B2B leads are qualified leads that can be reached out to and sold to by salespeople. However, it is not easy to find high-quality leads and convert them into clients. When generating them, keep in mind quality is the most important criterion. You will end up spinning your wheels if you increase the volume but don’t qualify the leads.
Your business will make 20% more income if your leads volume is increased by 20%. This is only as long as the quality of the leads does not decrease. You get the same percentage only if we are talking about qualified ones.
But as we have mentioned, this can be difficult. B2B marketers believe lead generation is their number one challenge.
To ensure you are able to overcome this challenge and boost your business, we are here to share the best tactics for your lead generation. When working on them, your success is guaranteed.
Consider Whitepapers
It is rare for B2B customers to make spontaneous purchasing decisions. Instead, interested parties should gather extensive information before considering a product.
Whitepapers have been proven to be a great way to generate B2B leads. Whitepapers can assist the research process and demonstrate professional expertise. You can provide relevant information to your target customer, which is enough to get a business email address back.
Your whitepaper should contain a reference to your product. This is the first step in lead qualification. An interested reader will immediately get in touch with you if your product is at the center.
Webinars Are Useful
B2B clients are more likely to need advice about products and services than B2C. After all, Prospects like to compare different providers and products before purchasing anything.
Providers can use a webinar to generate leads. You can present your product to multiple people and highlight the benefits and areas of application. This is your opportunity to highlight the best aspects of your product and the benefits customers enjoy with it.
This is usually not difficult to attend, and people sign up for it more quickly than an online demo. Higher conversion rates promised registering a prospect is the first step in lead generation. In return, they can take part in the webinar at no cost.
Identification of Visitors
You can be considered a B2B Lead if you have the contact information of someone who has demonstrated a need for your products or services.
Your website is visited every day by thousands of visitors. Unfortunately, not all of them download your whitepaper, request prices, or book a demo. For those who do, you need to be interested in them.
They have already expressed interest in your product, but they didn’t yet engage. To ensure they decide to take the final step, you will need to learn how to engage them.
It is a question of who visited your website, and for it, visitor identification is the answer!
You can use tools to reveal the IP address of website visitors and thus tell you which companies are interested in your product. This allows you to generate B2B leads you may not have otherwise.
These tools also often display relevant company data such as contact details and employees. It’s even more exciting that IP identification and visitor tracking can tell you which page was visited most often. This allows you to quickly prioritize the next steps and approach sales with each visitor.
Work on Ads and Traffic
There are clear steps to effective lead generation using content marketing. You must first attract your target customers’ attention. A thorough and meticulously planned analysis of your target audience will provide you with all the information you need.
Then, you can determine which media is most suitable for your target audience. It is important to determine which channels are most popular with certain groups: Touchpoints include search engines and social media.
You can then place the appropriate ads and direct traffic to those touchpoints if you know your prospects’ most important.
Now, what ads and options of traffic do you have to generate sales-qualified leads? You can look at them below:
- Google Ads.
Google Ads can be used strategically to enhance your content’s search engine optimization. Target customers will search for specific topics or problems and will find advertisements related to your content.
Search engine marketing is not complete without a link to your landing page.
This section describes the content, such as a whitepaper. Next, you need to “seduce” interested parties to access the gated content. Make them fill out a lead magnet, and you should be able to get their attention.
As mentioned above, in most cases, a business email address suffices for a lead form. It is helpful to get as much information from a lead as possible. But, if you request too much information from one, your target customer may be discouraged and cancel the registration.
- LinkedIn Ads.
Social media leads to B2B are different. LinkedIn is a key component of B2B lead generation; even though Instagram and Facebook offer similar opportunities, but these can be considered when you are in B2C.
A link on social media can be used to direct your target customers to an external landing site. These platforms are time-saving and cost-effective and will increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
You can use the Lead Generation Forms to advertise, sponsor content, or send sponsored InMails that include a call-to-action.
One-click and the user’s profile data (name, contact information, location, and position) is transferred to a form.
The name of the company is the most crucial piece to lead qualification. This information is essential for any further research, regardless of who fills out the registration form.
You can download the data from Lead Gen Forms directly from LinkedIn and transfer it to your preferred CRM system so you can target the ads and work in better options for your lead generation campaigns.
- Native Advertising.
Advertising has had a very negative perception in recent years, particularly in B2B.
Advertisers don’t get the same response even with the biggest advertising budgets. Experts even predict that classic advertising will soon end since trust is increasing in independent content.
Advertising is often ignored, but editors are now able to provide information about companies, products, and services.
For example, native advertising is the U.S. service offered by Taboola. It combines the goals for advertising with basic principles and options of editorial reporting.
Advertisements are now found as native ads on blogs and news sites. They have been styled and visually modified to fit editorial formats. They are teasers and contain links to landing pages for clients.
Ads can build trust, which can be used on landing pages through clever design. Advertorials can be attractively designed to attract attention and help you generate new leads.
Overall, PPC is one of the fastest ways to achieve results quickly. If you know your target audience, it can be extremely effective.
We have to mention that it can be costly depending on what industry you are in.
Also, remember that many people use AdBlock these days, so it is possible that they won’t see banners and other clickable ads.
Fortunately, there are many ways to post ads online. Google Adwords is the most popular. This platform allows you to post ads across all of Google networks.
To explore this option, you can go from three alternatives:
- The Search Network.
Advertisements displayed when you search for something is usually located at the top of the search results. The search network has search intent already. This is one of the best things about it.
Contrary to social media advertising, searches are more precise and targeted for a specific industry. In fact, any user is most likely either researching or very close to purchasing.
- The Display Network.
These ads appear on websites that have allowed Google to display adverts to their visitors. These adverts can be made with the Google visual advert generator. This saves you from having to create multiple ads of different sizes.
These ads have a lower CPC but are less effective in converting customers.
- Remarketing.
This is similar to the display network. However, the ads are only shown to users who have visited your site previously, making them highly targeted. This is sometimes called retargeting.
They offer higher conversion rates than the display network because the user has visited your site before and is most likely interested in purchasing.
Remarketing can be done in Google AdWords or via a third-party platform such as AdRoll.
It doesn’t matter what platform you use. Allow yourself at least 2-3 months before you start remarketing because you will need to accumulate a large list of people who have visited the website.
This is just an addition to the previous Google Ads section. Thus, make sure you include the notes to it.
Master Outbound Calling
Your lead generation process will benefit greatly from mastering outbound calling. Don’t worry about how much time this can take since your sales team will be doing a high percentage of their business over the phone.
A good outbound call strategy will increase your chances of making every interaction count. To make it work, this strategy should include:
- Clear goals with both close rates and average call handling times.
- It must help you qualify leads to improve your future contact.
- After the call ends, follow-up plans to increase the contact’s connection.
Marketing professionals are unsure whether to use scripts for their outbound calls. If you decide to use scripts for them, ensure that they are designed to give agents the support they need and not tie their hands.
Your agents should have scripts in their arsenal, not force them to follow rules that may not be applicable to individual calls.
Cold Emails: Get Creative with Them
Cold emailing can be difficult because you don’t have any prior relationships with the person or company you are sending it to. To get results, you must make a great first impression.
But how can you make this work based on almost nothing? These are some things that we recommend for cold email leads:
- Use creativity to stand out among the crowd. Make animated GIFs and memes to grab people’s attention.
- Make it funny! Text is boring enough. Sometimes humor can make a difference.
- Don’t waste your time with marketing lingo. This is something that many people ignore.
- At least two follow-up emails should be sent. Things can get lost in inboxes, just like social media. You have a greater chance of being seen if you send more than one email.
Also, be patient. This lead generation strategy can take time, but it is often efficient and effective to finally get those leads you need.
Take the Lead in Nurturing
Lead nurturing is a process that builds relationships with qualified prospects, regardless of when they buy. The goal is to earn their business when they’re ready.
Recent studies and reports have found and notified that lead nurturing was a key factor in generating 62% more ready-to-sell leads than the rest.
Some leads can be hot and make a quick sale. However, most don’t. This is where lead nurturing comes into play.
Most buyers are only now engaging with sales reps in the final third of their buying process.
Around 95% of qualified prospects are visiting your website to do research. However, 70% of them will ultimately buy from you or a competitor.
This is why you need to do everything you can to nurture them. How can you do this?
- Provide valuable content when the decision to give out their email addresses or the contact information is on the table.
- Always set incentives on your website pages.
- Continue connecting with them on other platforms like social media.
- Of course, keep track of everything.
Use Marketing Automation Software
You may not be smart if you are not trying to improve lead quality by using a marketing automation tool.
It is easy to automate the nurturing and scoring of leads within your sales funnel. Even if you have a small number of leads, automating this process can make it easier to get a hand with those leads. On the other hand, scaling sales is almost impossible without automation.
You won’t grow your sales efficiently if you don’t have the time or attention to detail or the analytical horsepower required to measure, track, and respond to every interaction across the entire prospect database.
Marketing automation platforms provide valuable analytics and measurement that can help improve lead quality.
It provides a detailed overview of each lead’s behavior in the sales funnel, as well as how your marketing programs impact lead generation, sales, and, most importantly, revenue. Integrate your CRM system and your marketing automation platform to get the best results.
Blog for Leads
Although this may seem obvious, you can still generate leads via your blog. B2B marketers who use blogs generate 67% more leads.
Your blog posts can provide relevant and useful information. Linking to demo forms or hyper-relevant anchor material can help turn your outbound information into inbound leads in the process as well.
Your agency can be seen as a thought leader in the industry by having a helpful blog. People will start to trust you for quality content, sales tips, and industry insights.
But how can you make this strategy work? Follow these tips:
- Add CTAs to your text.
Encourage your reader’s action by inviting them to visit landing pages that offer great content or inviting them to book a demo.
- Offer exclusive, relevant content.
Your blog is about responding to reviews. To help them get started, you can offer some templates for reviewing responses.
Ensure that you attach relevant and juicy content to all your blog posts. This will help keep the leads coming in.
- Offer reader perks.
It’s much easier to get someone to subscribe to your blog if there are benefits. You can offer subscribers special deals or VIP insight in your blog newsletter.
- Use the comment section.
Don’t let them down if they are engaged with your piece through the text boxes below. You can thank them for their interest and ask further questions.
Include Downloadable Content
Attaching downloadable anchor content to blogs can be a great way of generating leads and establishing your brand as an industry thought leader.
You can use infographics, ebooks, whitepapers (as mentioned before), and other content to gather information about prospects.
In return, you can give them relevant information. You can include downloadable content to many communication channels, such as blog posts, email campaigns, and social media posts.
But what content should you use?
- eBooks and guides.
Allow them to download eBooks and guides on specific topics that are relevant to your industry. This will allow you to educate your target audience while also generating new prospects.
Your eBook should be useful and informative. It can help you have a meaningful conversation with your sales team or move you further down the prospect pipeline.
- Infographics and checklists.
Another great content offering to bring business prospects is statistics and data. People love data and evidence of performance.
Why not make your company an information hub and offer your own infographics? Infographics can also be used to generate leads by giving permissions for relevant company blogs to post them and linking back to your site.
- Case studies.
Although case studies are typically considered “bottom-of-the-funnel” content, they can also be a great way to show your clients’ real success stories.
Did you know that 81% of organizations use case studies for their B2B content marketing? It is priceless to show clients your value and to be able to deliver results.
Clients in business want to learn all the secrets of the trade they can use to grow their businesses, and case studies offer that opportunity.
If you are working with prospects who are close to making a purchase decision, it is important to have as many case studies as possible that relate to your services.
If you are a reputation management agency or social media agency, two case studies should be created on each of your areas of expertise.
- Content “hub” or library.
People can search your entire “library” to find the information they are looking for. It can be searchable using categories, a search tool, tags, and tags.
This will allow readers to filter through the content to find what they are looking for.
Create Email Campaigns, Not Only Cold Emails
Email marketing is not dead. In fact, it was ranked by 70% as the most popular lead generation strategy.
Email marketing may not be as relevant in B2C, but it might be more so for B2Bs.
Many people still use email to communicate with their colleagues in the professional world. Although it may sound old-fashioned to those of you who are digitally savvy and rely on LinkedIn, many prospects will find that email communication is easier than ever.
Reach them wherever they are!
For lead generation, email marketing can be in many forms.
- Newsletters.
A newsletter that delivers high-quality, relevant content and deep insights is a powerful tool for lead generation.
- Nurture campaigns.
After someone downloads content, nurture campaigns or drip campaigns can be automatically triggered.
Automating your follow-ups allows you to nurture a new prospect, turning them from a customer to a consumer. These case studies of successful drips will help you generate more leads.
With this in mind, we recommend you follow these tips as well:
- No matter what form you use, always provide value.
What should your email campaigns include? The details of your email campaign will differ depending on the type of email you are sending (newsletter, outbound, etc.), but it is a good place to start with prospects by providing them with useful content.
Special offers, industry insights, and new data-backed strategies to increase their digital marketing efforts are great ways to encourage prospects to become customers.
- Don’t focus only on solutions.
These topics are actually related, but the way you write your email copy will determine who clicks through and finds value in what you have to say.
Your solutions will naturally flow if you frame your email copy around the problems of your audience. Your email campaigns will be seen as pushy sales messages if you write your copy around your solutions.
- Keep testing until you find the best.
Are you not getting many open emails? Start testing and determine what is going on.
Some solutions can include changing titles or adding more elements to your email that are appealing. Everything depends on what you determine based on statistics.
The Local Lead Generation Process for Your Business
All right! So, everything is about building properties and generating leads. But how does the process actually take place? Are there other steps I need to know?
The steps I mention below are what students from our local lead generation program follow to generate leads for businesses like yourself. So I’ll help you see what we do. And how if you join our program, you can simply generate leads for your own business (unless you want to start a side hustle and build a laptop lifestyle business).
Essentially, our lead generation can be divided into four steps:
The first is prospecting. You need to take the time to do market research on a niche (industry) and determine how many phone-driven businesses are there.
Keep in mind that this is local research as you need to know how many companies need leads. For example, you may search for “plumbing services Youngstown OH.”
You will find dozens or even hundreds of businesses trying to get themselves in front of the customers by ranking on Map Listings, organic results, and even Ad.
The second step, building. When you find a niche (plumbing, tree services, a software company, real estate…), you will need to start building your digital properties. You don’t need to be an expert in HTML or coding. It can be easy with the right tools.
The third step is now taking time to rank your lead gen website. With the site done, you need to work on SEO strategies and start dominating those Google search results. If you’re new to SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.
To keep it simple, it consists of the entire process of growing a company’s visibility on search engines like Google and generating organic traffic. And remember this, local lead generation is part of the strategies.
Moving on to step four, once you rank the site, you will start getting your ROI and profits. You only need to rent it out to a local business interested in the leads the site generates. You can offer a couple of free leads to their move on with the actual pay per lead.
To review steps 1-4 above, I described it to a normal student who is building a lead gen business to help local service providers generate more calls. But replace the student with you as the business owner. And replace sending the leads to a business to simply siphoning the leads to your personal business.
By the way, fun fact, about 20% of our students in our local lead gen program are actually business owners who went through the program. And they use the skillsets we teach to generate leads for their own business.
An Example of Lead Generation: Home Advisor
You must be thinking, “if lead generation sounds so good so far, how come I haven’t seen any company?” That’s the thing; there are many out there. You just don’t know they are dedicated to it.
HomeAdvisor is one of the best examples you can find on the Internet as it is a top lead generation company that has spent millions building its brand but also earned even more zeros for this same reason.
They started small as everyone else but invested in building their brand awareness to make people who are looking for home services go to their website and find what they need. They are over 75% of people’s first choice when they need those services.
If you don’t get HomeAdvisor that much or need a refresh, users need to submit their information to request a service and get a professional or expert who can provide it.
HomeAdvisor’s job is to share your information, which makes you a lead, with local companies so they can contact you and offer the service you’re requesting. For sharing this lead information, HomeAdvisor gets paid by the companies. This happens for every single lead they send to multiple businesses.
Business owners who don’t have marketing skills or don’t even know how to have any online presence will always rely on those pages to list their services. They will save time and effort, but companies like HomeAdvisor can make them spend lots of money as leads aren’t exclusive (one lead is sent to multiple companies after all).
Using Facebook Ads aka Paid Ad Platforms: Do They Generate Leads?
They DO generate leads. If not, no one would use them.
However, you need to remember two facts:
- Paid ads or platforms can be expensive.
- They don’t generate “natural” leads.
Whenever someone sees or clicks in one of those ads, over 80% of them did it by accident or are trying to close/report it.
Why? Because they aren’t looking for those services. At least not at the moment.
What those ads do instead is interrupt their time on the platforms. Users aren’t there to find companies or businesses unless they are searching for a specific company’s user, and for that, there’s a search bar. This is why it is hard to convert them to actual customers who will show interest in the companies’ services. Also, you’re limited by a budget.
When using lead generation, everything is organic. You aren’t forcing others to pay attention to your business but rather being there when they need you. This is why Google’s organic traffic will always beat paid ads, and the reason companies continue investing in it, which is a lot cheaper as well.
What Is Local SEO?
Don’t worry… I didn’t get it at first either. Following the short explanation, local SEO focuses on scaling businesses’ visibility on search engines. However, this is only for those who serve their communities face-to-face.
What does this mean?
Experts and professionals like painters, plumbers, and dentists (but not only them) offer their services to their local customers. Why? Because they can’t deliver them unless they are located in the same area of their customers.
To make sure those businesses get more leads, you need to rank them locally by claiming the business listing on Google to place them on Map Listings. Local SEO also involves online reviews, citation management, and how you manage your entire online presence in the local area.
If you are going to bet on lead gen, you need to adapt yourself to today’s world: The Internet.
Keep in mind that although traditional channels and methods like billboards, warm calls, and pamphlets still work, they aren’t part of your tools. Whenever someone needs a service, they go to Google and search for it.
“Dentist in Miami” or “plumbing services in Orlando,” etc. And you can keep coming up with services or professionals people need and look for. Thus, you need to make sure you’re using Google to get the companies in front of their clients.
Users will always click on the first search results (those near the top), and many of them will be either Ad links (people paid to place their websites there), Map Listing, and then you get websites. Almost all of them are your goal and where you should always aim to place yourself.
Can My Business Utilize a Local Lead Generation Strategy?
If you want customers, you better know you need it. Following the previous explanation, lead gen is all about placing businesses in front of their customers, choosing them over their competitors.
Put it simply – it’s all about closing deals and having clients for those companies to make money. The main difference with the usual methods companies use for this is how lead generation approaches different channels to get them in the right place of the market to get customers.
Those channels are all focused on the Internet as most people are searching for products but also services across the net. The issue is that the Internet is way too broad, and businesses don’t know how to place themselves. They usually try, but they get one common result: losing money and time.
How Powerful Are Organic Leads from Google?
For companies looking for customers, it’s everything. For you? Pretty much the same. When you build a business with digital properties, you get to make thousands of dollars a month.
This isn’t a “get started today and get rich tomorrow” thing, but it is HIGHLY scalable, and ROI + positive results are guaranteed. Learning a fairly decent and very needed set of skills to create your digital properties and start ranking them on Google is required.
I have invested in several online businesses over the years, and if there’s something uncertain, whether you will get your ROI or not, even more than the actual profit.
However, this business moved my earnings from five figures a year to a month in ONLY passive income while sitting comfortably at home.
On my laptop. Anywhere. Anytime.
You can look at one of the first sites I built back in 2016, and it continues making me over $1.000+ every month. The best part is that I don’t need to touch it or the rest I’ve built over the years, just like this digital property.
What Makes Lead Generation SO Alluring?
Here it goes: you can work from home.
The main issue with regular business opportunities is how much you need to invest in staff, equipment, or rent to have a place to sell your products or offer your services.
We all know the hassles of traditional businesses that involve regular expenses, which are extremely high. Can you afford it? I don’t think so, and even if you can, is it worth it? Now, it isn’t only about the money. You also need to put in a lot of work, and it isn’t only during the first couple of months or years. Usually, it is as long as you continue running it.
You can save yourself those headaches and bone-breaking tasks and expenses with lead gen since it is more about generating leads with digital channels—mainly websites.
Websites can be VERY cheap to build, and with many tools online, you get to do it in a couple of hours instead of days. Any virtual or digital business is scalable and won’t need constant maintenance.
So, let’s summarize this:
- You save money in regular expenses with traditional and most online businesses as what you need is yourself and digital properties (websites).
- You can bet on passive income.
- There’s no need to hire more people to get started.
- You can generate leads in multiple industries, which allows you to work on any niche you want.
How Can I Get Started in the Local Lead Generation Program?
Anyone can start and learn. That’s the beauty of this business model. I knew nothing about SEO, Map Listing, and everything I’ve mentioned so far. It is all about learning the skills, gaining experience, and deciding to take the step.
Remember that this business model will never get old as business owners are always looking for leads. They need to do business and scale their companies. Why not do the same while helping others and still making money?
You can start with this local lead generation course highly recommended for anyone wanting to grow in the business. It is a close training that will take you through each step and make sure you are able to get your ROI, profits and take control of your life.
You will be added to an incredible lead generation family ready to help you 24/7 when asking questions on the group. Anyone is welcome who’s willing to put in the work. Click here to watch the lead gen webinar.