It’s time to drive massive amounts of highly qualified leads into your funnel.
Without a consistent flow of leads coming into your business, your marketing and sales team are putting their time and energy into processes that just don’t seem to pay off. That’s more money you're spending on a process that isn’t churning out successful lead generation. Let’s fix that.
If you’re ready to bet on growth and exceed your goals for 2021, you need to start with the right strategy to propel you forward. These strategies will not only benefit you this year, but we formulated these thinking ahead of what this would mean for you five years down the road.
Setting your teams up for success from the beginning with a killer strategy for content marketing, automation, and outreach is the best chance you have to get the highest ROI for your marketing efforts.
B2B Lead Generation Strategies That’ll Fill Your Pipeline
The best B2B lead generation strategies are customer-centric. They revolve around what benefits the customer the most rather than what will help the company the most.
There is a sweet spot between those two strategies where the customer benefits greatly, and the company benefits by helping them - that’s the goal of solid lead generation strategies for B2B businesses. Analytically, that goal would look like better conversion rates, increased organic traffic, and an increase in marketing and sales qualified leads.
Let’s get you started on the road to incredible lead generation this year.
1. Creating the Right Content At The Right Time
Developing trust and being transparent with your reader is a smooth process to getting them to take action on your site.
Writing an article about pricing comparisons within your industry without specifying your role or intention is an opportunity to lose trust points with the reader.
Creating an article that is for someone ready to make a product decision without the proper info they need is a missed opportunity. A potential buyer ready to make a buying decision doesn’t want general information about a topic that they are familiar with, they want to see pricing comparisons, product reviews, and everything else that directly helps their buying process.
Whether it’s a missed opportunity or anything less than transparent, the main way to increase the amount of your generated sales qualified leads is to build trust with a potential customer consistently. When planning out your content, your goal should always be to establish your company as an informational resource and plan out how each piece of content fits into the buyer’s journey and subsequently into your sales funnel.
Creating content with each buyer stage in mind can be crucial to how a potential lead receives it. A great way to start is by matching up search queries with high-value keywords with a low keyword difficulty with high search volume. Once you have an idea of keywords that will be relatively easy to rank for, you can start the content planning process.
Let’s view all these steps with our customer-centric goggles: as a consumer, when you click on an article you found in your search results, and your question is not answered, what is your next step? Most people would not only bounce off the page to go and find their answer somewhere else, but you may also hesitate to go to that website again.
To avoid that happening, consider the keyword difficulty, common questions that come up in your industry, the buyer stage the consumer is currently in, and the buyer persona overall. That will all help your lead generation strategy turn your readers into buyers immediately and in the future.
2. Making It Instantly Consumable
Creating the need and want in your customers’ minds is vital in either creating a passive downloader or an engaged superfan.
The need to “act now” is a common tactic for many marketing strategies, but let’s go further than a call to action on your website. The real goal behind “act now” is for a customer to not only do that specific action (download, read more, purchase now) but also complete a pre-determined flow of actions on your website.
Developing your storytelling abilities will help your articles go viral, and more of your readers take your site’s preferred action. An example of how to make your blog post go viral is using the hook, story, and offer setup. The hook is grabbing the attention of your reader, the story keeps your attention, and the offer is the action you would like a reader to take.
Many consumers will download or buy information just to bookmark it to read later, and it slowly goes down on their list of importance. By framing the copy on your website to have potential leads act suddenly and having the information immediately available for them, you can create a superfan of your content.
Creating instantly available information other than e-books can include immediate access to an online course, video walkthroughs, a pop-up conversation with a live bot, or a quiz to seamlessly further their questions to the sales department.
Why is this extra relevant in 2021? Your reader’s attention is being split a million different ways, between social media notifications, email alerts, and competing ads to your content. Within 10 seconds or less, your reader will know whether or not they are staying on your page based on your “hook” or if they are bouncing off your page - which is a significant factor in your website analytics.
Creating the right content in the correct format is crucial to your companies’ content creation success. Need more ideas on how to find captivating lead magnet ideas?
For more details on how to find exceptional lead magnet ideas, check out our Lean Labs blog that excellently covers hitting your persona’s pain points, resource strategies, how to audit competitors titles and educational resources, analyzing your current strategy, and how to use SEMrush for your benefit.
3. Engage Your Audience With Email Marketing
At the end of the day, no matter how engaging your content is, there will always be exceptions to the rule. There will always be someone who likes your content, clicked your CTA, and opened up the information you provided, who will totally forget about your service - no matter how good your content is.
This is when email campaigns come in handy. Not only are you exchanging information with this lead when they submit a form, but you can strategically put them into an email campaign that suits their needs and also gets them even more fond of your brand. To do this, you can set up your email campaigns to turn unengaged leads into customers with timely emails by using segmentation, analyzing the timing of the information provided, designing your campaign, and more.
Setting up the automated task of enrolling a new lead who took action on your website into an automated email campaign saves your company time and money, replacing all the manual hours previously spent on following up one-on-one with contacts individually.
Automation has been leading innovation in every industry for a while now, and in 2021, it’s more important than ever. With companies creating their own automated services and virtual assistant companies in high popularity, these services’ goal is to free up time for teams to do other things that cannot be set up in advance. Working smarter, not harder, is the goal of automation and setting up automated flows like email campaigns.
Looking for automation software? Review our comparisons between Hubspot and Infusionsoft, or check out Zapier.
4. Bringing Attention To Your Lead Magnet
Okay, so you know how to build the right content, how to make your content instantly available, and how to automate tasks, now it’s time to bring attention to the content you worked so hard to create.
How do you gain the attention of those who are not searching for the answers you have on your website? Attracting people to your website can be done by creating a source of inbound marketing leads. Whether it is guest blogging, hosting a podcast, or posting strategically to make social media work for you - many organic options can be right for your business.
Using these platforms to put a personal touch on indirectly related topics for your business brings more attention to your content, gives you incredible social proof for your website, and helps bring in new customers that wouldn’t have found you otherwise.
In 2021, why is this information important to consider? Most business owners who market their business online have dabbled in paid media, started engaging with potential customers, and networking with indirectly related companies. The difference is when you start thinking out of the box and giving yourself extra creative opportunities to stand out from the crowd.
Adopting a B2B Lead Generation Strategy in 2021
This is just the beginning of your lead generation journey for business growth; this information, combined with a professionally-created lead-generating growth strategy, will have your readers turning into customers and referrers in no time.
If you’re looking to dive even deeper into this topic, check out our Lead Generation Resource Pack, which includes the six essential steps that you need to create the perfect piece of content for your lead magnets to have your leads become superfans.
