Lead generation is an essential part of the B2B digital marketing strategy. Every activity the marketing department undertakes should either contribute towards building the brand or generate leads for the business.
Once the lead is generated, the marketing team needs to use digital marketing tactics to engage and convert the information so the sales team can pick up the conversation from there.
1. Content Marketing Strategies:
One of the best ways to generate significant leads and then convert those leads into business is by creating high-quality, relevant content on your website.
This high-quality content should focus more on what your ideal customers are searching for. This means there are more chances of them finding your content organically when they search for solutions online.
Content can be customised for each stage of your current leads’ funnel. This means they get access to the most relevant information that will connect with them at each stage of their conversion journey.
2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):
All that fantastic content you create for promoting your business and generating your leads should be discoverable by them organically. That is where SEO comes into play.
SEO is essential for a business, and optimising your content and website is necessary for your B2B business to get found online and generate leads for your business.
There are two kinds of SEO strategies available for businesses:
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
On-page SEO focuses on optimising the content on your website using the right keywords.
Off-page SEO uses strategies like link building, etc., to improve your listing and online visibility.
The first important step for implementing a great SEO strategy at your B2B business is to write great content and try to identify what your ideal customer is likely to search for when they are online.
3. Social Media Advertising:
Once content is created, it is essential to distribute it as much as possible. This will help you to reach more ideal customers and generate better leads in the long run.
One sure way to increase the reach of your content is through social media platforms. Platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram or X can be easily leveraged to generate better leads by sharing your content and offers on these platforms.
These platforms also enable you as a B2B business to target and create ads to reach your ideal customers and help you generate their contact details to convert them into business potentially.
4. Email Marketing:
Once the leads are identified via campaigns on social platforms or some other marketing strategy, you should be looking at engaging with them using email marketing techniques.
Email is still one of the best and most direct ways to approach potential leads. If you can set up the right emails, you can move the lead through the conversion path to sign up or purchase your product or service.
As a business, you should always have an owned list of contacts that your potential leads have given you, or you have collected by running various campaigns like offering free ebooks or webinars, etc.
5. Webinars and Online Events:
Webinars, as discussed above, are a great way to generate new leads. They bring in many ideal customers interested in learning about a topic related to your product or service.
Running webinars in itself requires a marketing strategy to start with. You need to run social media and email campaigns and promote the webinar as much as possible.
This will generate interest and drive more signups. Once you, as a business, have access to those emails, it becomes pretty easy to communicate with them directly using email.
6. Account-Based Marketing (ABM):
Account-based Marketing is not a single tactic but a combination of various marketing tactics focused towards a few key accounts (could be businesses or individuals within those businesses) to create a conversation with these key accounts regarding potential business opportunities.
This involves identifying the target accounts, understanding almost everything about them, and then using that information to fine-tune and generate campaigns which connect specifically with those accounts.
This tactic helps the business generate a good relationship with those key accounts and use that relationship to sell their product or service.
7. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO):
As a business, you generate all the content that drives your ideal users to your website or landing pages. But after landing on your website, they are not taking the proper steps to engage with you or move towards the next step in the purchasing journey. What do you do?
This is where conversion rate optimisation comes into play. The marketing team should review the actions that potential users are taking on their website and decide on making edits to the website to encourage the potential users to stay back and engage and purchase the product or service.
A few tools let businesses check how users use their websites. This is also very important because we do a/b testing to test which design or piece of content encourages the ideal customer to move further in the purchasing journey.
8. Marketing Automation:
Technology is your friend; use it wisely, and it will make work easy for you. It is challenging to do most tasks manually, especially repetitive tasks like sending emails or social messages at the exact time of a particular day.
The solution is to use automation tools that help you send out whole email campaigns and schedule them so they get sent out at selected trigger points or intervals, known as drip email campaigns. Businesses can also use scheduling tools to send social media posts at their desired times.
Various marketing automation tools let you as a business do things like adding a score to each lead, so different tactics are triggered automatically based on the lead reaching a particular lead.
9. Influencer Marketing:
Influencer marketing is a phenomenon that has taken over marketing in the last few years. This has been possible due to the increasing consumption of digital content like videos on various social media platforms. Many content creators have become influencers as they can influence the buying decisions of their audience to an extent.
This tactic had primarily worked in the consumer product category for an extended period, but now, some niche influencers have also started impacting B2B businesses. This is why more and more B2B businesses are exploring influencer marketing for their B2B marketing strategies.
The key is first to identify the influencers who are creating content for the market in which your business operates. Then, it’s essential to identify ways to collaborate with them and reach out with ideas or encourage them to create ideas to promote your business along with them.
10. Data Analytics and Measurement:
As you run campaigns to generate more leads and convert them into customers, it is essential to measure the work that you are doing regularly.
Data analytics plays an important role here; it enables the marketing team to understand the return on their efforts and the management to know where the marketing budgets are being spent and how they improve the lead generation process.
Using data analysis, marketing teams can rework their strategy to focus on the tactics generating more positive results for their business.
Conclusion:
These are just a few top tactics; many other tactics can help your B2B business generate leads and convert them into business.
Which of these tactics have you used for your B2B business?