What Is B2B Lead Generation?
First, what is a lead? A lead, in a nutshell, is any person who has indicated an interest—no matter how small—in a company, or the company’s product or service. The indication of interest can come in many different forms, like visiting your site, subscribing to your email newsletter, giving your business a call, and so on.
Thus, lead generation is simply any efforts made by a company to generate leads. These efforts can be publishing content, investing in ads, working with influencers, and so on.
In practice, lead generation is the process of attracting people and then converting them so that they are willing to give you their contact information (mainly email address). After we’ve possessed their email addresses, we can then follow-up with other campaigns until they are finally ready to make the purchase
So, lead generation is mainly about answering two things:
- How can we attract people to our platform (mainly website)?
- How can we convince these people to give their contact information?
Why B2B Lead Generation Is Unique?
In a B2B environment, as we know, we are targeting another business instead of end consumers.
This situation demands unique lead generation approaches due to two core challenges:
- Businesses purchase B2B products/services from other companies. So the purchase decision is typically logic-based and data-driven rather than emotionally-driven. We have to convince them with data that our product/service can indeed improve theirs.
- There can be more than one person involved in the purchase decision with different roles. For example, in an organization, the IT manager must first consult with the finance manager and the CEO before the purchase of your SaaS product is a go. You will need to tailor your lead generation efforts for each of these roles.
As a result of these two challenges, many marketers argue that B2B lead generation is more difficult than its B2C counterpart but in our opinion, it doesn’t necessarily be more challenging, just requires different approaches.
Top 3 B2B Lead Generation Ideas
1. Create Remarkable Content to Address Customer’s Pain Points
Remember that in essence, people do not actually buy your product or service, but rather the benefits they get from your product/service.
This is even truer in B2B businesses: businesses will only purchase B2B products when they are sure that it is going to be beneficial for their business’s performance directly or indirectly.
So, if you can communicate your product’s benefits and address their pain points, you can attract their attention. How? By creating high-quality and valuable content that addresses the specific pain points of each target audience.
Yet, we will not be able to do this unless we have properly understood our target audience’s needs and pain points, so first, we should segment our target audience based on their position on the funnel:
– If the prospect currently knows they have an issue but do not know exactly what the problem is, then they are in the problem-discovery stage. For these prospects, your goal is to help them identify their precise pain point: you can provide links to various blog posts and white papers that discuss specific pain points.
– If the prospect is already aware of the problem they are facing and is currently searching for a potential solution (i.e. considering between your product and your competitors’), then you should offer them free trials, video tutorials highlighting your product’s benefits, and other content that can help communicate your product’s unique value proposition.
– If the prospect is already deciding on your product and just need that extra little push, you can offer content like product comparisons, testimonials/reviews, and so on. We will discuss more of this further below.
Communicating Value
When the prospect is already in the decision-making stage, they may ask for additional information and contact your salesperson.
This is a very important window of opportunity that you should leverage upon. You can try the following tactics:
– Yes, you should communicate your product’s key features, but it will be much more effective if you focus on the benefits they will get instead. Outline KPIs and metrics that can show that your product is indeed the ideal solution for this prospect’s specific needs.
– Do not be afraid to show a comparison between your product and your competitor’s. Be honest about it, and highlight how your product is better in features, performance, and pricing (the value they will get from what they pay).
– The age-old tactic of creating a sense of urgency can work wonders. For example, offer them a ‘limited-time’ package that is not available to the public, with features custom-tailored to their current needs.
2. Create Content Strategically to Capture Leads
Above, we have discussed the importance of content in attracting people to your platform (in this case, your website), and if you look at most of today’s market, they all have one thing in common: their online content is great, be it a blog, a YouTube channel, or a social media profile.
The basic principle of implementing content marketing, as we have discussed, is to ensure we can provide value and address our prospect’s pain points. This is how we are going to attract prospects to our platform via the inbound marketing principle.
This strategy is effective because we are not pushing our advertising outwards, but rather pull our audience inwards. People simply hate getting sold to, and therefore inbound marketing generates 300% more leads than advertising. Provide value before they purchase your product, and they will trust you more as a brand and are more likely to purchase your product.
So, how can we practically capture leads with content? The most common and effective approach is via what we call the content upgrade lead magnet method. The flow typically goes like this:
– Prospect facing a problem and looking for a solution
– They stumble upon our content in search of the solution
– You offer another piece, more in-depth content (i.e. an e-book or research report) for free in exchange for their contact information
– You captured their contact information and can send follow-up emails
3. Leverage on SEO To Accelerate Lead generation
Search engines are the most powerful driver of organic traffic, which will translate into a powerful lead generation platform. Above, we have discussed the importance of content lead generation, and SEO is the most effective way to get more people to consume your content.
While SEO can be a very broad subject to discuss, here are some important areas to focus on:
– Understand your target audience. You will not be able to execute effective SEO if you don’t properly understand your target audience and their search intent. In practice, we are going to use this knowledge in targeting our keywords:
– The keywords must be frequently searched by our target audience
– he keywords must be relevant to your business. Not all keywords that are popular are going to be relevant for your B2B business.
– Know your competition. The nature of SEO is to rank higher than your competition. so it’s important to research what your competitors are doing in their content marketing and SEO. Do a quick Google search for your target keywords and research the top-ranking pages.
– Link building. While there are various ranking factors that will determine your page’s search engine performance, the quantity and quality of backlinks remain the most important factor. Build backlinks to your content by:
– Giving them a reason to link your content. Include unique information, interesting stories, shareable images/photos/infographics, etc.
– Build relationships with influencers, media, and relevant websites in your niche.
Remember that SEO is a long-term rather than a short-term game, and it is very important to maintain consistency.
These three are just a few of the effective B2B lead generation strategies you can out new things in 2021.
For those of you who are interested in what are 5 other ideas of lead generation for B2B businesses? you can listen for more information via MACO Sharing Podcast: A podcast that gathering news in the marketing industry and consumer behavior from all over the world to share in 5 minutes on the channel >> MACO Youtube Click now
Source : https://breaklineagency.com/b2b-saas-lead-generation-ideas/
