B2B Lead Generation and Digital Marketing
Digital technology has opened up a whole new world of B2B lead generation channels for organisations. However, not all tools are as effective and efficient at delivering the quality leads you want.
In the perfect world, every B2B marketing campaign you run is successful, and every B2B lead generation strategy produces a plethora of high-quality prospects into your sales funnel. However, that’s not the world we live in, is it?
There is a tonne of information (good and bad) out there about how to get more B2B leads our of your B2B prospecting. Today’s buyers are much more sophisticated and clued-in than ever before as you will see from the research below from Forrester and SiriusDecisions. And B2B marketers are slowly starting to take the approach that has been used by B2C marketers for some time now. Therefore, the one thing you must always ask yourself is “what is the purpose of lead generation?”
Lead generation is all about bringing the right people into your sales funnel. And the chances are that each of those prospects will all be at different stages of the buying process when they arrive. Here are four B2B lead generation ideas that can deliver better results.
1. Focus on Traffic from Social Media
Unless you have a large team of people to manage your social media marketing, it is a mistake even to attempt to be on every possible platform with social media. First, a concentrated effort to leverage the lead prospecting capabilities of a few tools is much more efficient. Beyond that, as Neil Patel states, driving traffic to your website should be a core objective of using social media.
Organisations experience varying results with specific social tools. Analyse your efficiency with tools you use to figure out where the sweet spot lies. Most B2B prospecting strategies call on you to implement a customer-centric approach when it comes to your marketing efforts.
A blanket approach is not the path to take. People are on different social media channels because those channels deliver a different experience for the user. So if you can avoid it, don’t push the same message out across all of your channels. You need to tailor your messages based on who people are and what their interests are.
Using Twitter for brand awareness is a useful way to deliver your message, and there is a range of automation tools out there to help you ensure you have regular content. But mostly you need to use it to engage with your audience and generate traffic. You also need to ensure that the content you are pushing is good enough so that people will want to come back to your site on a regular basis.
LinkedIn offers some efficient lead generation features. With an audience of 414 million and counting as of February 2016, 100 million of whom use the platform on a monthly basis; it has to be the number one platform for B2B sales and marketing teams. LinkedIn has an excellent search function where you can search for prospects based on job roles and a range of other factors, which is great if you are a sales person looking for new opportunities. But I prefer networking through groups, which is a fantastic facility for driving engagement from prospective clients. Posting regular content that will be of value to readers is also an excellent service to avail of but don’t overdo it.
Facebook also has some nifty opportunities through event registration, sign-up forms and very granular audience targeting.
YouTube
YouTube offers the ability to show off your products and services, or position your company as a thought leader in its field (see the Forrester video below), and is the second most used search engine by people, so you need to ensure your videos are tagged correctly.
2. Continue to Use Email
Despite periodic efforts to tear it down as an “old technology” for qualified digital lead generation, email remains highly active. In case you missed it, I wrote about this last week in our post “Why Telemarketing Trumps Email for Lead Generation“. This point is particularly the case when using marketing automation features typical in customer relationship management software.
Using data gathering and analytics, marketing teams can more precisely develop campaigns that target the right prospects with the right messages. Sales teams can also set up automated campaigns that deliver messages at predetermined intervals. A call-to-action unique to the needs of the target recipient can contribute to clicks on your site and help with acquiring new leads that you can nurture over time. If used correctly, email marketing can be a very powerful medium for staying in touch with your prospects until they are ready to engage with you more directly.
A word of advice – segment your users into their relevant categories and only send relevant content to each segment.
3. Solve Problems with Content
Content marketing has become a top element of digital B2B lead generation. It includes precisely crafted messages in such forms as blog posts, white papers, ebooks, and videos that are helpful or valuable to the reader. The most successful content marketers consider the problems and motives of the prospective customers they’re targeting.
Content outlines a problem or concern from a prospect’s point of view and presents resolutions. Optimising articles for search engines can increase the eyeballs that see content. To generate leads, though, you need a strong story that appeals to the interests of the intended reader. Content syndication is a significant extension of a content marketing strategy. It is the delivery of your content through other websites or publishers. You can manage syndication yourself, but another option is to work with a company that specialises in this method of distributing your message through the right channels that hit your target audience.
An important part of content strategy is knowing the types of content and delivery channels that work best in your B2B industry. According to a research paper by SiriusDecisions “Demand Creation: Planning Assumptions 2015”, inbound marketing tactics that include strategies such as content syndication are responsible for driving more than 70 percent of enquiry volume for many organisations.
4. Engage People Directly
One of the best lead generation tips you can follow is this: you must engage your audience directly. Success on Twitter and other social media, for instance, is usually sparked by inviting reactions to your content and replying to prospects that do show an interest. This engagement process leads to conversations, and potentially a meeting which is positively influence on conversion rate. I’ve often used this method for engaging with people on a one-to-one basis and been extremely successful with it.
5. Social Selling
This online engagement has become what we all now know as “Social Selling”. Ultimately, it’s about building relationships. (If you run a search for that term in our search box you’ll see I’ve written about more than a couple of times.) The challenge sales people have is using it in a manner that will add value to the buyer – from the start of the buying process. But it is a skill that all sales people need to learn – and learn quickly.
If you are not using social selling on a regular basis, you are behind your best competitors. SiriusDecisions have also stated that 70 percent of the buying process is now complete by the time a prospect is ready to engage with sales. The world of the Salesperson is changing and unless you are willing to change your methods and up your game, you, my friend are going to get left behind.
6. Employee Advocacy
I also believe that selling has moved outside of the realm of just the sales person. It’s no longer good enough for a company to rely solely on the sales guy to be responsible for sales. It is also the responsibility of each and every person working in the organisation – starting at the top. And the best way to do that is through employee advocacy. Your teams and peers and bosses should all be engaging on a regular basis with your content and your potential prospects.
In Forrester’s US B2B eCommerce Forecast: 2015 to 2020 they state that “74 percent of B2B buyers research at least one-half of their work purchases online.” As I mentioned at the start, buyers are doing a lot of the work that the ordinary sales person used to do. And they are doing it online via the mediums I’ve written about here in this article: search engines, videos, whitepapers, content, email.
The author of Forrester’s paper, Andy Hoar, also revealed that he expected 22% of B2B sales jobs to be gone by 2020. You, the salesperson, are being replaced. Unless you are in a consultative position with your clients or are selling complex products or services, you need to change how you engage with your customers.
The Changing B2B Buyer
In their latest video “The Changing B2B Buyer” Mary Shea, Principal Analyst at Forrester shares her latest sales and marketing research. It describes how b2b prospecting strategies are empowered with more information than ever before and are educating themselves on going about the buying process. She also covers how the selling organisation needs to adapt their digital lead generation strategies to meet the needs of B2B buyers.
This (audio only) video is 10 minutes long, and I highly recommend you listen to it. If you don’t have time right now, bookmark this page and listen to it all when you have time. It is well worth 10 minutes of your day. Particularly the piece around the 6-minute mark that talks about what you, as a sales leader, can do in the next two weeks to bring some of these principles back into your company.
Conclusion
Finding digital tools to use for sales prospecting digital marketing is not a problem, there are hundreds in virtually every category. Here's a couple that we rate highly from Leadiro and Albacross. However, you need to develop a digital marketing strategy and focus on efficiency when selecting the right ones for your business.
As Forrester (and others) have stated already, the B2B buyer’s journey is nearly complete by the time he or she reaches out to your sales department. So your challenge is to ensure you are reaching the relevant audience for your company with the relevant content they require. Join us on the Internal Results LinkedIn page.
