Last updated on July 26th, 2022 at 11:36 am
Let’s face it. A crucial part of getting more customers for your products or services is getting more people to get to know about it. No matter how good your product is, if no one knows it, no one buys it. This post will help you to generate more B2B leads.
You don’t have to have the best product. You don’t have to be the cheapest provider. You don’t even have to have the best service. To succeed, you have to be the best seller.
In order to sell efficiently, you’ll need to generate high-quality leads. Leads that your sales people can take, contact, meet and make sales with. (Okay, this can be even fully automatic but your leads have to still be of high quality).
Improved lead generation and revenue
If you can increase your amount of leads by 10% and the average quality of your leads won’t decrease you’ll make 10% more money.
Each new email address you’ll generate is worth something. That’s why it’s very important to not take lead generation lightly. It’s one of the most important processes of your business.
85% of B2B marketers consider lead generation their #1 challenge.
Let’s see the 18 best tactics you can use to improve online lead generation for B2B companies.
1 Have a good conversation as often as possible
Never rely only on one-directional communication such as website, blog posts and videos. Try and have a real conversation with your prospects as often as possible.
If your user asks about a feature in the online chat for your website, don’t only offer a link to knowledge base, offer a 10-minute call to walk them through.
If you are emailing with your lead, offer a video call. If you are in a video call, offer to meet. Try and get closer to your leads every time you interact with them.
2 Use Twitter for lead generation
Twitter works for every business just because it’s so big. The challenge is just to find the right people. After that, it’s all about engaging them, which can be as simple as following them or taking part in a conversation.
You can use Twitter search to find people using relevant hashtags or keywords, use LinkedIn to find interesting professionals or use special tools such as Followerwonk or CrowdFire.
Using Twitter efficiently for lead generation requires a significant amount of time but if done right it can yield great results.
3 Generate leads from your website visitors
Leadfeeder allows you to transfer website visitors to your CRM as leads
Use Leadfeeder to show companies visiting your website. When interesting companies visit your website you can transfer them straight to your CRM as sales leads.
Leadfeeder integrates to Mailchimp and with the integration, you can see even individual visitors on your site.
Tracking your website visitors on an account level is an important tactic that suits well with any other online lead generation strategy. If you are not yet tracking individual companies on your website, Leadfeeder has a free 30-day trial.
4 Use lead databases
Use this with caution. When you are using a database someone other has built you can never be sure of its quality. As I mentioned before, lead generation has to do with the quality of the leads.
If your business is new or you need a big bump to your lead amount, lead databases such as Unomy or Salesfinder can provide that extra source of leads you need.
LinkedIn can be considered a database in this sense, too. LinkedIn is almost an endless source of professionals from various fields. Surely some of them are interested in your products so go searching!
5 Use marketing automation
Are you already collecting email addresses somehow? If not, fix that ASAP!
Once you have a source of new email addresses you can use marketing automation to nurture them and gain more data on your lead. Once you’ve progressed them in their purchase cycle with your marketing automation, sales can pick them like ripe berries.
Use data to segment your customers to send as relevant messages as possible. Never send the same materials to a new lead that you would send to your old customers.
6 Answer questions on Q&A services
Quora can be a great source of new leads. Your customers are already in Quora trying to solve the problems your service solves the best. Go there, help them and there you go – you’ve got leads who already have a very positive assumption of you.
We are using Quora for our lead generation here at Leadfeeder too, and it has proved to generate high-quality traffic to our website.
7 Leverage someone else’s audience
Justreachout.io helps you reach out to journalists and writers
Guest blogging can be a very powerful way to get your message spread wider. If you don’t yet have the biggest audience, someone else does and if you can provide them with good content, they’ll let you publish your post in their blog.
You can use tools such as Justreachout.io to reach out to influencers. You might even be able to outsource the whole task to freelancers so that someone ghost writes an article for you and pitches it to blogs and other publications.
8 Chat with your users with live chat
Even though you’ve used precious time to try and make sure that all content on your website is relevant and all possible questions have been answered some visitors just can’t find what they are looking for.
According to studies, 42% of customers prefer live chat for their customer support questions and 73% of chatters are happy with the result of their chat.
Most live chat tools collect email addresses so again you can combine this tactic with tip #5 in this list.
9 Make full use of your emails
A well designed signature can work as a lead generation tool
An example of a good email signature with links to social media profiles that can help your prospects find you.
You are probably already sending quite a lot of email from your personal email account. How many people do you have working at your company? Times that is the amount of emails you send.
Include a link or links in your email signature, use it to promote your content or link to your LinkedIn from it. If it works for 1 out of 100 it’s already quite well with the amount of email we send.
10 Participate in conversations
Are you already a member of relevant LinkedIn groups? Are you participating conversations on Facebook?
Remember to make sure your profile is in good shape when hustling on social media!
11 Experiment with different content formats
With video blogging you can find new audiences quickly.
Are you blogging actively but have never tried YouTube? You are losing leads. Some of your prospects like to read, some like to watch videos. You should be serving them all.
Use all possible channels to multiply your reach to generate leads from new channels. You can even consider translating your content to widen your reach.
12 Create lead magnets
A lead magnet is a free piece of content that is wanted by your customers.
Do you have special data, an internal tool that could be useful for someone else, too? Can you create something like that?
Creating something of high value and giving it for free is a great way to make friends. And friends are great leads!
This strategy is often called a lead magnet. Rosemary Brisco, managing partner of ToTheWeb gave a tip to use Upwork to create your lead magnets.
Upwork is a tool to find a freelancer for various tasks. Don’t expect miracles from there, either. Posting a good ad and selecting a well-equipped freelancer is a tedious task. If done correctly, Upwork can save a lot of time and money!
13 Promote customer referrals
Source: CustomerThink
Leads generated through customer referrals are often very high-quality. Do you have a clear process on how you turn your happy customers into promoters?
Use NPS score or similar procedures to find out who’s the most probable to promote your tool and send them ideas on how they can spread the word. You’ll be amazed how often they do!
14 Generate more online reviews
Positive reviews increase the trustworthiness of any product or service.
87% of B2B decision-makers browse online before purchasing. They will try and find honest reviews to support their decisions.
But don’t even consider buying reviews. If you only have one customer, make sure they’ll review you. Honest reviews generate you leads. Dishonest reviews can kill your search engine rankings or do some other harm. Don’t risk it.
Make sure your prospects find favorable reviews. Again, you can use NPS to find the correct target group to ask for reviews.
15 Create laser-focused landing pages
If your customer is searching for online marketing specialist don’t let them land on a page about digital marketing.
Make sure you are serving all verticals with your landing pages and then optimize inside the verticals. Conversion optimization should be an ongoing project and #1 priority in all website renewals, too. Part of your SEO strategy is to make sure visitors land on a relevant page.
Oh, and once you’ve created your lead magnets (tip #12), create well-optimized landing pages to go along.
16 Try lead generation ads
Facebook lead ads can help you collecting email addresses for marketing automation
Facebook and Twitter both have lead generation ads that allow advertisers to collect email addresses inside the platform with no need to direct users outside of the social media.
The idea of the lead ads is that when it’s easier for users to share their email addresses, they’ll do so more often.
My experience, however is not very good. It can increase your conversion rate a bit but your content has to work elsewhere, too. Lead ads are no magic bullet.
17 Increase website traffic with paid ads
Your website is probably already generating leads somehow and if you are following any of the tips here, you should have many reasons to increase your website traffic.
Increasing web traffic with paid ads is simple, but you don’t want just any visitors. Use time and effort to create campaigns that they generate sales leads and don’t just increase your web traffic.
Use Leadfeeder to see on a campaign level how well-suitable your website visitors are for you as sales leads and optimize further.
18 Make sure your SEO is in good shape
Google is doing search better and better every day. That’s why you should spend a lot more time crafting good content than trying to hack their algorithms and rank well with your bad content.
Still, it’s important to have some good backlinks and at least some kind of an understanding on what keywords are important. “Ranking higher in the SERP = more leads”, says Adam Gingery, DMi Partners.
By the way, guest blogging, mentioned before, can be one way to improve your SEO.
+1 Create good remarketing lists to re-engage visitors
Source: AdGlow
Don’t just use remarketing for all your users but create remarketing lists based on visitor behaviour and use targeted ads to get visitors back to your site.
If your visitor has read about a certain service show them ads about a fresh case study. If they have visited your site more than once, advertise your email subscription.
Tools such as Perfect Audience can help you remarket in various networks easily.
#Lead generation strategy
A well-working lead generation strategy is a well-balanced combination of various tactics, online and offline.
Try and measure your efforts as accurately as you can but don’t over-optimize your lead generation either. Be more active in doing more things that work than fewer things that don’t work.
Lead generation is a hard task and one of your most important as a business owner or a marketer. Don’t neglect it.
Republished with permission from the original on Leadfeeder.
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