Lead Generation for B2B: Expert Tips and Tricks
Lead generation is at the core of B2B marketing. Getting a potential customer’s contact information is the main goal. Gathering and nurturing those leads is why marketing agencies exist. It’s our job to offer just enough information to potential consumers that they are interested and want more. Whether you offer resources, services, or demos – lead generation is the first step towards generating sales. This guide explains just some of the ways you can generate more leads for your B2B organization.
Lead generation is at the core of B2B marketing.
Understanding Your Audience
Here at glassCanopy, we market “hard-to-describe products to hard-to-find audiences,” focusing on B2B audiences of 10-250k prospects. In this market, one of the most critical aspects of our lead generation strategy includes producing the right content for our specific audience.
We try to understand the key players involved in the decision-making processes within an organization and produce content that targets their needs and concerns. Marketing this content using tools that allow you to target specific audiences (industries, job titles, location) helps you gather quality leads.
Focusing on tools that allow you to target your specified audience will help you generate the best leads.
Understanding Your Product
B2B content marketing involves more than just targeting the right audience. You also need to understand how your product solves a problem. This understanding of product functionality and industry at a deeper level helps create effective comprehensive campaigns. “Understanding your product” includes discerning the nitty-gritty details, functionalities, and what sets you apart from competitors.
Content Coupled with SEO
The best way to generate leads is to create content that people want, and couple it with a highly focused distribution strategy. Content typically comes in the form of blogs, eBooks, webinars, or white papers. Usually, you’ll find one that seems to work best for generating leads in your specific niche, but you’ll still want a variety of formats for lead nurture. With a comprehensive understanding of your audience and product you can write content for audiences with different job titles, technical expertise, and at various stages in the sales funnel.
For example, writing an eBook or white paper and keeping it gated is the easiest way to start generating leads. What’s more, if you initially promote that content with paid ads and then couple it with an SEO oriented blog to generate organic leads, you have a rock-solid base for producing leads.
Having a strong SEO strategy is the easiest way to generate organic leads.
SEO Strategy
For a complete breakdown of the SEO strategy we use at glassCanopy, check out this blog post.
As a quick overview, our SEO strategy focuses on:
- Keywords: This is the basis of every SEO strategy. It is all about picking the right keywords that have a good search volume and meet search intent. Keywords are the foundation of how people will find your content via search engines.
- Searcher Intent: When selecting keywords, keeping searcher intent in mind is key. You need to make sure you are fulfilling the searcher’s needs with relevant content when they find your page.
- On-Page Optimization: Placing and using keywords in the content you produce is an important contributing factor in determining page rank.
Once you have a content asset and a blog post to drive traffic it is much easier to start promotions using….
Social Media
Using social media is one of the many ways you can get your content out there. You can do organic or paid social posts to promote your content.
Organic Social
Generally speaking, organic social is not that helpful in generating leads for a B2B audience. Twitter is full of spambots and Facebook has decided to significantly decrease the amount of brand/company content it will include in newsfeeds. However, LinkedIn can help generate relevant leads. Since people usually follow companies that are related to their industry, relevant consumers are more likely to find and interact with your content on that platform.
LinkedIn regularly delivers as our best performing organic social platform.
Paid Social
For social media to be effective, paid posts are the way to go. The same trends apply to Twitter and Facebook in terms of not generating an abundance of quality leads. Even when you can target your audience with paid promotions it is still difficult to get your content seen and in front of the right audience on these platforms.
However, paid LinkedIn posts are a strong lead generation tool. The platform offers paid options for lead generation forms. User information is auto filled into forms so all they have to do is click your CTA and then you get their information. Plus, in lead generation for B2B it is important to target the right audience. LinkedIn allows you to target specific job titles and industries so your content is seen by the right people.
LinkedIn offers tools that allow marketers to target specific jobs or industries.
Designing Landing Pages That Convert
Presenting your content well is another important component of lead generation for B2B. You need the style of your content, landing pages, and banners to be cohesive across platforms.
When creating a significant piece of content (eBooks or white papers), launch a landing page to promote it. This way you can drive all relevant traffic from organic social, paid promotions, and the blog to one central location. This makes it easier to understand and analyze where leads are coming in from and determine the success of specific campaigns.
Call-to-Action
A strong and relevant call-to-action, or CTA, is the motivating step to becoming a new lead. Usually, the CTA offers content or some other service (demo, free trial, etc.) as a hook to convince people to offer up their contact information.
Your CTA comes in two forms. An offer and a button. The offer provides more detail and the button is 2-3 words that are the final click to getting that content info. Of course – you want these to match. You don’t want to have a landing page offering an eBook and a CTA button that offers a demo.
| Offers | Buttons |
| Want to see [insert product or solution] in action? | Get a demo |
| Check out our eBook to see how [insert solution] helps [insert problem] | Download Now |
| Give us just 20-minutes to show you how we can help you improve [insert problem]. | Let’s Talk |
Forms
Forms are the final step in the lead generation process. It is important that you get the information you need to successfully follow up with this person and facilitate the marketing-sales handoff process.
Form fields should be limited to three or four critical pieces of information.
The most popular are first name, last name, and business email.
However, you don’t want to ask for too much information, this can deter people from filling out your form and cause you to lose the lead. When designing forms, try to limit the fields to name and email (or even just email if your sales team is comfortable working with that). Also, set up forms to only accept business emails so you can gather more information about the person from LinkedIn without having to bother them for additional information. Of course, depending on your product you may need another field or two but try not to have more than four.
Limiting forms to only accept business addresses allows you to enrich leads with data from LinkedIn and other tools rather than having to people for it directly.
Company Information
It’s important to include some company information and validation on the landing page. Validation can be customer testimonials or a logo parade. This way the potential consumer can get more information about what you do as an entire company and is especially important when your content is on a really specific topic. You want to show that you offer more products or services than just the one you are promoting.
Design
The following image is a very simplified example of how you could choose to design a landing page. To understand the success of your landing pages, use mouse tracking software to see if users are confused by the layout, have trouble with the form, or to just understand general user behaviors.
Remember: Keep it Simple and Contained
You want to create a smooth experience for your users. They shouldn’t have to click a bunch of different buttons and windows to get to your content. Try to keep the main CTA form embedded on the page and above the fold. If someone is really interested in your content or offer, they want to be able to quickly fill out their information. There is a chance they won’t even look at the rest of the page.
Make sure users can fill out forms and access your content without having to click through numerous pages.
Keeping landing pages contained is also important. You can give users access to your website by embedding a link into a logo, but you want to keep users focused on the CTAs you have on the page. Without giving them obvious ways to go wandering through your main website you are more likely to get their information.
Now go get those leads!
Lead generation for B2B is challenging – there is no denying that. There are many elements that need to be considered and designed, but once you figure out the right methods for your product you can keep using those strategies and have a continuous stream of leads.
Interested in our lead generation services? Contact us.
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