In B2B marketing, lead generation is the most important KPI for the marketing team to measure the ROI of overall marketing expenses.
Basically, one of the primary objectives of the B2B marketing team is to generate quality leads that can be moved into the sales pipeline. The more leads they generate, the better the sales pipeline looks and, thus, the overall business growth.
So, a lot depends on how effective your B2B lead generation strategy is and how efficiently you can measure its ROI.
In this article, I will break down every aspect of B2B lead generation strategy and share with you some of the powerful lead generation strategies that successful businesses and I have used for my clients.
Lead generation is a process in which we convert an unknown but potential customer into a lead, i.e. someone who shares his/her details like name, email, and contact number that can be used to take the conversation forward for sales.
Now in the B2B space, these leads are usually the decision-makers from other businesses to whom you can pitch your products and services that will be useful for their business growth.
Once you have a lead, you nurture them via marketing automation. If it qualifies as a potential prospect for your offerings, it can be passed into the sales pipeline for conversion.
Whether it’s B2C or B2B lead generation, we target people who might be interested in our offerings, but there are a few differences in approach and buying process that you must consider to create an effective lead generation strategy.
Here are some key differences in the B2B and B2C lead generation processes-
1. Objective: B2B lead generation aims to build long-term relationships with prospects & stay on top of their mind so that when they are ready to make a purchase, your brand is the first thing they think about.
Whereas in B2C lead generation, the objective is to attract people ready to make purchasing decisions.
2. Target Audience: B2C lead generation caters to a broader audience, while B2B caters to a narrow audience base that comprises people sitting on the top management level to make purchase decisions for the company.
3. Purchasing Power: In B2C, the buying decision is in the hand of the individual prospects you are targeting, while in B2B, the purchasing decision does not rest in one hand. You have to cater to multiple people within a company to make the deal happen.
4. Content Requirement: B2B buyers are usually very informative about their problems because they research and consider multiple vendors to find the most viable solution. So, you need valuable content like case studies, whitepapers, and industry reports to win their trust and build credibility with them. On the other hand, for B2C lead generation, you can promote free resources and unique and personalized offers to individual prospects for conversion.
While both B2C and B2B lead generation focus on a common goal to improve customer sourcing and generate more leads for the business, these are some of the differences that you must consider to avoid mistakes in your lead generation strategy.
Keeping this in mind, let’s see what you need to build an effective lead-generation strategy.
A lead generation strategy would be incomplete and ineffective without putting all the marketing elements in place. Here are the vital components of a B2B lead generation strategy that you need to prepare beforehand –
Customer touchpoints are places where customers interact with your brand throughout their journey. Identifying these touchpoints & analyzing their actions can help you make their journey more effective & efficient by offering the right information on the right platform.
A Customer Journey Map visualizes how your customers interact with your brand at various touchpoints. Using this, you can determine what information you can offer to your prospects at different stages of their buying journey.
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a description of a type of company that would fit best for your offerings and a Buyer persona can be defined as the description of the individuals from those companies who may be involved in the buying process.
By defining the ideal customer profile and customer personas for your business, you would be able to target the right person from the target companies for quality lead generation.
Lead Generation Funnel is a visual illustration of how prospects come to know about your brand and get converted into leads. An effective B2B lead generation funnel enables you to guide an unknown visitor through a journey toward conversion.
By now, you must have understood why these elements are essential for your business. So, if you are missing any of the above-mentioned, you need to get it ready before moving ahead.
If you have everything in place, let’s go ahead.
Before knowing the strategies for lead generation, you need to know the various marketing channels you can use to generate leads for your B2B business.
For B2B lead generation, you cannot rely entirely on online sources because, in B2B, the credibility of your brand and the people behind it is crucial for offline methods to be adapted strategically.
Here are a few of the most common channels for B2B lead generation –
So, which is the most effective channel of all?
Well, the answer lies in how and where your target audience is most available and active. You should do your own research for your business to build an effective marketing strategy.
However, if we follow the HubSpot data, Email marketing, and SEO can be the most reliable B2B lead generation channels.
With that in mind, let’s get started with the 19 powerful and actionable lead-generation strategies for B2B businesses.
The best marketing strategy is the one that aligns customer needs & industry with your product and company objectives. So, going ahead, ensure that your company objective is clearly defined.
Let’s start with the most basic lead generation strategy if you’re ready.
You have to understand that the lead generation process is a trade of information between your organization and website visitors – you provide information related to your offerings in exchange for their contact information.
And it must be a win-win situation for both parties because what your visitors gain from the trade builds the foundation of trust and credibility with your company.
This is where Lead magnets come into the picture. These are helpful resources you can offer to a prospect in exchange for their contact details like an email address.
To create an effective lead magnet, you need to focus on your buyer personas and develop resources addressing their challenges at different touchpoints throughout their journey within your company ecosystem.
An effective lead magnet is one that your prospect can use within their organization. Some of the most convertible lead magnets are –
Leadfeeder is one of the best B2B lead generation tools that can help you identify the companies visiting your site and display the contact information of the potential decision-makers in the company.
What if I say that you don’t need to make a trade with your prospects to get their contact information? Would you be interested in such a tool?
Using Leadfeeder, you can also see the pages that the prospect visited on your site and quality them based on their location, behavior, and other attributes for sales.
You can also set alerts for the most valued prospects so that if they revisit your site, you get an email alert allowing you to stay updated with their behavior on your website and establish communication accordingly.
Check out my in-depth Leadfeeder Review to learn more about its features and pricing. And here’s an introductory video on how Leadfeeder works –
One of the most common mistakes I have observed with the B2B companies I have worked with is that their blog posts aren’t Search Engine friendly.
You must understand that Google is the first platform where B2B buyers search for potential vendors or solutions for their problems. If you aren’t visible there, you are basically invisible to your most valued customers.
With this strategy, you might already be investing your time, effort, and energy in creating blog posts for your website, but you’re missing the most crucial component that can help you make the most out of it – SEO.
To create SEO-friendly blog posts, you need an effective content strategy that targets your primary keywords and addresses prospects’ queries at different marketing funnel stages.
Now you have SEO-friendly blog posts driving traffic to your website from search engine results. What after that?
Your blog posts can be the first touchpoint for most of your customers on your website, and once a visitor lands on your site, you want to convert them into a lead.
And a dynamic call-to-action at the end of the post can be an effective lead generation strategy because if a visitor engages with your article till the end, there’s a high probability that they can be converted.
However, the CTA has to be very specific to the blog topic, category, and target audience. One of my favorite examples of this strategy is HubSpot.
For example, a blog post titled “The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing” targets users who might be new to email marketing. This is why this CTA offered an email marketing planning template that can help them get started with it.
In this strategy, the relevancy of what you offer to your readers is vital for better conversion. You can use CTAs like “Book a free consultation” and “Request a demo” on blogs targeting the most potential customers, while in other cases, you can offer the most relevant lead magnets.
Exit intent popup appears when a visitor is about to leave your site, i.e., when the user’s cursor goes to the browser window to click on the back button or change the browser tab.
Honestly, this is not my favorite lead generation strategy because of how people use it. The exit-intent popup should not appear to every visitor because eventually, they have to leave your site, and not every visitor is your potential customer.
You have to be very strategic in whom to display the popup and with what message – keep it very personalized based on their interactions on your site.
For example, if a visitor has already completed the lead generation cycle, you don’t need to display an exit-intent popup. In contrast, if a visitor spent longer than a specific time duration and explored product pages, a popup with a case study download would be more effective than a generic newsletter subscription or free ebook.
Take a look at this fantastic exit-intent popup by OptinMonster –
Remember, exit-intent popups should be your last chance to convert an engaging visitor into a lead – not everyone who lands on your site. For better conversion, you can use an exit-intent popup for the visitors who –
You can use OptinMonster to target visitors with personalized exit-intent offers based on their behavior and interactions on your site.
This is another classic B2B marketing strategy that I use to stay connected with the prospects at every stage of the marketing funnel. And this strategy helps me convert over 50% of the visitors who leave the website without leaving their contact details.
I have audited hundreds of B2B websites to date, and in my experience, almost 95-98% of the website visitors leave the site without sharing their email on their first visit. You don’t have to trust my words for this, just analyze your website analytics data and see what the number looks like for your site.
Now, retargeting those lost visitors and potential customers on other channels like Facebook and LinkedIn allows you to establish communication with them and offer them something relevant to get them back on your site for conversion. You can also leverage Google Ads to target your visitors via display ads.
Remarketing campaigns on other channels enable you to create multiple touchpoints for prospects at different stages of the funnel to keep them engaged with your brand until they are ready to take desirable action on your site.
This is another lead generation strategy that never failed me. In this strategy, you directly target your competitors’ main keywords or brand names on Google search ads.
If your competitors have already figured out the keywords that generate leads and have done hard work in building brand awareness for their brand keywords, you can take advantage of it for your business.
Using the SEMrush Advertising Research tool, you can see what keywords your competitors are targeting on Google Ads. For example, in the image below, you can see that SendInBlue is targeting its competitor’s brand keywords on Google Ads.
Once you have identified the keywords your competitors are ranking for or targeting on Google Ads, run a PPC campaign targeting those keywords at a small scale and see how many of them attract sales-ready customers for your business, and then execute the campaign at the larger scale targeting the most relevant keywords.
Here’s how SendInBlue is targeting the “Aweber” keyword on search results-
YouTube is another marketing platform you don’t want to leave out of your lead generation strategy. Here’s why-
The fact that I want to show you is that no matter who you are targeting, there’s a high probability that your target audience is available on YouTube searching for possible solutions to their problem. And you don’t want to miss the opportunity to help them and introduce yourself as their savior (really, savior?)
Also, to create videos on YouTube, you don’t need to invest in expensive equipment and studios to impress your viewers. Your viewers just want information that you can offer them simply by repurposing your existing content in explanatory videos like Moz.
You can also create different types of video content to keep your viewers engaged. Here are a few ideas for your YouTube channel-
and more…
When it comes to paid advertisement, most B2B marketers ignore Facebook or don’t take it very seriously.
In fact, I was also among such marketers until I ran a campaign on the platform for one of my clients. The result I gained from it changed my opinion, and I have put Facebook Ads in one of the top-performing lead generation platforms for B2B brands.
Here, the game is you cannot use Facebook like a B2C brand and expect results. For B2B marketing, you have to take a different approach considering the behavioral aspects of your customers and how they use Facebook in their day-to-day routine.
Facebook Ads offers a few B2B-targeting attributes like job, industry, employer, interests, and more that enable you to target them more effectively.
You can also use Facebook website retargeting ads for remarketing to website visitors. Trust me, no matter who you’re targeting, they must be using Facebook at least once a week (if not daily), and you don’t want to miss that opportunity to convert them into a lead.
After Google Ads, LinkedIn is my best-performing lead generation platform regarding the quality of leads you can attract.
LinkedIn is a professional networking platform that enables you to reach out to the decision-makers of the target companies directly. But the real challenge is in converting those potential customers into leads.
To achieve that, you have to offer something unique and valuable in which CXOs and other high-level professionals would be interested.
Here’s my secret to success on LinkedIn Marketing – Industry reports work well when grabbing the attention of industry leaders and executives of successful companies. Try it, and you’ll thank me later!
Besides, if you don’t like contacting potential clients directly on LinkedIn, it’s also a great place where you can conduct an effective email search.
Many users have made their contact details public, and you can easily find their email and mobile numbers on their profiles. You just need to open his/her LinkedIn Profile and click on “Contact Info” like this
However, the chances are that most of your prospects have made their contact details private. To find their contact details, you may need an email finder tool to extract the profile details like name, company name, company website, etc., and reveal their email address.
Further, you can create an email list of your prospects and use it for email marketing campaigns or retargeting campaigns on Facebook & Instagram to connect and engage them by offering relevant lead magnets.
If you are not using webinars as lead generation material, you are leaving a lot of potential leads for your competitors. Here’s why-
There’s another reason why hosting webinars is one of the successful lead generation strategies (and you’ll agree too) – people see how you or your product can solve their problem in real time.
Basically, by using webinars, you can showcase your expertise in the field, which ultimately helps you build trust and credibility with your target audience, which eventually leads to conversion.
As a B2B marketer, a lot depends on how many and the types of leads you can generate. If you produce tons of leads, but the sales cannot close most of them, then the quality of your leads is poor, whereas if you provide high-value leads but keep the pipeline dry, you’re doing no good for the business.
The B2B marketing and the sales cycle are quite long, and that’s why you have to always keep the quantity and quality of leads in mind while building a B2B lead generation strategy for your business.
If you like this article, check out my complete list of essential B2B lead generation tools.
