified as transactional or relationship messages, these communications’ primary purpose must be to confirm a commercial transaction that the recipient has previously agreed to enter into with the sender, along with a few other narrow definitions of transactional messaging.
- Direct email:
It involves sending an email solely to communicate a promotional message (for example, an announcement of a special offer or a catalog of products).
- Mobile email marketing:
It develops large amounts of traffic through smartphones and tablets.
Social marketing:
This type of marketing involves leveraging social media to generate leads online. Businesses can use it to generate and nurture millions of dollars worth of leads. As a matter of fact, one of the most obvious ways for B2B lead generation using social media is using LinkedIn. Since social media is an integral part of content marketing, and to some extent, search marketing, so, your blogging or infographics can be extremely successful if you are active on social media platforms.
In order to integrate social networks into their marketing strategies, companies have to develop a marketing model. One such model includes the following steps:
- Selection of the correct social networks to use
- Setting out a financial plan for hiring social media brand managers or consultants
- Designing organizational structures to manage the social network in the companies’ market
- Selection of target markets
- Selection of the products, services, brands or company messages that you plan to promote
- Performance measures for the social media strategy such as evaluation, data analytics, etc.
Content Marketing:
Content marketing refers to the marketing focused on creating, publishing and distributing content to the online targeted audience. It is a crucial element for the B2B lead generation. As a matter of fact, the businesses often use it to attract attention, generate leads, expand their customer base, generate online sales, increase brand awareness or engage an online community of users. While pursuing content marketing, the main focus of the businesses should be the needs of the prospect or customer.
Once a business has identified the customer’s need, information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, email newsletters, case studies, podcasts, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, blogs, etc. The appropriate type of content for any business will depend on the business’ goals and target customer.
Search engine marketing:
Search engine marketing includes both paid search results (using tools like Google Adwords or Bing Ads, formerly known as Microsoft ad-center) and organic search results (SEO) and plays a crucial rule in the B2B lead generation. It includes the following steps:
- Keyword research and analysis:
It involves ensuring the search engines can index the site, finding the most relevant and popular keywords for the site and its products, and using those keywords on the site in a way that will generate and convert traffic.
- Website saturation and popularity:
It means how much presence a website has on search engines, can be analyzed through the number of pages of the site that are indexed by search engines (saturation) and how many backlinks the site has (popularity).
- Back-end tools:
These include Web analytic tools and HTML validators which provide data on a website and its visitors. The tools further help to measure the success of a website.
- Whois tools:
They reveal the owners of various websites and can provide valuable information relating to copyright and trademark issues.
- Google Mobile-Friendly Website Checker:
This test will analyze a URL. It will further report if the page has a mobile-friendly design.
Leverage these strategies to make the most out of your B2B lead generation efforts and see your business benefit like never before!