Are you looking for quality sales leads that will increase the productivity of your sales team and help you achieve your business goals? Well it is no secret that to keep your business afloat, you need to generate high quality leads that will eventually turn into paying customers. However, the challenge lies in devising an effective strategy to generate qualified, result oriented leads.
Generating qualified leads is crucial to your business success, as such leads drive sales, revenue, and the growth of your organization! A business without qualified and convertible leads is similar to a motor vehicle without an engine, no matter how much gas you put into it, it cannot function.
Your B2B lead generation strategy should aim at creating an interest in the products and services that you offer. Many online and offline tools are available for businesses to create such interest and generate sale for your offerings. Some of the lead generation methods available for businesses include:
- Using Inbound-marketing strategies to drive customers to visit your business.
- Effective use of paid marketing strategies in outbound marketing to draw in customers.
- Drawing customers with the help of compelling, engaging, and persuasive content in the form of blog posts, infographics, video posts, podcasts, webinars, seminars, and more.
- With the help of SEO, using terms and phrases that potential customers look for when shopping for products that your line of business offers.
- Understanding customers’ perception of your brand, eliciting their feedback on your products, and services with lively interactions using various social media channels.
- Directly inviting customers to visit your business with the help of emails, and newsletters.
These are a few of the B2B marketing tools and lead generation companies available for today’s businesses; however, the success of your business depends on your ability to devise an effective lead generation strategy and communicate with your target audience with the help of these tools in meeting your business goals. Over the years, many small, medium, and big businesses have tried and tested some lead generation strategies and derived the intended results. A list of such strategies are:
- Identifying customers buying needs: Identifying the right customer base, and understanding their needs, shopping preferences, etc., is vital to generating qualified leads with a higher possibility of conversion. You need to look at a slew of data available online, talk to your employees who speak directly to the customers, listen to what your target customers say on various channels, including social media networks. Talk to industry experts to understand the emerging trends, verticals, etc. Understanding your customer’s persona and their needs goes a long way in generating the right leads.
- Analyze Behavioral aspects of Target customers for scoring better leads: Apart from demographics, behavioral aspects of your target customers play an important role in buying decisions. Factors such as the process of buying, how they reach your stores, whether they walk-in or buy online, etc. will help you understand what influences prospects to actually make a purchase.
- Use a mix of Inbound and Outbound marketing strategies: There is a limit to the extent each of these strategies can drive customers to your stores – online or offline. It is imperative that you use a mix of both the channels to drive maximum traffic to your online store as also to your physical store. Using a mix of both inbound marketing and outbound marketing techniques will offer maximum results to your lead generation process.
- Co-ordinate with the sales team: An effective lead generation strategy should aim to drive more sales, generate higher revenue and contribute to the growth of your organization. As such, you need to co-ordinate with your sales team to see if your lead generation process is effective, and offering the desired results. Using a mix of the sales team’s quantitative analysis with your qualitative feedback from customers will help you make necessary changes, improvements in a bid to fuel sales, improve your marketing ROI, etc.
- Use content to attract Customers: Digital media has become a very powerful tool to promote business, share feedback, etc. it has about 70 billion content available for customers. Unfortunately, close to 70% of this content goes unnoticed. You can attract customers by offering value in your content, content that serves a specific purpose of your prospects, etc. Understand the psyche of your customers’ that they like visuals. Using images, videos, etc., will help you draw more customers to your content. Also, make your content mobile ready!
- Use social media to build relationships and listen to your customers: Social media has become very powerful tool to build and nurture relationships with customers, prospects, etc. A research shows LinkedIn has emerged as a powerful tool for generating B2B leads. It is important that you offer value to your customers by helping customers understand your products, your brand and more. Actively participate in discussions on social media, answer customer questions, accept their feedback, etc.
- Effective use of your business website: Your business website has four elements that can convert mere visitors into customers. Create attractive, irresistible and compelling offers, landing pages, information form, and call-to-action buttons.
- Use Seminars and Webinars: Educating customers face-to-face by conducting seminars and webinars is a very effective way to generate B2B leads. These platforms offer a great way to display your professionalism, your customer-centricity, your brand supremacy, and more.
- Referrals: Effective use of referrals from customers, and other industry players such as non- competitive suppliers, vendors is a great way to generate quality leads.
- Change your strategy: Well, if your current strategy fails to work or do not provide the desired results, do not hesitate to change your strategy and deploy a new, and better one in pursuit of improving the results.
B2B lead generation is easier said than done. It requires careful analysis of quantitative and qualitative data, experimentation persistence, and resources, as well! With the help of predictive tools of marketing, you can devise a systematic and targeted lead generation plan based on your customer’s profiles.