Guide to B2B Lead Generation

The primary objective of any B2B marketing endeavor is to draw in qualified leads and subsequently transform them into clientele. However, achieving this outcome is not a matter of luck; it necessitates a thorough and meticulously devised lead-generation strategy. Yet, as numerous B2B marketers know, crafting such a strategy is frequently more challenging than anticipated. This guide will delve into the fundamentals of lead generation and provide an overview of how you can leverage your website and other online marketing platforms to convert qualified leads into clients.

What Constitutes Lead Generation?

Before delving into your business’s various lead generation channels, let’s precisely define what lead generation entails.

Roughly 96% of your website visitors are not yet prepared to purchase. The majority may only briefly peruse a page or two before departing, with some never returning to your site.

Lead generation endeavors to funnel these visitors into your sales pipeline. Subsequently, you nurture them, providing further information about your products or services and maintaining communication until they are ready to make a buying decision.

However, it’s crucial to underscore that quality outweighs quantity in the realm of leads. Not all site visitors align with your target audience, necessitating a focus on generating qualified leads that have the potential to evolve into valuable clientele for your business.

Regrettably, many businesses identify generating high-quality leads as their primary challenge.

Thus, prioritizing quality is paramount in any lead generation strategy. As you proceed through the subsequent chapters, remain mindful of your target audience, concentrating on attracting and converting leads that will drive revenue for your company.

Components of a Successful Lead Generation Strategy

Effective lead generation necessitates a cohesive strategy comprising multiple channels. Leveraging various channels broadens your company’s reach and ensures engagement with leads through diverse avenues.

Considering that 76% of B2B buyers utilize three or more channels during their purchasing research, it’s evident that most leads expect information to be disseminated across multiple platforms.

While we will delve into each of these channels in greater detail in subsequent sections, the following six channels should all play integral roles in your lead management strategy:

Your Website: As the primary conversion point for potential clients, your website should effectively demonstrate how your offerings can address their needs, distinguish your brand from competitors, and guide visitors on becoming clients.
Content: Although inherently part of your website, content plays a pivotal role in lead generation and warrants recognition as a distinct channel. Valuable content educates your audience or assists them in achieving specific objectives, fostering goodwill and increasing the likelihood of visitors providing their contact information to become leads.
Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising: Strategic PPC campaigns effectively capture the attention of individuals actively seeking your services. By directing users to relevant pages on your site, PPC endeavors to convert them into leads.
Social Media: Once predominantly beneficial for B2C marketers, advanced targeting options on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn enable B2B marketers to drive qualified traffic to their sites.
Email Marketing: Email emerges as the most potent channel for sustained communication with potential clients. Armed with a lead’s email address, you can maintain regular contact, nurture relationships, and guide them through the sales funnel.
Lead Management Software: As leads are generated, a robust system for assessing their quality and advancing them toward conversion is imperative. The right lead management tools facilitate these tasks while furnishing insights to refine your strategy.

The Role of Your Website in Lead Generation

Your website serves as the virtual headquarters of your company. It should furnish all necessary information for visitors to evaluate whether they wish to engage with your offerings.

Furthermore, it should prompt qualified visitors to share their contact details, converting them into leads. Achieving this involves several crucial steps:

Craft Clear Calls to Action

For an effective lead generation process, it’s imperative to determine the desired actions for your visitors upon landing on your site. Whether completing a contact form, subscribing to an email list, or downloading a product trial, clarity in your calls to action is essential.

Ensure that each page features clear directives, explicitly informing potential clients of the actions to take on your site. Be direct, concise, and elucidate the benefits of action using phrases such as:

Sign up
Get started
Claim your [product, trial, sample] now
Download today
Get a free quote

The choice of calls to action depends on the specific objectives you wish to achieve. Our comprehensive blog post can explore further examples of effective calls to action.

Craft Effective Forms

Usually, the primary call to action will entail visitors filling out a form. However, eliciting this action necessitates more than merely presenting a set of form fields on your page.

Effective lead generation forms strike a balance between gathering sufficient data to qualify leads while minimizing the number of fields to encourage completion.

While acquiring email addresses is paramount, additional data points to consider include:

Name
Company name
Projected budget
Specific service requirements
Additional comments/information

Regular testing and optimization of forms are crucial to maximizing the generation of qualified leads for your business.

Optimize for Search Engines

The efficacy of your lead generation efforts depends on the visitors your site attracts. Since 93% of the B2B buying journey commences with online searches, optimizing your site for search engines is imperative.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) entails optimizing your site to rank prominently in search engine results pages, enabling you to reach your target audience as they seek information about your products or services. While the intricacies of SEO are beyond the scope of this section, comprehensive guidance can be found in our SEO optimization guide or services page.

Optimize for Conversions

Beyond form optimization, conduct A/B or multivariate tests on calls to action, images, buttons, and other site elements to identify versions yielding the highest conversion rates. Implementing the winning variants can significantly augment your lead count.

This is significant for landing pages utilized in campaigns across various channels, such as PPC and social media. These pages are instrumental in converting campaign traffic into leads, underscoring the importance of optimization to enhance results.

For detailed insights into optimizing your site for conversions, consult our Guide to A/B Testing.

Personalize Your Content

Many businesses err by presenting identical content to all visitors. While this is inevitable in the initial stages, leveraging marketing automation software enables the segmentation of site visitors based on factors like industry, company size, and buying cycle stage.

Personalizing the site experience for visitors facilitates access to relevant services and offers, fostering engagement and prompting conversions.

Offer a Superlative User Experience

Visitors are inclined to exit sites where desired information is not readily accessible. Thus, ensure easy navigation, with all critical content accessible within 1-2 clicks from the homepage.

Additionally, prioritize fast loading times, eschew intrusive pop-ups, and uphold overall user experience excellence. Though seemingly rudimentary advice, it is pivotal, as visitor dissatisfaction precludes form completion and hinders lead generation efforts.

Utilizing Content for Lead Generation

Content serves as a cornerstone in any effective lead generation strategy, catering to every phase of the purchasing journey.

Initially, informative content aids in engaging top-of-funnel prospects who are initiating their research journey. This could involve publishing comprehensive guides or informative pieces addressing specific topics pertinent to your industry.

Subsequently, detailed pages elucidating your services and their advantages can effectively capture the attention of middle-of-funnel visitors, illustrating your competitive edge.

Finally, bottom-of-funnel prospects can be persuaded to convert through enticing promotions, exclusive offers, or complimentary trials.

An efficacious content strategy has the potential to reach individuals unfamiliar with your brand, educate them about your offerings, and incite their interest in becoming clients, all without necessitating direct engagement with your sales team.

Moreover, with 83% of B2B marketers leveraging content marketing for lead generation, failure to incorporate content places you at a disadvantage compared to competitors.

Here are several potent content types conducive to lead generation:

Blog Posts:

A staggering 79% of B2B marketers regard blogs as the most potent content marketing tactic for their endeavors. Establishing and maintaining a blog is paramount, as it provides a platform to disseminate expertise on topics of interest to your audience.

Share insightful tips, address industry trends, and address common queries, positioning your brand as a knowledgeable resource within your domain. Optimize posts for search engines and disseminate them across social media platforms to attract qualified traffic to your site.

Guides & eBooks:

While blogs suffice for covering rudimentary topics, downloadable guides and eBooks can provide in-depth exploration and added value to visitors. These resources can be “gated,” necessitating an email address for access, effectively integrating visitors into your sales funnel while furnishing them with valuable content.

Case Studies:

Highlight past successes by crafting case studies showcasing the efficacy of your products or services in addressing client objectives. Such narratives, supported by analytics and client testimonials, offer tangible proof of your capabilities, fostering credibility and trust.

Infographics:

Infographics are visually captivating mediums for elucidating complex industry topics through visualized data and statistics. They simplify intricate subjects, render them more understandable for readers, augment engagement, and facilitate social media traction.

Original Research:

Original research conducted by your company, whether via consumer surveys or client data analysis, can yield invaluable insights for industry peers. Publish these findings on your site, employing email-gating to collect leads. Additionally, presenting research comprehensibly aids in acquiring backlinks, further enhancing your site’s visibility.

For further insights on leveraging content for lead generation, refer to our Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing.

Utilizing PPC for Lead Generation

The strategies discussed thus far involve leveraging your website and owned channels without incurring costs for advertising space on external platforms. Your website and its content represent long-term investments akin to enhancing a property.

Contrastingly, B2B PPC advertising entails paying for advertisement placement on third-party platforms, with Google AdWords being the foremost choice.

However, unlike conventional forms of paid advertising, Google Ads (and analogous search engine PPC platforms) enable you to target your audience when actively seeking information. By focusing on users based on specific keywords and phrases they search, you can allocate your budget towards qualified leads with evident purchasing intent.

Here’s a rundown of what you should do to craft PPC campaigns geared towards lead generation:

Target Keywords with Explicit Intent:

In SEO, nearly any keyword pertinent to your offerings holds potential for your site. You optimize pages for keywords your target audience searches, irrespective of their informational nature, to enhance organic rankings for diverse searches.

Conversely, in PPC, this approach diverges.

Given that you pay for each visitor, ensuring that they harbor a genuine interest in becoming leads is imperative. Achieve this by selecting keywords with overt purchase intent, such as “purchase [your product]” or “[your service] free quote.” Additionally, incorporate terms like “inexpensive” or “poor quality” as negative keywords to prevent ads from appearing for searches detrimental to your reputation.

Like your SEO strategy, conduct thorough keyword research to pinpoint optimal keywords for your campaign, focusing on users displaying clear conversion intent.

Develop Tailored Landing Pages:

As previously highlighted, the efficacy of your PPC campaigns hinges on the landing pages utilized. Each ad should direct users to a landing page delivering precisely what the ad promises.

For instance, if an ad prompts users to “Request a free quote,” the corresponding landing page should feature a quote request form, facilitating immediate access to the quoted service without requiring additional clicks.

Regrettably, many businesses funnel all PPC campaigns to a generic landing page. However, conversion rates will likely plummet if the page content fails to align directly with users’ search queries.

Furthermore, deviation from ad-to-landing page content incurs penalties from platforms like Google, manifesting in diminished Quality Scores, inflated ad costs, or potential account suspension.

Vigilantly Monitor Campaigns:

Upon launching a campaign, remember that PPC necessitates ongoing oversight rather than a “set-it-and-forget-it” approach. Continuous expenditure mandates vigilant monitoring to maximize budget utilization.

Key metrics to track include:

Enhancement of click-through rate (CTR)
Augmentation of quality score (QS)
Reduction of cost per click (CPC)

Refining your ability to furnish searchers with sought-after information enhances the efficacy of PPC in generating leads for your business.

Harnessing Social Media for Lead Generation

Not too long ago, numerous B2B marketers dismissed social media as ineffective for their ventures, often deeming it more suitable for B2C enterprises. However, the contemporary landscape presents a different reality. Nowadays, most B2B marketers integrate social media into their strategies, recognizing its efficacy in driving qualified traffic to their platforms.

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are particularly effective channels among many social media platforms.

Facebook:

With the most extensive active user base among social media platforms, Facebook offers a vast audience reach. Moreover, statistics indicate that 43% of B2B marketers have successfully acquired customers through Facebook, underscoring its potential as a lead generation tool.

Primarily, leverage Facebook to disseminate informative content, share company updates, and engage with your audience. Social media’s inherently informal nature makes it conducive to building relationships with existing and prospective clients.

From a lead generation perspective, Facebook’s advanced ad targeting capabilities are particularly advantageous. Like Google Ads, Facebook provides PPC options enabling you to run ads to garner likes on your page or posts and direct traffic to your site for conversions.

These ads operate on a PPC model, allowing you to target audiences based on individual characteristics ranging from basic demographics to nuanced details like interests, careers, and pages liked. Additionally, utilizing “custom audiences” derived from uploaded email lists enables targeted ad delivery to leads already engaged with your brand.

LinkedIn:

As the sole social media platform tailored explicitly for professionals, LinkedIn emerges as a pivotal tool for B2B marketers. Notably, 62% of B2B marketers affirm its unparalleled effectiveness for business purposes.

LinkedIn is a platform for sharing company news and thought leadership blog posts, but its advertising options are particularly noteworthy. “Sponsored Updates” enable targeting users based on career-specific criteria such as industry, company name, job title, and skills. This feature proves invaluable for pinpointing key decision-makers at targeted organizations and focusing advertising efforts on individuals empowered to act on your offerings.

Twitter:

Twitter facilitates the dissemination of information from both your website and industry blogs. Utilize the platform to share newly published content, enticing users to visit your site and explore your products or services.

Like Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter’s efficacy in lead generation is amplified through paid advertising. Promoted tweets, appearing seamlessly within users’ timelines, are practical tools for driving engagement.

Twitter’s distinctive advantage lies in targeting users based on their past tweets. By tailoring ads to users who have previously discussed relevant topics, such as accounting software, you enhance the likelihood of resonating with your target audience.

Nurturing Leads through Email Communication

Email correspondence represents the most effective means of sustaining contact with leads and guiding them through the sales funnel.

Regular appearances in a lead’s inbox ensure sustained engagement with your brand and offerings. However, the content of your emails must align with the informative and helpful nature of your overall content strategy, as one misstep could lead to subscriber disengagement.

Here’s how to leverage email to communicate with leads and drive conversions:

Craft Informative Newsletters:

Initiate your email marketing efforts with regular newsletters. Distributed to all subscribers, these communications amalgamate company updates with industry-related tips, positioning your brand as a valuable resource within your niche.

Personalize Email Campaigns:

Employ lead nurture email campaigns to sustain engagement with leads. These automated campaigns deliver tailored emails based on user actions, ensuring relevance and enhancing the likelihood of conversion. Unlike general newsletters, emails within lead nurture campaigns cater to specific segments of your target audience, optimizing effectiveness.

Implement Drip Campaigns:

Drip email campaigns, while less personalized than lead nurture sequences, provide leads with pertinent information at predefined intervals. Crafted in alignment with typical sales cycles, these campaigns deliver relevant content tailored to the buying process stage, facilitating informed decision-making.

Incorporate Strong Calls to Action:

Each email should incorporate clear calls to action, guiding subscribers on the following steps. From encouraging site visits to promoting specific services, calls to action should seamlessly complement the email’s content, driving recipients back to your platform for further engagement.

Adhering to these strategies can make email communication a potent tool for lead nurturing and conversion. For additional insights, explore our Beginner’s Guide to Effective Email Marketing.

Lead Management Strategies

Effective lead generation is only part of the equation; you also need a robust strategy for managing and nurturing those leads through your sales funnel.

Notably, 79% of marketing leads fail to convert into sales due to inadequate lead management practices. Therefore, implementing a comprehensive lead management strategy could boost your sales by up to 80%.