Posted On: Feb 26, 2021
Posted By: John Duff
b2b lead generation

Every organization is at that phase, where they need to churn out leads for meeting the business target.

While leads generation has never been easy, but due to the pandemic, the complexity of the process has increased manifold.

Zig Zagler, an American motivational speaker and salesman, once stated:

You are out of business, if you don’t have a prospect.”

Without prospects, there would be no pipeline and without that, sales representatives wouldn’t have anybody to pitch for their service or product.

So, marketers are going out of their way to find innovative tactics and processes. They are digging out or exploring the new ones that could accelerate the generation of leads.

Source: Business2Community

Here, you can also see that almost 61% of the companies stated generating leads has been a constant challenge for them.  It is the top challenge among all the challenges such as securing a budget, identifying the technologies, finding an executive sponsor, and others.

Many of them are implementing the new tactic along with the traditional and established ones so that they can have the best of both techniques.

Some of the best ways to generate leads are:

Identifying the Target Audience:

How many times have you heard; you need to understand your target audience?

Probably many times, that’s because when you don’t speak the language of your audience, they are not going to get your message. It’s just a necessary business acumen that you need to inculcate in your approach. Now the language here doesn’t mean you need to speak in their native language. It means speaking the thought process of your customer, speaking the preference of the customer, and so on. This brings the connection between you and your customer and they could grasp what you are conveying and listen to it as it is of their interest.

While when the audience is not segmented and targeted properly, you couldn’t have the same rapport with the audience.

Using Automation Tool:

Marketing automation tool is the latest technology used to speed up the lead number.

These tools track the activities of the prospects, nurture the visitors, personalize the marketing messages, to have a good relationship with the customer.

According to a VentureBeat analyst, 80% of the companies using marketing automation witnessed an increase of leads. And almost 77% of them saw increased conversions.

A Thorough Research:

We all love to be known as experts. As everybody likes to follow the experts. So, do more of the research and generate content like white paper. White papers are long-form of content with everything statistics, information, findings, and other in-depth materials that take one deeper into the subject.

B2B audience like brands that have exact solutions to their challenges. The white paper is a detailed presentation of the solution, information and other materials that helps them in their professional practice.

A Creative and Experimental Content:

Content is the king. Try experimenting with the content very often. A website with the unique content, and something new to offer often get more views from the visitor. Customers stay for a longer period to check the content.  It gives visitors a reason to scan the content. It could satisfy their mind buds just as the taste buds!!!

airbnb infographic
Source: WebFX

This is one of the creative content by the travel company Airbnb. The company was promoting its booking options via the infographic.  As the content is easy to understand, the brand got a greater number of leads.

Asking the Right Inputs from the Sales Team:

The sales team are the front line workers in an organization. They are very much aware of what a customer needs, what are their pain points, what would drive them to purchase a product or service and much more. So, it becomes necessary to take the suggestion from the sales team as well. For example, they can provide the information that whether the prospects are more interested in a customized service or the pre-built one so that marketers can focus on the same.

Their strategy could revolve around that scenario, and they could develop the content, plan email campaigns, develop landing pages to showcase it to prospects and convert them as customers.

Webinars and Events:

Events and webinars are one of the effective lead generation strategies. While physical events couldn’t be organized due to the pandemic scenario, virtual events are gaining popularity.

lead generation b2b
Source: Statista

In this statistical finding, you can see events and webinars have the most effectiveness with 68% and 61% respectively.

Some of the tips to look into before planning the virtual event are having an event strategy, as there would be some investment to run the event, you shouldn’t stray from the path. The next thing to consider here is defining the audience. You need to check which set of the audience is going to attend your webinar as targeting a broader section of them could lead you nowhere. While you might get leads but they wouldn’t be convertible. It would just become knowledge imparting session than getting the leads number, which actually is not bad in the long-run or for a brand promotion.

The next step is to leverage the content with the speaker videos, useful posts, and other knowledgeable discussion that could positively kick-start the event. The more your organization is exposed the greater you get leads. You can also include the partners in the promotional activities. This would give the exposure by expanding the reach.

Finding the Not-so-Happy Customer of the Competitor:

Every company works hard to satisfy their customer. But some customers don’t get satisfied with the kind of service a specific brand is offering. So, watch out for these customers in your competitor’s customer base. This way, you could find what is not making the customer satisfied and pitch the product the right way to pull them towards your brand.

The competitor’s loss is your gain.

Using Cold Email:

One of the effective and efficient lead generation tactics is shooting out cold emails. These emails help to attract the prospects in bulk numbers. Your aim is to bring them to your sales cycle.

cold email

This is one of the nice examples of a cold email, where the marketer highlighted the metrics “Saved her 8 hours a week.” Most of the customers have this pain point where they need to save their time and achieve the target.  The brand here did the exact thing where it showcased how it could resolve the customer’s challenge.

Video Content:

This content can surely give you the right number of leads. Many customers don’t like to read the content. For them, you need to present the information in the video format. While it does save their time also, it becomes easy to grasp the information and implement it in their process.

A nice example is of the AFP Habitat, a publicly held corporation based out of Chile. It planned to reach the goal of 2 million members for opening the new accounts.

After posting the video, almost 70% of the viewers watched the video, and 65% opened the account. It shows if planned the right way, the video content has the power to shoot sales.

Conclusion:

Lead generation is one of the hectic processes that need the right expertise and patience. You can’t expect to generate a good number of leads in a short span. It would be too ambitious.

The best practice here is to integrate the effective approaches and wait for the results. You would surely generate the right output.

The blog clearly explains some of the best tactics that could help generate leads.