The ever-increasing competition, along with an abundance of data, has made it hard for marketers to generate leads, let alone convert them. According to the 2022 State of Marketing Trends report by HubSpot, about 61% marketers consider generating leads and traffic their biggest challenge.
However, while B2B lead generation and conversion is a complex task, it’s equally important. After all, that’s how you improve your sales, right? But how can you generate more leads for your business that convert? Read along.
This blog talks about everything from what lead marketing is to how you can generate more leads. Furthermore, you’ll learn why some businesses successfully generate leads but fail to convert most of them.
A Lead is a business or an individual who has shown interest in your company’s products or services. And lead generation means identifying that individual or business and converting them into paying customers.
The lead generation process is crucial for sales and marketing teams in a B2B organization. Because more leads mean more contacts to reach out to, which further increases the likelihood of conversions and thus sales.
Here are some different channels businesses can use for generating business leads:
Search engine optimization or SEO is fundamental when it comes to lead generation. Optimizing your business website for a certain set of keywords will help you drive valuable traffic, which will make conversions easier.
Also, if your website makes it into the featured Google snippets on the top of search results, it’s more likely to get more leads. And this translates to better chances of conversion.
While social media is quite a popular channel for B2C lead generation, it’s often considered ineffective when it comes to B2B domain. However, that’s not true. At least that’s what the stats indicate.
For instance, the State of B2B Marketing Report from Wpromote: a well-known digital marketing agency, states that 89% of the B2B marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation. And HubSpot states that 43% of the B2B marketers have acquired customers through Facebook. What’s more, 82% of B2B content marketers used Twitter for organic marketing in 2021.
The fact that social media is so extensively being used by B2B marketers states its effectiveness. All you need to do is choose the right channel and follow the right strategy.
Here’s how you can generate business leads using social media:
For a B2B company, their ideal customers are businesses, right? And that’s what you find in abundance on LinkedIn. Almost all businesses, especially in the digital domain, are on LinkedIn. Because of this, using LinkedIn for generating business leads would be the best idea.
Pro Tip: LinkedIn has these amazing Lead Gen Forms that auto-populate with the data of the individual when they click a CTA. This way, gathering relevant information becomes easy.
While Facebook is not as popular as LinkedIn for generating B2B leads, it’s still worth it. You can create Facebook ads with customized CTAs and direct your prospects to a landing page.
It’s a known fact that primary decision makers in an organization, including managers, CEOs, and CTOs, are pretty active on Twitter, which means an opportunity for generating B2B leads. You can either answer the questions posted by business owners or run paid ad campaigns to capture leads.
Content marketing is yet another amazing way of generating B2B leads. Creating valuable and insightful content will not only help attract your target audience but also portray your business as a thought leader.
You can create insightful blog posts, downloadable eBooks, case studies, webinars, and guides and offer the same to your visitors in exchange for their contact information. This way, you can generate more leads.
However, if you already have some content on your website, you can opt for content syndication, i.e., posting the content on different channels to improve content reach SEO and thus generate more leads.
Content syndication, although effective, requires expertise and dedicated resources. So, hiring a professional like DAT-A-CURRATE would be a smart move. They can help you distribute your content across different channels evenly, ensuring maximum visibility to your target audience more effectively.
According to Smart Insights, B2B marketers get 65% of leads from referrals. Also, research says that 84% of the B2B buyers start the purchasing process after a referral. That’s how powerful referrals are.
Therefore, encourage your existing customers to refer your services to ideal clients. You can even offer incentives in exchange for the referrals (this works like magic).
Several times businesses succeed in generating business leads, but they don’t convert well. And here are some main reasons why it happens and how you can avoid it:
What most businesses do is they right away start creating campaigns without generating demand for their product or services. And because of this, even if the products/services are visible to the leads, they still might not choose to buy from that business. All this is because of a lack of demand generation or brand awareness.
Therefore, before jumping into lead generation, you must focus on demand generation. And you can do that by creating a buyer persona that depicts your ideal customer. Find what the problems of your ideal customers are and offer a solution by creating valuable pillar content to generate quality leads with higher conversion rates.
If you are not sure who is your ideal customer, DAT-A-CCURATE can help you create and integrate customer profiles with buyer intent and technographic and firmographic data enabling you to create personalized sales and lead generation strategies. This way, you’ll be able to refine your search for your target customers and thus improve conversion.
Buyer intent is the probability of how inclined a lead is to your product or how close he is to making a purchase. However, most businesses never consider it and let their sales team handle all the leads like they’re equal. And by the time they reach the lead with the right buyer intent, it’s too late.
Using buyer intent, you can filter actionable leads and direct your sales team to them, which significantly increases the chances of conversions. Therefore, consider buyer intent the next time you generate leads. Or, you can simply reach out to experts at DAT-A-CCURATE who can help you:
– Identify target accounts showing intent
– Talk to those who are talking to your competitors
– Equip your teams before they speak to your potential buyers
– And finally, enhance the conversion rate.
Content marketing isn’t just about creating content. It’s about creating relevant content that solves your leads’ problems.
There are 3 stages of a buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. You should create content based on what stage of the buyer’s journey your lead is.
Let’s say your lead is at the consideration stage. At this stage, a blog on what your product does isn’t something they need. What they need is a comparison guide or a testimonial that’ll show them how your product is better than others. And this might help them decide better.
Refer to this blog to find out what content you should create based on what stage your lead is in.
Always remember, the lead generation process in itself is pretty simple. You just need the relevant channels along with the right strategy, and you can generate as many leads as you want. What’s hard is converting those leads into paying customers.
However, you can make it easy if you focus on demand generation, consider buyer intent and create relevant content as stated above. Happy lead generation and conversion.