Posted by A constant supply of quality leads.
That’s what your B2B business needs. To keep your sales team busy and income flowing in, you need at least a few powerful lead generation tactics.
Are you here looking for them? Then this post is for you.
Below, find three lead generation strategies used by successful B2B businesses.
1. Content Marketing
Many B2B businesses do content marketing. Not every one of them is successful at getting leads, though. Oftentimes, the reason for a failure to attract leads is focusing on too many content types.
To avoid this mistake, we’re going to focus only on three content types: white papers, webinars, and case studies.
Why these?
They are the most effective when it comes to driving leads, as proven by studies.
Source: MarketingProfs
So, we’re going to prioritize them in your content marketing strategy.
White Papers
A white paper is the best-performing content type for B2B lead generation. It’s a piece of high-value content that’s detailed, in-depth, and has valuable insights.
Typically, a white paper offers quality tips to solving problems of the target reader, so it has lots of value for them. If you invest in this content, you’ll have a chance to reach early-stage leads. These are people who aren’t ready to buy and need to ensure that your company is the best one to use.
That’s why businesses create them. OroCommerce, a B2B eCommerce platform, has white papers as featured posts on its blog to attract engagement.
To generate quality leads with white papers:
- Make them really useful for your target audience. Explain now, sell later. At this point, focus on making your white papers address a real problem with practical solutions
- Make the best white papers gated. This means asking to complete a “lead capture” form to get them. This way, you can get emails from visitors.
Creating this content type can be fast. When you have the text ready, you can use white paper templates. They have a predefined structure and visuals to help make appealing content.
Webinars
Webinars should be a part of your content marketing strategy because they:
- Provide relevant, useful information to your target customer
- Establish your company’s expertise and build a good reputation
- Help target customers to solve real problems.
How to generate leads with webinars?
Easy: require emails to register. Those interested in attending will provide them to get an email reminder later.
Like this one from Tidio, notifying that a webinar about chatbots is about to begin.
Keep in mind that you can make webinars available on your website for viewing on demand.
Just create a lead capture form like this one below from Accenture. This way, you can turn every viewer into a lead while focusing on other things.
Important! Provide a quick summary of the webinar to visitors. By knowing what they can learn by signing up for the webinar, they will be more likely to do so.
Read more: 6 Simple Ways C-Level Executives Can Leverage Webinars for Brand Growth
Case Studies
Case studies are effective for B2B lead generation because of the same reason. They help to build credibility and reputation by showing how your company helped to solve real business challenges.
Many businesses dedicate entire website sections to case studies. This makes finding them easier for potential leads and customers.
B2B decision-makers often read case studies to verify if a potential partner is reliable enough to assist them with tackling issues they’re facing. In simple words, they’re looking for “Show, don’t tell” type of content.
That’s why you should invest in creating case studies. Here’s where to start:
- Reach out to a customer to be featured in a case study. Ask a client of yours if they would be interested in helping you
- Have a plan in mind. Have a list of questions prepared to get the information needed to create a “customer success” story
- Publish the case study (make it gated content). Upload the case study to your blog and share the announcement via email newsletter and social media.
Important: share every content piece you create on social media. To maximize the possibility to generate leads, use a social media management tool to publish content on custom times.
2. Lead Generation Chatbots
Let me start by saying that you have an incredible opportunity here.
Why?
Only 0.5 percent of B2B companies – your competitors, that is – use chatbots.
So, there might be a great chance for your business to generate leads with this method.
How do you do it? Just add a free chatbot designed specifically for lead generation to your website. The process takes only a few minutes, and you can customize its messages to share with potential leads.
Many B2C eCommerce brands, for example, tend to use chatbots to share discounts for the first purchase like this.
As a B2B business, you can also share:
- A free demo
- A discount for a premium plan
- A link to a landing page.
Chatbots are also great for sharing content. So they can give an engagement boost to all those white papers and case studies you made.
Again, use a free chatbot template and change the welcome message to something like this one below. The chatbot can display this welcome message on your website’s homepage, so you’ll definitely have many potential leads see it.
The link in the message also makes it easy for visitors to go directly to the content. This way, you reduce friction and increase the chance of getting more leads.
Don’t worry that you can’t use this opportunity because your website isn’t compatible. Even though some chatbots are promoted for use on specific platforms – there’s a WordPress chatbot for WordPress sites, for example – most of them work on all websites.
3. Cold Emailing
This strategy gets a lot of bad rap but it’s still number one for B2B lead generation. Direct contact is a great way to convert a person who knows nothing about your service into a lead.
Making cold outreach emails engaging and not “spammy” is the most important rule when it comes to this strategy. Overly “salesy” emails will be considered by many recipients as spam, which will affect email deliverability and your reputation.
Follow these tips to get it right.
- Get to the Point. Don’t waste anybody’s time by telling stories about how you started your company and why. Greet the recipient and make the
- Keep it Short. There’s no magical formula for the perfect length, but keeping the email within 100 words is a good idea
- Focus on benefits. No salesy talk, period. If you want to pitch your product, describe its features as benefits to the customer
- No fancy terms. B2B eCommerce businesses often sell industry-specific products. Still, it doesn’t mean you’ll sound like an expert if you mention industry jargon in the email. There’s no way to know that the recipient knows what they mean.
Consider using your awesome content, too. You can show how you solved a problem that the recipient might have, too, with a case study.
But never send files or too many links to avoid getting your emails marked as spam. A better way is to hyperlink a part of the text and indicate that the link goes to the case study.
Now, let’s bring all these tips together in a simple template.
Cold Email Template for Lead Generation
Hi [name]
My name is [name], with [your company name].
Does your company suffer from [problem]?
We helped [company name] and [company name] accomplish [great results]. As you might have noticed, both these companies are similar to yours.
I’m confident that we can help you avoid [problem] with [benefit, one sentence].
Are you available for a call this week so we can discuss this further?
Feel free to use this template but remember that the best way to improve it is to try. By checking how your email performs, you’ll know which versions appeal to your potential leads better.
Read more: 5 Effective Email Marketing Campaign Tips for Service Businesses.
Time to Generate Leads
There you have it, a quick guide to an effective B2B lead generation strategy.
As you can see, you don’t need to invest in a bunch of techniques and approaches to generate quality leads. These three methods will keep you busy for a lot of time. Plus are the best to try, so prioritize them to get good results fast.
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