Member Article

7 Ways to Generate B2B Leads Online

It was the B2B section of the industry that used to be interested in lead generation. Later, it was online marketing that opted for it. But even today, it is tougher attracting potential business customers than hooking consumers but the availability of various powerful techniques today makes decision-makers become online leads.

B2B lead generation is all about impacting the bottom line, as many case studies and specific strategies imply. However, there should be present a firm foundation to ensure the capturing and conversion of a large percentage of leads from the campaigns you’ll be running.

So, to start with, you must avoid the leaky bucket like many of the B2B marketers did till now. They forget to seal the marketing funnel but kept on directing more traffic into it to keep it filled, which increases acquisition costs and bring below-average results.

The landing pages and the online forms play the biggest culprits here, the latter separating leads from non-leads and impacting conversion rates greatly. This makes overall lead generation results suffer and they suffer massively! The only way out is optimising the forms or using a tool to ensure that no leads that your marketing campaigns generate are left behind.

For example, let’s send 1,000 visits to a landing page, each costing $3 and the form converting just 10 of them (1%) into leads, which makes the cost per lead $300. But, if the conversion was 3%, then the 30 leads generated would cost $100 each. For that, you need to improve your lead generation form.

After that, it is about choosing the lead generation channels and/or strategies to use. Good SEO is the easiest and primary way; next, it is email marketing and then, social media and content marketing. All are effective forms of B2B lead generation, but the question is: What suits you?

To answer that, you need to focus upon the audience biases as well as skill sets. There’s no specific ranking that can be given to the different strategies. However, despite all the inconsistencies, the general trend makes email marketing the most preferred way, followed by SEO Marketing Services (SEO), social marketing and content marketing. But fact remains: it’s how you use the lead generation channel that brings the desired results and not what you choose.

So start offering specialized content for free, which will be of great value to the visitors. The content should be presented as a series or as a newsletter; it will keep the interest of the TG for longer and will solidify the trust on the vendor. Right timing is important, for a professional will plain hate to wait long for required information. It should genuine news without delay!

‘About Us’ should be both attractive and informative, for it represents the entire company and everything that it stands by. And there should be present personal contact info. This is important even in the digital age of communication, for both the business managers would like to know who they are dealing with.

LinkedIn is a major Lead Generation Marketing Strategies platform and is also used for research. Creating a profile each for the business and the person behind it is a practice that bears many fruits. Posts should be useful to prospects and must also showcase the expertise of the poster. Join only communities that comprise potential customers; those that are interested in and participate actively in them. Also, don’t forget to add a sign-up form on every page of your website. It is better than pop-ups and cuts out the annoyance part when it’s short and stands out from the rest of the page.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Vikas Gupta .