Every business needs new customers to grow, which makes lead generation a keystone of the marketing arch.
To stay above the waves and ahead of the competition, every brand needs to maintain an active lead generation strategy.
In the B2B arena, the purchase decisions are much more researched and weighed. Instead of ways to motivate impulse buying, here are the seven B2B lead generation strategies that often slip under the radar.
Asking Questions
Quizzes are potent lead generators. Their enormous popularity on social media bought them a one-way ticket into B2C and B2B marketing.
Companies have started using quizzes during their promotional webinars – we’ll cover those in a minute. Many webinar platforms offer quiz software integrations.
Quizzes and surveys are inexpensive to run and flexible for the type of questions you like. More importantly, they are more dependable because they are anonymous.
To create a quiz that generates leads, you need an engaging title so that people wish to click on your quiz. About 80% of people will click on something based on the title alone.
Some of the most-engaging titles are:
- Which X are you?
- Which X is best for you?
- How much do you know about X?
- Are you X?
According to LeadQuizzes, an average quiz has a lead capture rate of 33.6%! This company lets you create quizzes that connect with your marketing software like MailChimp, HubSpot, and Zapier.
You can promote an online quiz in a lot of ways. Embed it on your website, display it as a popup, share via email or social media or even run it as a paid targeting ad.
Dedicated quiz tools let you learn more about your respondents so you can make smarter marketing decisions.
You can even create surveys using Google Forms. They easily embed into a WordPress site, contact form plugin, or email.
WordPress Quiz plugin can be a great addition to your WordPress website, in case you want to create not only engaging content, but also get feedback, create online exams, and personality tests.
The plugin provides various options using which you will build advanced quizzes and integrate them with popular tools, such as GetResponse, PayPal, Google Sheets etc.
Focus on B2B Lookalikes
Instead of waiting for leads, you can simply approach companies that are similar to your existing customers.
With the help of artificial intelligence, you can upload a customer list and the AI churns out a list of similar companies.
Similar companies are known as B2B lookalikes. They have the same characteristics as the companies you already do business with.
The best thing is that they don’t even have to be your customers. If you focus on “lead lookalikes” data, you can get a list of companies who, for example, downloaded your whitepaper or requested a trial.
Your teams can use B2B lookalikes for cold calling through a hosted phone system or advertising. If you already have suitable sales stories or use cases, it’s easier for you to convince a potential customer of your product.
The same method applies when you send proposals to potential clients. You look at similar proposals that had a high conversion rate and modify them for new prospects.
Proposal software such as Better Proposal offers highly-customized digital proposals designed to impress your clients. But you don’t have to start from scratch. Check out this collection of free proposal templates and pick the one that best tells your story.
Repurposing Your Old Content
New content is always welcome, but new initiatives take plenty of effort and time to research, plan, write, edit, and most importantly, assess the effectiveness.
Instead, you can squeeze more juice from the existing content by repurposing the old pieces that bring you leads. Yes, I’m looking at you, e-Books and whitepapers.
Your evergreen content is the prime candidate for repurposing. Go through your archives and you might be surprised just how much of your content qualifies as evergreen.
Look for these two elements:
- Timelessness – it’s still relevant today
- High quality – keeps getting traffic
You also want to check your site analytics to see what posts have performed at their top in the past month and the past year.
Keep in mind that repurposing doesn't just mean reusing an old piece over and over again. You also need to refresh it to make it appealing to a new audience.
So how do you do this?
Refresh old posts
Look for the bits of information that are past their expiry date. Things change and your content has to follow. Old statistics may not be true anymore while trends shift for better or worse.
The Top 10 Product Reviews articles are especially prone to aging – make sure the products are up to date and still available.
As a rule of thumb, add spaces, bolding, or headings to make the post more structured and readable.
Create an infographic
A great and engaging way to visually summarize the content of your post. This is especially true if you have a lot of data in your article – infographics let you relate data or break the story into major talking points.
Write an ebook
You’d be surprised how many high-quality ebooks started as blog posts. Expanding your know-how content into an ebook is a logical step in content marketing.
Choose a promising blog post and boost it with additional information and research. Add photos and other visual elements.
To achieve a more professional look, you can outsource the work to your design team or design it yourself using a tool like Designrr.
Once you have your ebook created, use it to grow a subscriber list or for an additional source of revenue, giveaways, rewards, etc.
Creating Whitepapers
In the B2B world, spontaneous purchasing decisions are much less common than in B2C. Interested parties are more likely to gather relevant information before even considering a product or service.
This is why whitepapers have proven themselves in generating B2B leads. Whitepapers let you quantify the research process and show professional expertise.
The goal is to provide your target customer with relevant information which is worthy of getting a business email address in return.
Include some kind of reference to your product in the whitepaper you offer. This is the first step in lead qualification. This way an interested party automatically gets in touch with your product even if it’s not the centerpiece of your whitepaper.
Hosting Webinars
In B2B, products and services usually need more instructions and advice than in B2C. Before making a purchase, businesses like to compare several products or service providers.
The basic question is: Are we investing in the right tool?
As a provider, you can use best webinar platforms to generate leads. Webinars allow you to:
- Present your product to several parties at the same time
- Highlight the areas of application and benefits
- Answer question
Attending a webinar doesn’t take much effort and people register more easily than for an online demo, which promises higher conversion rates.
Lead generation happens when a prospect registers which lets them attend the webinar for free.
Visitor Identification
If you can manage to get the contact details of someone who has expressed interest in your product or services, you have yourself a valid B2B lead.
Every day interested parties stumble upon your website, but unfortunately, not all of them download your white papers, solve the quiz, or book a trial.
Now you need to find out how to engage with them. This person has shown interest in your product but didn’t engage.
So how do you find who’s visiting your website?
There are tools for visitor identification. They reveal the IP addresses and tell you which companies have a demand for your products. This feature gives you B2B leads that might otherwise have bounced.
Some of these tools like CrazyEgg can display heat maps to visually highlight the most clicked areas on the page or confetti reports that show each click.
Visitor identification tools can identify companies, and regions, but also relevant business data such as employees and contact details.
IP identification and visitor tracking can tell you exactly which of your pages were visited and how often. This allows your marketing team to focus on the next step and personalize the sales approach for each visitor.
Take Part in LinkedIn Discussions
You can find targeted discussion groups on LinkedIn for almost every industry there is. These people are looking for questions and answers and you can leverage this to:
- Post relevant content, such as ebooks or notices for webinars.
- Answer questions to establish yourself as an expert.
- Become a go-to source of information.
- Start relationships that you can nurture into new business leads.
Just keep in mind to stay aware of the dynamics of the discussing group. Being too salesy or dominating the conversation easily annoys group members and drives them away instead of towards you.
Your best strategy would be to offer genuine help and build real connections with the group participants.
Conclusion
Not having an active lead generation strategy in place means compromising both the hot and cold leads. Do your analytics, refresh existing content, and use quizzes and webinars, to help drive high-quality leads donut your sales funnel.
Although most of the lead generation tips above fall into pre-click strategies, the post-click stage, such as sending web-based, trackable proposals is just as important.
