A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding B2B Lead Generation

Running a business is like walking on a tightrope. Your each step must be proper and measured, otherwise a downfall is guaranteed. Especially, when it comes to the first step, the risk is at its highest. In business too the risk is highest during the first step — lead generation. And perhaps, that is the reason why 91% of the marketers believe that lead generation is their most important goal in business.

I know many of you may not associate high risk with lead generation. But try to think from a different perspective. Your customers are just a tiny fraction of your total leads. But what if the lead is tiny in the first place? Then you may end up with even less number of customers, resulting in lower profits.

To avoid this nightmare, there is a need to understand the B2B lead generation process and the strategies that can boost it. In this article, we are going to do exactly the same. We will discuss what B2B lead generation is, what are its types, what are its advantages, etc. So, get ready for an insightful read that will boost your understanding about B2B lead generation and help you generate more leads for your business.

What is B2B Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the first step for a startup or an enterprise to go through before generating qualified leads. B2B marketers use B2B lead generation to drive prospects to their organization organically. For instance, it includes blogs, coupons, live events, SEO, social media posts, etc.

The process identifies the potential customers who have an interest in the offerings of products and services of the organization. The next step takes place by capturing data from interested customers. The very next step is to make them enter into the sales funnel. Modern lead generation marketing requires a well-designed website that is fully optimized and should generate interest in services.

Advantages of B2B Lead Generation

Apart from the obvious benefit of generating leads, B2B lead generation also has many other benefits which a business owner must know of.

Some of the benefits of lead generation are:

Track Results and Measure Performance

One added advantage of generating leads through digital marketing is, you can track all the results and measure your performance accordingly. With this, you can analyze which marketing campaign worked for you and which one did not. With this crucial data, you can make an informed decision for future marketing campaigns.

Cost Effective

Lead generation can be a costly affair when we talk about traditional marketing. However, with digital marketing, it can be extremely cost-effective. Here, you can cap your spending and utilize money wisely by targeting only your audience base. This method also has lower cost per lead which is a metric showing difficulty in acquiring the lead. Easier the source, lower the price.

In addition, these leads are high in quality since you obtained them by targeting the specific group of potential customers. In a nutshell, you get high quality leads and that too with lower cost per lead.

Strong Sales Opportunities

B2B sales lead generation strategies are to build lifelong relationships with the targeted people. The organization demonstrates its offerings with a step-by-step procedure. Once the prospects have faith in the business, they will always look forward to buying services or products. This way, it leads to maximizing sales opportunities for the organization.

Quality Leads

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) targets people according to their needs and interests. Including topics and keywords in the content makes it possible to collect interest from the prospects who showed interest in purchasing products or services.

This can be done with pay-per-click ads. PPC ads will help to target the display ads for a specific group. It will generate high-quality leads if the firmographics and demographics are done correctly. It is true when you collect marketing automation methods. According to the report, 80% of marketers believe marketing drives better leads. Also, 77% obtained conversion rates than those who don’t use marketing automation.

Expanding Customer Base 

There is a chance to gather much information about the target audience during the lead generation campaign. Hence, the collected information will help better understand the prospects and their needs. This results in a measurable impact on the business.

Save Precious Time

There is intense competition in the market, where the sales target keeps rising every year to the peak. In the present scenario, time-saving is the most important phenomenon. Salespeople shouldn’t spend much time in search of new leads. They should proactively engage themselves in meeting prospects. Online lead generation helps to target the potential into actual customers. 

Lead Generation Mediums

When it comes to lead generation, there are many marketing methods that businesses use. These methods can be broadly grouped into two major methods — inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Let us have a look at what these marketing methods entail.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing simply means creating valuable content and tailor experiences that attract your target audience. In simple words, it is all about solving your audience’s problem through your content. The motive of inbound marketing is to generate leads and convert them into long term customers. Inbound marketing is a broad concept and it involves several components. Let’s have a look at them one by one.

Content Marketing

The content is the king and the brand voice of the organization. Unique and personalized content is the main motive to engage and inspire the interest of the customers. The write-up should be capable enough to provide answers to the audience’s questions. A plagiarized-free valuable content is a great way to create space in the customers’ hearts.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing as a lead generation tactic.

Interactive Chatbot

An artificial intelligence chatbot is designed to build trustworthiness with customers or prospects. The round-the-clock chatbot availability uses conversational marketing to gather contact details and share required information. Besides educating the customers, answering repetitive questions, and reducing resolution time also lessens the pressure on agents.

The chatbots are trending when it comes to inbound marketing. In fact, the chatbot is predicted to reach a higher market valuation of $1.25 billion by the year 2025. These bots are designed in such a way that they don’t feel robotic and give a human-like personalized feeling while conversing.

Downloadable Content

An excellent method to hold the prospects' attention is to prepare guides, eBooks, and more downloadable content. These are the techniques where an organization gets a chance to make the prospects dive deep into their services and products. In order to maximize the organization's reach, you can use SEO strategies on the informative and appealing content materials.

Website Lead conversions

The maximum lead conversion takes place at the website. It is necessary to place call-to-action on the website. The call-to-action should be able to stimulate the audience to check out webinars, sign up for newsletters, and register for events. Apart from this, the design and layout of the website is another factor that you must consider as it increases lead conversions.

Search Engine Optimization

Undeniably, creating content for web pages, blogs, and downloadables is impactful for inbound lead generation. It is not only limited to this. Driving traffic to content is imperative as it has no value until someone reads it. The website visibility can be increased by SEO with the correct keyword placement and the right keyword density so that the content ranks better on search engines.

Social Media Marketing

Social media power can influence and improve different areas of marketing efforts. It is a gold mine for leads, and collecting them on social media platforms helps find the people who have shown interest in the brand. Moreover, the leads will help to maintain longer relationships. And maintaining relationships is easier through some special offers on social media platforms.

Dynamic Call to Action

The landing page is the page that generates the maximum number of leads. It drives the action the marketer wants a customer or a prospect to take on the website. A call-to-action (CTA) should be boldly visible so that it visually gets differentiated from the background and website.

The CTA for lead generation must have:

• A powerful copy

• An attention-grabbing website design

• The right offers for the audience

• The correct placement of CTA

Multidimensional Quora Platform

Answering an accurate answer to the question on Quora is one of the tactics for lead generation. Quora is a platform where valuable advice, website links, and thought leadership ideas can be shared. It allows direct engagement with an audience and potentially improves SEO. Another method is to post a question and see how the audience is responding.

Stages of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is divided into four stages:

1. Attract

2. Convert

3. Close

4. Delight

Attract

The initial stage of inbound marketing is to find and attract the target audience. Before initiating the step, try to know how people reach the website. Getting answers to this question helps to rank higher on Google search.

Convert

Marketing is a broad strategy in which prospects are converted. After all, the end goal of marketing is to look for new users and convert them into permanent ones.

How to convert users in inbound marketing?

• CTA

• Sign-up forms

• Signing up for the newsletter

Close

By using automation, one can enter the closing stage. Automated emails will remind the users of their abandoned carts and can encourage a busy customer to return to their site for the complete purchase. Nowadays, businesses are also employing chatbots for this stage.

Delight

The last stage is to delight the customers, wherein rewards to the customers are given. It might include actions such as thanking messages, discounts, follow-up emails, and much more.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing refers to businesses proactively reaching out to their customers to initiate a conversation via various mediums. It is opposite to that of inbound marketing. Let’s have a look at the various means through which a business executes outbound marketing.

Email Leads

Email leads are collected by using an opt-in form. The process is quite simple that revolves around collecting information about potential leads. The strategy to collect data is not only limited to getting email leads but it also takes care of those leads by transforming them into regular customers. In case it is done rightly, lead generation results show highly increased customer engagement.

PPC Lead Generation

PPC lead generation is also the technique to attract the right visitors to your page. Placing ads on a site that shares similar values with the brand helps attract many customers. In addition, it increases the customers' likeness for the products

Events

To connect with the customers, businesses often organize several types of events like trade shows, online webinars, and one-off promotional events. This particular technique is helpful in defining the brand and increasing its customer base. 

Direct mail

Direct mail may sound old-fashioned or outdated; still, it is considered a reliable way to get and stay in touch with customers. It is quite effective throughout the complete customer lifecycle. Driving brand awareness to prevent customer churn rates is possible through direct mail efforts

In a Nutshell

Lead generation has experienced the transformation from the conventional methods to these new-age digital tactics that businesses have adopted in the recent past. If you haven’t adopted these changes yet, you might be losing out on massive lead generation opportunities.

If you are a startup who is looking to grab these lead generation opportunities or an enterprise looking to revamp their lead generation strategy, this article is a perfect guide for you.

We have tried to focus on the entire B2B lead generation process throughout the article. The write-up has simplified the entire lead generation process by focussing on its advantages. It also mentions two major types of lead generation medium in great detail. This makes it easier for you to decide which medium (or both) you want to go with.