Many businesses spend substantial time and resources to generate leads. This is entirely comprehensible since, without a consistent intrusion of new leads, a business can not grow. So marketers prefer to invest in proven tactics like email marketing, SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing that drive prospects towards the sales funnel.
This is great. But, sometimes you have to work hard and think out of the box. Clients these days get bombarded with emails and advertisements which annoys them at times. It’s getting increasingly difficult to cut through the noise, so the demand for innovative new strategies is the need of an hour.
In this article, we’re going to discuss the out of the box strategies that can matter most to B2B business and explore some of the most efficient ways used to generate leads. But before exploring those strategies, you must get the foundations right and make sure that you’re able to seize and convert a large percentage of leads from the campaigns.
Avoiding dripping marketing funnel
Many B2B marketers spend a lot of time, metaphorically, pouring water into leaky buckets as a result the bucket never fills. Similarly, marketers try hard to fill the traffic in their marketing funnel just to keep it full. Whereas you should focus on fixing the bucket (marketing funnel), rather than pouring more water (traffic) into the bucket to keep it full. This is a recipe for blown up asset costs and below-average results.
The biggest problem here is landing pages and, in particular, your forms. Forms are essential. They segregate your leads from non-leads and have a huge influence on your conversion rates and overall lead generation results. If you have not yet, then begin with optimizing your form. Ensure that you’re not leaving leads behind from your marketing campaigns.
For instance, You send 500 visits to your landing page for $2 per visit. If your form converts at 1% you’ll get 5 leads at a cost per lead of $200. If, on the other hand, your form converted at 4%, you’d receive 20 leads at a cost per lead of $50.That’s 4X more leads for one-fourth of the cost per lead without spending more– just by improving your lead generation form.
Once your funnel is well-optimized and you have utilized all the opportunities to improve your landing pages, it’s time to acquire traffic but which lead generation strategies should you use?
Which B2B lead generation channels work?
The answer to this question depends on the person you are questioning. Hubspot’s study of the best B2B lead sources concluded that SEO is the best lead generation channel whereas Chief Marketer’s data on the same question, concluded that email marketing is the most effective channel.
The likely answer is to do with audience prejudice. A survey conducted by an email marketing provider is almost certainly going to have different results to one conducted by the content providers, as their audiences vary.
Instability aside, the online strategies that always stand out are:
- Email marketing
- Search marketing
- Social marketing
- Content marketing
- Conversion rate optimization
Twitter can be used to close a $250, 000 lead for a B2B business, or it can be used to spam prospective clients and disgrace a brand. So, the channel you choose will play a large role in how effective and efficient your lead generation is, how you implement your campaign will play even a more major role.
With this warning, let’s look at 15 easy ways to generate more B2B leads to generate magnificent results.
15 Easy strategies to generate B2B leads
- Personalized Email Campaign
You need to design your personalized emails. Your emails should speak the language of the reader Be it academic prose or informal style. The key information should remain the same, but your delivery mechanism needs to vary depending on the reader’s personality. Always include your call to action (CTA) in your email signature. CTA in emails is very common. You need to stand out and take a step further by placing CTA below your signature. This works wonders especially if you send a lot of emails. For further tips to personalize your emails check out our blog, “8 most valuable tips for personalized email marketing”
- Syndicate Your Content
Content syndication expands your brand’s content by swaying the audiences of compatible brands. By placing your content in front of the right audiences that you may have failed to reach otherwise, you can generate more leads and increase your business opportunities.
Additionally, syndicated content can help you to upgrade your search engine ranking by getting backlinks to your website. Make sure that you syndicate the best of your content. This strategy works best when the content is valuable and appropriate to a particular set of audience. SEO is just an added advantage.
- Answer Questions on Quora
Recently, Quora has become quite popular. It has around more than 100 million active users. Using the full-text search feature, you can search for questions that are relevant to your niche. By regularly providing helpful and educational insight, you can get observed by your target audiences on that platform. This strategy helps in building brand awareness. You can even add a link to your answer in case you’ve created content that specifically addresses a question on Quora. This may help you to get traffic.
- Experiment with Interactive Content
Visual content is a huge success these days. Charming prospects and clients are an essential component for the success of any marketing strategy. With an entertaining, engaging, and interactive infographic, your brand stands out and becomes more noticeable. Brand recall is high, and brand awareness goes through the roof. Delighted customers are great promoters, and they will share your content. Remember to put social sharing buttons to make the job easier.
- Make a Social Media Splash
Social media channels are the most functional way to engage with prospects and customers irrespective of industry. Different channels are more efficient for different demographics. If you are seeking younger customers don’t forget to link your Snapchat account to your other social media channels. Other platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are important as well depending on your target audience. You must know, on which platform will you find your target audience. LinkedIn is a wonderful place to gain qualified leads. B2B marketers see a higher success rate on this channel as it has a higher concentration of business users than other social media sites. As social networks advances, new platforms arise, and customer behavior changes, sales, and marketing teams should follow the changes closely to keep up with the dynamically changing preferences.
- Create remarketing campaigns
Remarketing helps you track visitors who showed interest in your site and then direct specific ads to them. The biggest advantage of remarketing is that it pays attention to your engaged audience. These people already being familiar with your products or services, have higher chances of converting into leads. It also builds brand awareness and increases website traffic.
- Optimize your landing pages to match search intent
Optimizing your landing pages is one of the best Search marketing strategies to generate B2B leads. Always optimize your landing pages to match your purpose. Landing pages help your leads to convert into clients. Landing pages drive traffic. Optimizing a landing page makes sure that you attain the highest possible conversion rate from the visitors who arrive at that landing page. Landing page optimization can also help you to lower your customer acquisition costs, and acquire more customers. Here are a few ideas you can use to optimize your landing page:
- Align Your Form Length to Your Offer.
- Write attractive headlines.
- Segment by channel.
- Test your landing pages.
- Provide visitors with valuable offerings.
- Write Your Value Proposition Again, and Again.
- Keep the attention ratio 1:1.
- Give something away for ‘free’
This email lead generation strategy is outstanding. Today’s internet users are so used to being promised irrelevant “freebies” that it’s lost all meaning. Offer your target audience relevant freebies which will help them grow. These free proposals are a lead generation strategy, designed to turn free users into paying customers. And the reason this will work well is only if the offered freebie is genuine and valuable. There should be real value in these freebies.
- Add dynamic CTAs to your blog posts
This is one of the content marketing strategies to generate leads. This strategy helps you to convert the readers into leads. Place your call to action (CTA) on your blog posts. Place your CTAs on your blog posts, pushing readers to notice your CTA. Once again, you’re using the interest they’ve already illustrated and created a pathway for them. Best of all, you can automate your CTA. This will automatically insert CTA in your every blog post, depending on the topic/category you define before publishing.
- Pack your content with data & sharable ideas
Back in 2010, you could almost publish anything and it would rank if you got the technical SEO basics right and pointed a few links to your page. Things are very different in 2020 and you have to earn your place in the SERPs these days. The only thing that hasn’t changed is that links remain one of the most important ranking factors, as confirmed by Google itself in 2016 and various studies since – such as this one from Backlinko (2020).
One of the most efficient ways of generating the links you need to get your pages in the first ten positions is to pack your content full of data, stats, and third-party references from trusted sources. This makes it simple for Google’s algorithm to verify the precision and authenticity of your content and it also makes it more link-worthy and shareable to users.
- Host Webinars
Consider hosting an online event or webinar. Though sometimes you struggle to set them up, properly implemented and informative webinars are one of the best ways to locate brand new leads and increase website revenue. Our CEO, Mr. Sanju Pillai has hosted many successful webinars. Although the final goal of a webinar is to get leads for your business, you shouldn’t make it all about you. These events should revolve around conveying your knowledge as an industry leader to your attendees. If you do an excellent job, these attendees may see you as an expert who they would reliably refer to consult for various services.
At the end of your webinar, always remember to have a Q&A session, and offer guests a way to contact you directly. Send them a “thank you for attending” follow-up email, which will serve as a reminder for busy guests to check out your website whenever they have time.
- User-friendly experience
User Experience (UX) refers to the way that website visitors search, browse and use your website. Websites that have good UX seek higher conversion rates and see longer on-page times with higher engagement rates. If your UX is not good enough it often leads to high bounce rates and confusion. Navigation is one of the most important aspects of a website with good UX. To assess your user experience, browse your website as if you were a lead. Here are a few tips to make your website navigation simple and efficient:
- As simple as possible, with limited menus, sub-menus, and pages
- Easy to understand
- Easy to access
- Laid out in a sensible hierarchy, with related pages grouped together
- Optimize your website
Begin with optimizing your website to increase website leads. Search Engine Optimization is the best way to make your website more. The process often involves assessing, adding, and editing written content to make sure it will help your website rank highly. SEO is essential to ensure that your site shows up in the search results for the keywords and phrases most relevant to your business. SEO is worth the effort, because it’s both effortless and free to update your website, and ranking highly will drive traffic and increase website revenue. If you wish to generate leads without advertisement, SEO is for you.
- Speak at events
There are a variety of trade expos and conferences that you can join or attend. But becoming speaking at these events and contributing to them will majorly boost up your credibility as an authority in your niche. You’ll also experience the undivided attention of a suitable audience, which will give you a humongous opportunity to impress. So whenever you are invited to speak at such an event, don’t waste your time thinking just say ’yes’.
- Outreach the prospective clients
Occasionally the best course of action to find leads online is to track them down all by yourself. If you’re surfing the web and find someone who could be your prospective client, you should have an outreach program to handle this. For instance, if you see someone mention on LinkedIn that they’re having a hard time locating organic apples in their area, consider replying to ask if they’ve seen your online shop. Or drop them a short and polite email asking if you can help them. At the end of the day, nothing beats a personal touch, and you may find that these leads are among the most essential and most qualified leads you’ll encounter.
How many leads can you handle?
Following the lead generation strategies we’ve mentioned in this article, the most important question is how many leads can you handle? You may reach a point where you end up with more leads than your sales process can handle but there’s a key to this lock.
Automation means you can handle vast numbers of leads without the manual workload. You can also choose to outsource lead generation to work efficiently towards other internal aspects. You need to learn how to prioritize the most valuable leads to your business. You can check out our blog, ‘10 Reasons To outsource Lead Generation’. You need to know how to prioritize the most valuable leads to your business.
These strategies will help your brand stand out when used in co-occurrence with your current marketing and lead generation strategies. Remember that creating helpful, relevant, and informational content is the prime aspect to charm your prospects and gaining their trust. So the next time you’re looking for more leads, give these easy strategies a try. You might just find a new favorite channel for your brand that produces high-quality leads. FunnL is one platform that works toward continuously striving to generate sales qualified leads taking care of all the tactics and strategies. All you have to do is convert those qualified leads to your clients.
Need help to generate online leads?
Let the experts at FunnL help you generate more qualified leads. With an experience of generating 10,000+ sales qualified meetings (SQMs), FunnL provides you with an all-in-one Inside Sales Platform that permits you to design, manage, measure, and optimize your inside sales campaigns. If you wish to increase your productivity and generate a higher number of sales qualified meetings contact us and book your appointment.
