How To Do B2B Lead Generation To Benefit Your Business

June 12, 2022

|In Lead Generation, Strategy & Consulting

As senior B2B marketers with a well-established business, you have successfully implemented a variety of digital marketing campaigns. Your email marketing is effective. You create search engine content, good-quality case studies, and blog posts. Your social media is also working well.

The business is getting some leads coming to the website, but unquestionably, there is much room for improvement. Traffic to your website has been stable to declining, and you may be worried about the economic impact on your business and industry. More good-quality leads coming to the website can serve as a strong defense in an economic downturn. And the sales team will love you for it!

So what are the B2B lead generation strategies that greater benefit your business? There are some strategies you may not have associated with lead generation, but which have proven to be highly successful.

Expand your markets

Lead generation can give you insights about other prospects that are keen on engaging with you or already are consuming your content. This segment of potential customers can be an addition to your current target audience and help you expand your market.

Increase your revenue

Using the right message, offer, and content to generate interest from prospects can improve conversion rates, generating more buying customers faster.

Increase Brand Awareness and Visibility

Lead generation is also a great way to build brand awareness and visibility. It is critical to raise exposure and awareness to strengthen your competitiveness. You can accomplish this by developing content that your target audience is interested in and publishing it on the platforms they use. Many buyers are looking for solutions from their mobile devices, so it is also important to optimize your website for mobile traffic.

Automate the lead generation process

You can also use various off-the-shelf software and tools to automate the lead generation process by qualifying and scoring leads, sending them targeted content, and tracking their engagement through the funnel. The aerial perspective of prospects and their activities is critical for enhancing marketing and sales strategies.

Improve lead quality

Lead generation also gives you a highly targeted approach to content creation, with a separate landing page for different pain points. When you create content that resonates with each of your buyer personas lead quality will improve.

Reduce reliance on cold calling

Cold calling is a labor-intensive activity and one of the most expensive activities your sales reps carry out. When hot prospects are flowing into the website your sales team can focus more on closing business. A sales process that provides quality leads for sales reps to close translates into better sales productivity on the income statement.

Now that we know the benefits, let’s take a look at 5 easy steps to kick-start your lead generation tactics, and start bringing in high-quality leads!

1. Know Who Your Target Audience Is

To properly target your audience, you’ve got to know exactly who you want to talk to. Ask yourself these critical questions to gain a clearer picture of who your ideal buyer persona is:

What kind of business needs what you offer? Think about the industry, geography, and business size.
Who within these businesses has the problem your product or service can solve? Consider their position, seniority, if they’re a decision maker, etc.

Build up a clear profile of your target audience with as detailed a description as possible. This first step makes lead generation a lot easier down the line.

2. Build Your Potential Leads

What Are Potential Leads?

Prospects are leads who have shown interest in your product or service by offering and have indicated that they are actively searching for the types of solutions you offer.

During this second step of reviewing your leads to identify those who you can advance in the sales journey and make solid prospects, you can consider some of these strategies.

Make sure that you have accurate contact details that are compliant with local regulations and have received their consent to engage via email.
Create a unique offer, valuable to the lead, that will set you apart from your competition and allow you to engage further with them.
Connect with them on social media. LinkedIn is considered the gold standard for business development. But don’t be spammy in your outreach.

3. Leverage the Power of Added Value

To best entice new potential leads, ensure that you are offering something of clear value at each stage in their buyer journey. Each offer should ideally be customized to answer their particular questions and concerns, whether they be Top of Funnel, Middle of Funnel or Bottom of Funnel leads.
Your messaging should answer questions like:

How does our product or services solve their problem?
How is your solution unique and superior to other options
How will it help them overcome obstacles or do their jobs better?

Creating a buyer persona may help you learn more about your present and prospective consumers, and what matters to them, and provide a roadmap for the kind of offers you can give and content you can share to provide added value.
The goal is to take prospects through the buyer’s journey and all the way to the bottom of the sales funnel where the deal is closed. Adding value at every step of the way is the best route to ensuring this happens.

4. Get Intimate With Your Numbers

In order to be successful with B2B lead generation, you must have a clear understanding of the number of leads your business needs to generate to meet your goals within a set deadline.
To do that, you’ll need to ask yourself a number of important questions:

What is your revenue target?
What is the average revenue per sale?
What is the lifetime value of a new customer?
How many sales do you need if you hope to meet your goal?
On average, how long is your sales cycle?
How many potential leads do you currently have in your pipeline?
What is your marketing budget/cost per lead?

For many small or start-up companies, some of these numbers might still be unknown – but these are integral to building a successful B2B lead generation campaign.

5. Create a Lead Generation Plan

As a B2B company, you need to craft a plan that communicates the value your product or service offers to your target audience – with the right messaging, at the right time, in the right place with the right call-to-action. Depending on your audience, this might be through email marketing or social networks.

Don’t forget to set a specific and realistic budget and keep the cost per lead in mind. A good general rule is that marketing costs should stay between 5-7% of revenue. Therefore, if your revenue target is $100k, your marketing budget should be around $5-7k.

While it’s always good to know about how to start your lead generation journey, it is equally important to be wary of the pitfalls and challenges that can come along the way.

Let’s look at some of the common lead generation challenges and their potential solutions too.

Measuring ROI for your lead generation campaign

Lead generation can get quite complicated at times and tracking its performance even more so. Tracking the ROI of your lead generation campaign on a monthly basis can help you quantify the success of your campaign and in turn optimize the next one. A few common B2B lead generation metrics to track are MQLs (marketing qualified leads) and SQLs (sales qualified leads).

Nurturing leads to sustain them longer

Once you’ve captured new leads through your lead generation campaign, you then need to keep them warm and move them through the funnel so that they become paying customers. This happens by consistently engaging with your customers via relevant content and offers. This is also a great way to build brand salience as well.

Relying on referrals alone

Referrals and word-of-mouth marketing are definitely a great way to get good-quality leads. But they are not enough. A referral strategy cannot guarantee you authentic or high-quality leads on an ongoing basis in great numbers. You need to go above and beyond and include other sources of leads such as email, the use of 3rd party data, events and thought leadership white papers as a few examples.

Knowing your customers

Building an ideal customer profile is an important first step. Without having a buyer persona or ideal customer identified, your lead generation campaign risks being too general and missing the mark in speaking to user needs or pain points. Developing a buyer persona is a complex task and one that many businesses outsource to a digital marketing agency with this expertise.

Lead generation is a robust method to ensure that your business gets a steady stream of high-quality leads, come rain or shine. It can help you build your pipeline of potential customers and also streamline the process for your salespeople. If done right, it’s a great way to boost your revenue, build your brand presence, and build a lasting relationship with your customers.