The process of identifying the actual customers for your product or service, and then attracting them to buy is known as B2B lead generation. Identifying potential clients entails finding companies that may be interested in the product or service your company provides. Capturing information from these interactions and feeding it into your sales funnel is what attracting interest is all about. Through a sale, a lead can be turned into a customer.
A lead is not a random potential customer, it’s one step away from you. All you have to do is capture their attention, provide value, and demonstrate that your service can solve their problem. A successful B2B marketing strategy relies on generating quality leads and building a strong pipeline that assures a steady growth rate.
Lead generation is one of the most essential activities for B2B marketing and sales teams.
How does lead generation work?
The process of generating leads can be difficult and time-consuming. However, you can outsource it to a lead generation partner. You must have a good idea of the type of customers you want. You need to optimize your website or create a landing page that offers your product and service and get it seen by the right people. Then you need to divert the traffic using a compelling call to action to fill out a form and hand over their contact information. Usually, a lead might fill the form easily but sometimes they need a lot of persuasions. This information can later be used for email campaigns.
You’ll start seeing results from this exercise in a census of new customers you start getting, depending on the quality of leads you can produce and their degree of inclination towards your company or service.
Doing lead generation, yourself can save you money but if you outsource it to the right lead generation partner then you get the benefit from an expert’s approach. You can save time on leads, making it much easier to turn them into loyal customers.
How to build an effective action plan for B2B lead generation?
- Set Your Goals: This necessitates a preliminary envisioning of the effects of the B2B strategy you’re about to implement; you’ll also need a consistent process for achieving this vision, and if necessary, bullet them out as goals. Make sure you also determine the quality and quantity of leads you want to generate through the process and ensure they align with your business objectives.
- Filter the Customer Profile: You don’t want to risk anything after reaching so far, so make sure you filter the companies you want to reach out to. You may also build the buyer personas to represent key decision-makers.
- Drive Interest and Awareness: Here, awareness takes precedence over interest. The method of attracting the interest of your potential customers, known as awareness, can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Interest, on the other hand, progresses your customer’s initial awareness to the next level, where he or she is much more likely to engage with you.
- Gather Details About Your Prospects: Once the leads show interest, you’ll want to learn everything you can about them. This usually includes contact information, firmographics, demographics, and other pertinent information.
- Engage and Nurture Your Leads: Not every lead can transform into a customer. You’ll need to follow up with a few leads to make sure they’re a good match for your product.
- Test and Monitor Your Channels, Then Adjust: The phase does not stop with the conversion of a lead into a transaction. Another factor is testing.
Best Practices of B2B Lead Generation
Let’s look at some tried-and-tested methods for ensuring that the lead generation campaign achieves its goals.
- Identify your target market – A whopping 48% of consumers are likely to consider products or services that are tailored to their requirements.
- Include a live chat option on your website – According to a Forrester survey, 44 per cent of virtual customers believe that live chat is the most important feature that a website should have. Everyone wants a quick solution to their problems.
- Nurture your CRM software – If your goal is to drive sales and increase productivity, you need to invest in an authentic CRM tool.
- Include contact details on your landing page/website- Enhance your credibility by including a contact number on your web page.
- Include testimonials or media files for added authenticity – It is quite obvious that testimonials are an effective way to gain the interest of potential customers. And if they’re in the video or even photographs, you’ve got a good chance of increasing your conversion rate.
- Use contests/affiliates to promote your brand- Run a contest on your website and get your audience to write a tagline for your brand or maybe do a slogan for your next campaign. This will generate interaction and interest among your audience and in return, you can offer them a discount or a gift maybe.
- Offer your visitors freebies – Everybody enjoys a freebie, and your website visitors are no different. A monthly or even weekly newsletter (if that seems doable) or an eBook can be an excellent way to entice visitors to share their details and join your mailing list.
- Encourage your customers to share online reviews- Online reviews helps in making a buying decision. Request your existing customers to do a review for your brand online and in return you can offer them a discount on their next purchase.
- Participate in consumer forums such as Quora – Every month, over 100 million people use Quora to ask questions. You will take advantage of this ability to advertise your business by responding to their questions.
- Including forms on every page – Putting a form on every page is the best way to convince potential customers to share their details. It is sufficient to simply ask for the First Name and Email Address.
SUMMING-UP
With this, we come to the end of this blog and we hope we’ve covered the essentials of B2B lead generation for you. To say that marketing campaigns could be effectively measured by the volume and more importantly, the quality of leads that drive-in would not be an exaggeration. Marketers still struggle to generate quality leads online given the abundance of data available online on how to generate leads. This is the reason they lose out on their marketing campaigns.
The digital world is morphing at a constant speed and if you need to keep up with your competition you must invest in lead generation. Shergroup has started offering lead generation service as a part of our marketing campaigns to help you drive more traffic to your website and increase your customer base organically. We offer lead generation as an outsourced service that is low cost and easily accessible. Our subject matter experts will dive into your data and organize the process to help you build those numbers and create sales.
Reach out to us today to get started. Call us on 0845 890 9200 or live chat on our website so we can discuss what you want to achieve.