Changing the Way B2B Sales and Marketing Managers Acquire Customers

• admin
• Mar, 21 2022

One of the biggest problems B2B sales and marketing managers face during customer acquisition is low-quality leads. Because of this, several other problems follow. For instance:

– Low-quality leads are hard to push through the customer acquisition funnel.

– Marketing teams end up wasting too much time on low-quality leads.

– Spending too much time on low-quality leads means there’s less time for good prospects.

And all this leads to a sub-par customer conversion rate even after generating an adequate number of leads. So, what should you do?

Well, to enhance the effectiveness of your customer acquisition strategy, you need to change the way you acquire customers by supercharging your lead generation process.

This blog talks about modern-day lead generation methods using which you can generate quality leads that require much less effort to move through the acquisition pipeline. They’re easy to nurture and more likely to become a paying customer. So, read in full.

What is Customer Acquisition?

Several times people confuse customer acquisition with lead generation. While these terms are related, they aren’t the same.

Where lead generation is the process of attracting leads to your business, customer acquisition is the process of moving those leads up the sales funnel and converting them into paying customers.

Lead generation is the first step of customer acquisition which literally determines how easy or hard the remaining customer acquisition process would be (better lead generation means better customer acquisition and vice versa).

Modern-Day Lead Generation Methods for Effective Customer Acquisition

1. Improve Brand Awareness with Demand Generation

Before jumping right into lead generation, it’s imperative to increase brand awareness and interest among your target audience. It becomes even more important if you operate in a competitive space.

Increasing brand awareness or demand generation is like a prerequisite for lead generation. You need to let your audience know that your brand exists. And what this results in, is high-quality leads that are more likely to convert.

To improve demand generation, you need to focus on content. Just find where your target audience hangs outs and what they need and structure content around the same. However, make sure the content is highly detailed, valuable, and insightful. By doing this, you’re prepping your audience to become your leads.

Now, towards lead generation.

2. Use Your Content Efficiently with Content Syndication

Content syndication is both helpful in demand generation and in finding relevant leads. It’s basically the process of distribution of resource-intensive content across different channels other than your website.

Let’s suppose you have a blog on your website that hardly receives any hits. You can use that content and share it as a guest post on a more popular website or create social media ad copies and linked posts around that. And that’s what content syndication is.

However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. After all, you need to figure out who you need to show the content to across what channels and how frequently. That’s when you can reach out to a lead generation expert such as DAT-A-CCURATE.

Experts at DAT-A-CCURATE can help you expand your reach among the target audience. Based on what domain you operate in and where your audience lies, we can help you create customized content syndication strategies to distribute your content across all relevant channels evenly.

3. Focus on High-Value Prospects Using Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing is a strategic way of creating data-driven potential customer accounts and specifically targeting them. This method helps you filter out low-value prospects and create customized marketing strategies for high-value prospects resulting in effective customer acquisition.

While including ABM in your customer acquisition strategy is probably the best thing to do, it requires professional assistance. This is because ABM involves understanding the needs of target accounts based on their company profile, understanding their buyer intent, the technology they use, market competition, etc.

You can connect with DAT-A-CCURATE if you want customer accounts with information such as buyer intent, technographics, and firmographics, along with information on decision makers including but limited to phone number, email, social media, etc. And this will enable you to craft personalized sales and marketing strategies that ensure high conversion.

Pro Tip: ABM can really help you save time that you’d have otherwise wasted on low-value leads or a generic marketing strategy that may not be very effective. So, make sure to include it in your customer acquisition strategy.

4. Nurture MQL or Marketing Qualified Leads

MQL is more like filtering the leads you’ve already generated.

Marketing-qualified leads have interacted with one of your offerings (downloaded an e-book or resource) and shown interest in your products/services. The leads have basic information about your product/service and are highly likely to respond positively to your marketing efforts.

Let’s suppose one of your MQLs downloaded an e-book on the topic “x.” You can send them a whitepaper on the same or similar topic or can help them with a content piece that explains how your product can help them. And doing this will help you convert MQLs to SQLs (sales qualified leads), which the sales team can nurture further to convert them into a customer.

If MQLs are a newer concept for you, DAT-A-CCURATE can help. We have qualified professionals who’ll ensure that your sales pipelines are filled with marketing-qualified leads at all times.

Wrapping Up

The most significant benefit of opting for modern-day lead generation methods is that it saves you a lot of time. With the right leads at your disposal, you can direct all your efforts to the leads with a higher potential for conversion. And all this amounts to a faster & effortless movement across the sales cycle and more effective customer acquisition.

FAQs

What is B2B Sales?

B2B sales simply mean a business selling to another business. For instance, if there’s a software company “X” that sells its business software to other companies, it’s known as B2B sales. However, if the company sells the software/app to individual customers, it’s known as B2C.

How do you acquire customers?

While customer acquisition strategies are different for every business, here’s what generally happens:

– Generate qualified leads

– Nurture them with good quality content (social media posts, blogs, whitepapers, etc.)

– Convert them from MQL to SQLs

– Motivate them to decide and become a paying customer

What is a customer acquisition strategy?

A customer acquisition strategy is an action plan that includes different processes with the motive of effectively acquiring customers.