7 Lead Generation Strategies You Need to Know for Your B2B Business

Guest post by Lee Gladish

Lead generation and lead capturing strategies are the cornerstones of your B2B marketing. When you have tactics that result in audience engagement, it gives you the chance to optimize the customer experience component of your business.

In a recent study, experts found that customer experience surpassed product and price as main brand differentiators. For B2B companies, this means using strategies that result in a positive perception of your business.

When you build a positive perception for your business, you must consider the following aspects: 

• Brand experience
• Product experience
• Experience with the service

However, before you can even create engagement, you must first capture your audience’s attention to your brand. You can hire the services of a B2B sales and lead generation agency to guide you all the way.

In preparation for such a partnership, know the effective lead generation strategies for your B2B business.

What Is B2B Lead Generation?

B2B lead generationis the process of obtaining new leads or prospects for your business. As a B2B business, your company markets and sells to other businesses. These are the businesses you want to capture using lead generation techniques. Generating leads is an integral component of any business strategy. Your business needs to bring in new customers to increase revenue and achieve growth. Also, more leads allow you to engage with more potential customers.

B2B Lead Generation Strategies You Need to Know  

A lead is a few steps away from becoming a customer. For B2B lead generation, you must provide value and show that your products or services will solve the problem of your target companies.

When you decide on a specific strategy, make sure that your end goal is to generate quality leads . You don’t want to waste time and resources generating leads that are unlikely to convert or make a purchase. Every lead generation marketing strategy should enable you to capture quality leads that can also help you gain more customers and generate revenue.

Effective strategies that successful B2B businesses use for generating leads include: 

1. Email Marketing

One of the best options for generating leads for your business is using an effective B2B email marketing strategy or tactics. The best email marketing strategy has two components:

• Outbound – This part allows you to bring new leads into your funnel.
• Inbound – Use an inbound methodology to nurture your audience until they become buyers.

With these two email marketing techniques, your funnel will remain topped up with new, warm leads. Here, you are not tied up with the brutal game of waiting for your target market to discover your brand and content. You are making it available to them right in their inbox.

Top Lead Nurturing Email Examples to Inspire Your Strategy

Here are the top lead nurturing examples that you can refer to and review while developing your emails.

B2B Lead Nurturing Email Examples:

Litmus is an excellent example of how to utilise clever, clear language to present readers with a relevant email that adds even more value.

Ecommerce Lead Nurturing Email Examples:

Video is an excellent way to communicate or explain visual items. Sephora delivers a fun video with instructional content as well as product offerings from an employee. Although there are numerous calls to action, the major focus is on watching the tutorial, which is beneficial to the reader. A visual email for a visual brand that attracts your attention and displays the products in a fresh and interesting way.

Most customers read reviews, testimonials, and check on ratings before making a purchase, therefore your product is only as good as its customer feedback. Casper adds social proof to this typical abandoned cart email by including a hilarious customer testimonial.

Casper's abandoned cart email is short and sweet. It asks the reader if they'd like to return to a cart they've put items to, displays what they were shopping for, and provides a link to return back to their shopping cart to complete the purchase.

For the outbound B2B outreach, consider these 390+ (free) email templates from successful brands such as Hubspot, Dropbox, and Box used for initial outreach, follow up, lead re-engagement, and booking demo calls.

2. Live Events

Another B2B marketing lead generation tactic you can use is with live events where you have a chance to engage with your audience and promote your products in real time. Events can be in-person or virtual. During the event, encourage attendees to check in on social media and tag the event in their posts, videos, and photos.

Also, create a hashtag that is easy to remember. For example, Agorapulse’s Agency Summit asked attendees to use #AgencySummit and the Women Tech Network Global Conference used #WTGC. Hashtags allow you to continue engaging with your audience after the live event. With a simple search, you can monitor the conversation around your event. Attendees can also use the hashtag to easily find more content and posts about the event. Remind your audience that the highlights of the event will appear on their feed, and their tagged friends can also see those highlights.

Interact with the attendees as much as you can to create the best possible experience. Remember to thank your audience, tag them in photos and videos, and respond to their comments and reviews.

3. Content Marketing

In this option, you have valuable content to share, including blogs, infographics, videos, and so on. Informative and educational content positions your business as an industry expert and helps you build trust with potential customers. You can also use content marketing to explain how your products and services will help visitors solve their pain points.

Google requires websites to provide valuable content. The longer your visitors browse your pages, the higher your pages will rank in search engine results pages. Therefore, you need to create content that is helpful and relevant to your target audience.

Study the latest upgrade on the Google algorithm, the Core Web Vitals. The update focuses on placing value as the topmost factor for search engine ranking.

4. SEO

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website pages to get higher organic rankings in search engines... If they rank high, searchers are much more likely to find and click on your pages, driving up your website traffic and generating more leads.

Again, optimize your content by making it valuable and helpful for your target audience. Along with content optimization, use keywords in your content.

Make sure to include your keywords in a manner that sounds natural on your content. Keyword stuffing is a big no-no in SEO.

You can easily check your current SEO score and get a step-by-step report on what can be improved with an instant website audit.

5. PPC (pay-per-click)

One of the lead generation strategies for B2B that you can use is pay-per-click. For this, you pay Google (or another ad serving platform) to provide you their Google Ads services.

With this strategy, you place ads online on a variety of relevant sites. The best part about Google Ads is that you have the freedom to choose where and when your ads appear, so you can put your ads right in front of your target audience. Once they click your ads, they will gain access to your landing page, where you can engage with them and move them further down the funnel. However, it’s important to note that you will have to pay Google every time your ad is clicked, even if the user doesn’t convert.

Other alternatives include Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Quora Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and so much more… Make sure you choose the right platform based on your marketing objective and the type of your buyer persona.

6. Social Media

If your target market uses social media, then you can engage with them there. More and more companies are using social media to capture a significant part of the burgeoning social media audience.

Through social media platforms, you can do many things for lead generation, including: 

• Hosting a live stream
• Posting social media ads
• Using referral tactics
• Conducting surveys and polls
• Using direct messaging features for cold outreach
• Giving special offers

Sharing your content on social media is also one of the best strategies available for B2B marketing. When you share your content via social media, make sure to urge your followers to introduce your content and services to other people, experts, and agencies related to your business.

7. Linking Strategies

Building links – both outbound and inbound – is a great way to generate leads as well. This strategy is easy to do.

When you guest blog, lead your audience to your website by providing them links. This is a great way to drive traffic from another blog or site back to your own content and boost your SEO. Make sure you have the information or the blogs that visitors want to read when they click a link and land on your pages. In short, provide what you have promised to provide.

Share your links everywhere you go, operate, and participate – forums, social sites, YouTube, paid ads, blog, content contributions, etc. You can also use internal linking, where one of your pages links to another page on your site, to direct users to more of your content. Just keep in mind not to appear ‘spammy’, as this will drive away both - your potential customers and Google.

Conclusion

When targeting other businesses, you need to find people who are interested in buying before you even consider selling your product or service. B2B lead generation strategies, like email marketing, social media, and live events, are a great way to find quality leads. These strategies also help you engage with leads, move them down your funnel, and convert them into customers.

About the author

Lee Gladish is the former Co-Founder at Reply.io and the current CEO at AirborneApp, which is the industry’s first sales engagement application purpose-built for Agencies. He has been in the software sales space for over 10 years. After working with countless (sales) agencies he understands the necessary tactics required to achieve massive results. He’s also helped many other businesses & entrepreneurs build a better sales engine.