People start a business with the aim of taking their business to a new level but this can only be done if we have potential B2B leads. B2B leads are qualified personnel that can be contacted by a salesperson or business and products can be sold to them. Finding or generating high-quality B2B leads is not an easy job because you require a lot of technique, skills, and experience in this field.
Although generating leads is difficult, if you do it in a proper way, it will allow you to beat any type of competition and make a good base in the market. Quality is one of the most important and essential factors in any business. If you are able to generate plenty of B2B leads but cannot qualify for these potential leads or cannot provide quality as expected, you may waste all of your effort that you made to generate these B2B leads. On the other hand, if you are able to increase your B2B leads up to 30% without compromising or decreasing quality, it is guaranteed that your income will also increase up to 30% or may even more.
Do keep this fact in mind that generating potential leads for your business is extremely difficult. A survey concluded that more than 85% of marketers consider generating leads as their biggest and toughest challenge. Here are some of the best and most effective strategies that can help you to generate leads for your business not only in big volume but in an effective manner. Before moving to that part, let’s first talk about some initial things.
What Exactly are B2B Leads?
Business to Business or B2B lead is a point of contact or an organization that presents itself as a potential customer, client, or buyer. A lead is an initial point or the beginning of the sales process. It shows a business interest in the products and services of any other company or organization.
If you are an owner or CEO of a B2B company, it is extremely important to work on B2B leads for your business because it will allow you to always have a good volume of potential customers that will buy products and services from your brand and will return you a major increase in income. Do keep this fact in mind that nothing can benefit you more regarding your sales process than well generated and properly implemented B2B sales leads.
Why Get Involved in Generating B2B Leads?
The growth and success of any company or business mainly depend on your ability to attract new customers and make them loyal to your brand. If you have a great reputation in the market or have loyal customers that refer their family and friends as well, attracting new customers can be done without any hassle.
But if this is not the case, you may have to spend a lot of your time and money in order to generate B2B leads for your business. Most business owners usually ask this question that why it is important to spend time and resources in generating B2B leads and the answer to this question is that:
- It helps businesses to get new customers in minimum time.
- It helps to qualify for your leads so that you can reach your potential and targeted customers.
- It will build a stable and automated lead generation system for any B2B company.
- One of the major reasons is that B2B leads will help you to continuously grow your business and take it to the peaks of success and income.
Best Ways to Generate More B2B Leads
Now the question comes about how to generate potential B2B leads that can benefit your business. Below are the most effective and easy to implement techniques to get this job done in the best way possible.
- LinkedIn Content Creation
- Inbound Marketing for Lead Generation
- Utilize Twitter for Generating B2B Leads
- Optimize Your Company Page on LinkedIn
- Using Quora
- Send Direct Emails for Leads Generation
- Generate Leads By Sharing Video Posts on LinkedIn
- Generate B2B Leads via Blogging
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Generating B2B Leads through LinkedIn Ads
- Generating B2B Leads Using Google Ads
- Generate B2B Leads via Referrals and Invitations
- Getting Help for Strategic Partnerships for Generating Leads
LinkedIn Content Creation:
LinkedIn is one of the most powerful content creation platforms and if you are going to implement strategies for generating B2B leads, this option should never be ignored.
With the help of quality content creation, you have the ability to change your external marketing strategy, attract people’s attention from all around the world through LinkedIn advertisements, and start developing an effective engagement strategy in which you can attract customers that are interested in your products and services.
There are two effective ways to generate leads through content creation, one is to post your content as an individual while representing a company or not, and the second is to publish your consent as a business.
- While working as an individual, a man named Marcus Murphy started this technique by sharing different types of interesting and useful posts on this platform. Because of his content-sharing strategy, he was able to get more than 1,100 connections and followers in minimum time.
With the passage of time, he has become one of the most influential and recognized business leaders in his respective industry. In the meantime, if he shares a simple text post that doest have any useful meaning, he is able to get hundreds of likes and comments without any hassle.
- While adopting this strategy as a company, Adobe is one of the most successful examples. You may think that they share only boring and corporate-related posts but they actually share a lot of interesting and colorful posts that can attract any person whether he is interested in graphics or not.
They also share eye-catching and funny stories of their users and employees. This technique attracts users’ attention towards the brand but it does this in an indirect way instead of directly talking about sales and business.
If you have access to this amazing platform and you will definitely have access, never ignore this option as it has the ability to take your business to the heights of success with an immense volume of sales.
Inbound Marketing for Leads Generation:
Inbound marketing is one of the most preferred and effective marketing platforms. On this platform, customers and companies are attracted to your business without requiring you to reach out and make connections. This method is a favorite of marketers because it allows them to attract potential leads that have a huge interest in buying products and services.
For better understanding let’s take an example of a person who searches for a keyword such as “Web Software Company” and your company’s icon with the name comes up in the search results, this is clearly the results of an inbound marketing strategy. This is the case when a B2B lead is coming at your doorstep rather than you going towards them and contacting them for making a connection.
Some of the most popular, effective, and widely implemented inbound marketing strategies include:
- Publishing posts with high-quality content, pictures, and links on your social media platforms.
- Post different types of interesting videos on youtube related to your brands, products, and services.
- Holding webinars will attract potential and serious sales B2B leads.
- Sharing your contact on various platforms ranging from LinkedIn to other most common means such as blog websites and social media accounts.
Your main aim should be to attract customers and companies who are searching online for some reliable business with whom they can make connections and do business. Although all above mentioned inbound marketing strategies can bring efficient results, implementing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can bring results that may not be possible to achieve using other techniques.
Utilize Twitter for Generating and Personalizing B2B Leads:
No matter whether you have B2B, DTC, or B2C business, it is extremely important to personalize your buyers for generating leads in the best way possible. Twitter is one of the most popular and effective forms for this reason.
If you want to extract some basic and personal information about your target customers or company, LinkedIn may not be considered the best option as people tend to provide less personal information because this is only for professional use. But if you visit their Twitter ID, you will be able to get more personal information about the company that will help you to personalize your B2B leads strategy in an efficient way.
This will not only allow you to build a connection in a much better way but will help you to convert your simple first lead into a loyal and returning customer.
Optimize your Company Page on LinkedIn:
It is highly recommended to make sure that your profile page on LinkedIn is attractive and has all the attributes needed. Having an eye-catching LinkedIn page is essential because it will be your first impression on your customers or clients.
Simply creating a corporate profile page with a normal level of the logo will not bring you any good results. You should optimize your profile to increase its visibility on LinkedIn. This factor will make sure that when someone visits your company’s profile page, they should have all the information and data that is necessary to know about your company.
You can optimize your company page on LinkedIn by analyzing different profiles of your competitive companies. This will allow you to know about the things that have ranked their profile on top of the search results. You should also notice companies that are low ranked and see what mistakes they have made.
Using Quora:
Quora is a well-known platform that is used for posting questions and getting answers from experts. There are plenty of businessmen and CEOs who are constantly looking for various types of advice, suggestions, and recommendations in different business aspects. They usually look for content that can be followed and with whom they can make a connection.
If you are working on generating B2B leads, you should definitely join Quora and answer different questions that are asked by various leads. This will allow you to increase your brand visibility to a greater extent. You can boost traffic to your brand by linking your website to your Quora profile.
While answering a question, make sure that you provide it in a brief and best way because there is a huge probability that the company will follow you or may ask you about your services and products. Do keep this fact in mind that Quora can only bring you expected results if you provide authentic and simple answers.
Send Direct Emails for Leads Generation:
If you have done some research on generating leads for B2B companies, you may have read about the well-known company, Bizzible. This is a B2B company that only invested $800 on sending direct emails for generating leads and they got excellent results.
A report released by the company owner stated that their email campaign was one of the best campaigns in the history of their business as it brought an additional revenue of more than $33,000.
The same was started by the former account executive of Ash Ambridge. He said that his strategy of generating leads using direct emails archived a 100% response rate from all aspects whether they are customers, companies, B2B organizations, or leaders in their respective competitive industry.
Generate Leads By Sharing Video Posts on LinkedIn:
Company profiles and pages don’t have a lot of organic reach on LinkedIn but if they have video posts, they are highlighted in search results which can result in a large volume of leads. When you visit a company page such as Unilever, you will see that there is an option stated as “View Recently Published Videos” on top of the page.
Users are attracted more towards video posts as compared to plain texts. Once they will click on this option there will be videos and if they find them interesting, they will go on by clicking on the “View All Videos’ ‘ option. Videos can also be a great feature as you have the opportunity to put your product and service in the form of visualization.
This will give a broad and exact idea of your brand and companies will tend to follow you. Do keep this fact in mind that videos will not bring B2B leads right after they are uploaded, everything takes time.
Generate B2B Leads via Blogging:
If you have a B2B business, you should never ignore or treat blogging as an ordinary option. According to a research report published in 2020, blogging and creating content of high quality is one of the most effective ways of generating B2B leads and it can bring leads in bulk if done properly.
Creating and publishing blogs can also enhance your writing skills and will also strengthen your connection with the customers. There are many lead tracking tools that will help you to identify people who have visited your brand site. These are the people who can be converted into potential leads and results in loyal customers.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
SEO has great importance in marketing especially when it comes to content, articles, and blogs. This is a search engine optimization technique that optimizes your website and content in a way that can effectively attract traffic to your brand through search results. SEO helps your content to rank high in the search results.
You do have the idea that more people click on the first 2 to 3 websites that come on the top, the probability of websites ranked below is almost 10%. This strategy worked in a long-term manner and is extremely beneficial for B2B companies that require a continuous flow of new B2B leads.
Implement SEO in your content to change its structure and style in a way that it can rank high. Backlinking is a great technique of SEO as it can drive traffic from various different websites. Backlinks are paths to your websites that are merged into other ranked websites. This can be done by working with an agency or an SEO expert.
Generating B2B Leads through LinkedIn Ads:
Text ads are extremely popular among marketers as they are highly customizable in terms of targeting customers and B2B leads. LinkedIn offers its users two types of text ads, one is known as PPC (Pay Per Click) while the other is known as CPM (Cost Per Impression).
This is one of the best options to generate B2B leads using LinkedIn. You can target your potential leads and audiences on various bases, some of the most popular include age, gender, position, industry, schools, degrees, colleges, or even groups. Like all other online advertising platforms, you will only pay for the campaign according to your will.
One of the best things about this type of strategy is that you will only pay money if you are getting the performance. If there are no clicks or impressions on your LinkedIn ad, you will not be charged a single penny.
Generate B2B Leads Using Google Ads:
Google Ads is considered as one of the best options by many B2B company owners because it has the ability to attract audiences and generate leads in search engines even if provided keywords are extremely difficult or highly competitive.
According to research, more than 90% of the searches are made on google while looking for a brand or a company to make it a lead or buy products. This fact increases the chances of generating leads for your business in minimum time.
Although Google Ads cost you on each click that will be made on your advertisement, if you look at the final results and increment in your income, this cost will only be a minor part of it. This strategy will help you to stand out in a competitive market as a reputable and reliable brand.
The most important factor in this stage is finding the best and most suitable keywords for your campaign. Your keywords should be directly related to your brand, product, and services so that your website can show up in the search results whenever the user searches for them.
Generate B2B Leads via Referrals and Invitations:
In today’s world, people spend a major part of their day using social media applications and other kinds of communication networks. They keep on sharing things with their friends and family. This habit can be a great benefit for B2B companies. You should expand your referral network by working on your face-to-face as well as online methods.
You should connect with a company that has a lot of new traffic who is interested in your products and services. Offer your connection with referral bonuses and prizes on each new lead that will be sent to your business. This will provide you with a full-fledged team of members that will work to find new leads and will send them your way.
You can also implement this technique on your loyal customers. Offer your previous customers a “Refer a Friend” or “Invite a Friend” option and provide them with some discount or bonuses in return.
Getting Help from Strategic Partnerships for Generating Leads:
Just like you can build a referral network, you can get help from strategic partnerships with the businesses that have a strong base in the market and have the ability to send new leads to your business, website, or brand.
For instance, you can provide a company with a call tracking software and choose a partner with a well-known Information Technology company that will provide this program to its customers.
There are huge possibilities that you may not find the best strategic partners on your next door. You should do thorough research for this purpose and find the best one. Once you have the best suitable brand in front of your eyes, provide benefits to that brand’s clients in exchange for using their services and products for your customers.