As we are now living in a digital revolution, lead generation is not the same as it once was. Today, businesses and marketers need to be smarter, digitally savvy and all-around more innovative to capture the interest of customers.
B2B companies in particular face a lot of pressure in an increasingly competitive market. As such, businesses must work harder to generate high-quality leads who are the core audience for their product or service and can help them achieve their objectives.
Why Lead Generation is Crucial for Success
Simply put, lead generation helps drive interest in a company’s products or services. While this seems like a simple concept, the problem is today’s evolving landscape of buying and shopping.
There is an overabundance of options for customers to choose from, which means lead generation is essential to help companies stand out in the crowd. As B2B companies increasingly struggle to differentiate themselves from their competitors, it often comes down to competing purely from a price standpoint, but this is not helpful for long-term growth.
Instead, B2B businesses must learn to master the art of lead generation by developing a more personalized and strategic approach.
Prospecting is also important, as is demand generation. But deploying high-quality lead generation tactics is most critical for the long-term success and growth of B2B companies.
What Are High-Quality Leads?
According to Gartner, high-quality leads are those that are more “ideal prospects with a greater potential for sales.” Instead of generating a high quantity of leads to simply drum up as much interest as possible, it’s about finding quality leads with certain characteristics that make them more likely to follow through on a sale. Qualified leads are those you identify by paying extra attention to needs, interests, and buying patterns for a more personalized approach.
Best Strategies for B2B Lead Generation
There are numerous strategies marketers can use for lead generation, but the following are the most promising when it comes to generating the highest quality of leads:
1. Know Your Customers and Understand Their Pain Points
Targeted, personalized marketing strategies are key to generating quality leads, and the best way to accomplish this is to better understand who your customers are and what challenges they face.
Who is your target audience? What are their needs? How do they think and behave? What influences them to make a purchase? What are their pain points?
These are all important questions to ask as you collect data to help you better understand your target audience and how best to attract them. Once you have the answers to these questions, you can create personalized, tailored messaging and content that specifically speaks to their wants and needs.
2. Create High-Performing Content for Multi-Channel Marketing
Expanding on the previous point, you should use the data you collect on your target audience to create high-performing content that attracts their attention. Content is – and likely will always remain – king.
However, you don’t want to simply rely on just any old content, you want to optimize your content and utilize all channels to expand your reach. This includes website and landing page content, social media content, email content, and even content for live events.
Create content that your target audience will find most useful and engaging. For B2B lead generation, this means your content should provide valuable information. B2B content is less about creating viral and shareable content and more about meaningful content that your customer will find genuinely useful for what they are looking for.
This can include white papers, videos, webinars, and physical content like flyers and pamphlets you can hand out at events. You’ll also want to create website content and email content with clear calls-to-action (CTAs).
SEO is also critical for ensuring the content on your website reaches the right audience when they are searching for products or services. Optimizing your content is essential for analytics, which can help you track data to help you better understand customer behaviors and preferences.
3. Prioritize Social Media Marketing
We mentioned social media content above, but social media marketing is so crucial that it deserves going into more detail. Social media is one of the best ways to reach audiences, even for B2B companies. If you’re not marketing your products or services on social media, then you are missing out on valuable leads.
A successful B2B social media marketing strategy for lead generation should include the following:
- Using a range of social network channels for better reach (LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
- Building a robust social media presence
- Setting realistic goals and measuring results
- Being consistent with your posting
- Leveraging paid social media ads
- Engaging with your audience by asking questions, hosting live discussions, and responding to comments
4. Sales Training and Lead Nurturing
An important aspect of lead generation is not only acquiring leads but nurturing them as they move through the sales funnel. Emails, for example, are an excellent way to nurture leads and essentially “hold their hand” through the sales process, ensuring they are engaged throughout the process.
Nurturing leads is about building relationships so they will more likely move from being potential customers to converted and loyal clients. Engage with them at every stage of the customer journey to ensure the highest level of satisfaction.
One way to accomplish this is to provide better training for your sales and customer service reps so they know how to best engage leads and provide the best experience possible. Ensure you have accurate data on your leads to help your sales team boost customer engagement through personalization.
Collecting data on your leads will enable you to better understand who they are and what they want. That data can then be used to empower your sales and CSRs to better help your customers, ensuring personalized engagement at every stage of the sales process.
The more you know your target audience, the more you can address their particular interests and needs, which will enable you to provide more engaging experiences. And the more engaged your leads are, the more likely they are to turn into loyal customers.
Author
Get our newsletter and digital focus reports
Stay current on learning and development trends, best practices, research, new products and technologies, case studies and much more.
