Lead generation isn’t easy. In fact, while 85% of marketers consider lead generation a top measure of success, only 6% of B2B companies would call their team’s efforts “highly effective.”
The challenge is that hundreds of B2B businesses are fighting for the attention of the same pool of consumers.
To reach your potential customers — and not get drowned out by the competition — you must establish an effective process for lead generation. It’s also important to keep up with the latest technology for lead generation, particularly AI-powered automation platforms.
This blog post has compiled 23 proven strategies for generating B2B leads. These tactics will help you consistently create new sales opportunities and fuel long-term business growth.
Table of Contents:
Understanding B2B Lead Generation
B2B lead generation is identifying potential customers and enticing them to buy from your business.
A person is considered a “lead” when they indicate an interest in your product or service and take a desired action, such as filling out a contact form on your website, subscribing to a newsletter, or seeking more information about your offering.
Some leads are more likely than others to become customers. You can qualify leads based on budget, timeline, degree of interest, and other factors.
Generating B2B sales leads is often more challenging than B2C ones because the sales cycle length is usually longer, the price point is frequently higher, and a final decision involves more parties.
The Importance of Quality Lead Generation for B2B
When it comes to lead generation, it’s important to focus on quality over quantity. It might feel great to say, “I generated 500 leads this week” — but if only two of those leads convert to customers, you wasted a lot of time and money on the 498 other leads.
It is more profitable to focus on high-quality leads. These consumers need the solution you offer and have a budget that aligns with your product’s pricing model. By allocating your resources to a smaller number of highly qualified leads, you’ll have much more impressive results to share: higher conversion rates and increased ROI.
Here are some additional benefits of generating high-quality B2B leads:
Increase Revenue
When you focus your efforts on qualified leads, you increase the likelihood of converting your leads into paying customers. The more qualified leads you produce, the more chances you have to close sales and boost your revenue.
Enhance Brand Awareness
A huge part of lead generation is the creation and distribution of enticing targeted content (blog posts, whitepapers, landing pages, etc.). As you continue to build and amplify your web presence, consumers will become increasingly familiar with your brand. And when it’s time for a buyer to start shopping for a solution, your B2B business will be top of mind.
Gain Useful Consumer Insights
When a lead fills out one of your forms, you gain valuable information about your potential customers. You can learn more about the demographics, interests, pain points, and buying behaviors that define your target audience. You can apply these insights to refine and improve your ongoing lead generation efforts.
Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment
Lead generation helps to facilitate better collaboration between the sales and marketing teams. Both teams must understand the ideal customer profile, the tactics being implemented, and the process for transitioning marketing-qualified leads to sales-qualified leads.
Identify Areas for Improvement
By analyzing lead generation campaign metrics, such as conversion rates and lead quality, you can gain useful insights to apply to your sales and marketing efforts. You can use this data to improve and inform audience targeting, content creation, or outreach strategies.
23 Effective B2B Lead Generation Tactics
B2B businesses can take many different approaches to lead generation. While some businesses prioritize inbound tactics like content marketing and search engine optimization, others might invest more in outbound campaigns and paid advertising. The best B2B lead gen strategy will depend on your industry, goals, and audience.
Check out our list of 23 B2B lead generation tactics to build a strategy that works for your business.
Attract Leads with Enticing Content
Content marketing is a powerful and cost-effective strategy for B2B lead generation. Rather than hunting down leads, use this inbound strategy to attract your ideal customers. Content marketing involves creating valuable content that teaches, entertains, or sells. Let’s look at a few effective content-driven strategies for lead generation.
1. Write Blog Posts
Create informative, high-value, keyword-optimized blog posts to position your business as an industry thought leader, attract new visitors to your website and get them one step closer to becoming a customer. Pick keywords relevant to your business and core audience’s pain points. Be sure to include a strong call to action to drive visitors to your lead capture form.
2. Create Video Content
Research shows that 44% of consumers prefer to learn about a product or service by watching a video. Don’t miss out on those opportunities — invest in creating video tutorials, demonstrations, and customer testimonials. To amplify your video’s reach and generate leads across platforms, share your video on your website, email campaigns, YouTube, and other social networks.
3. Distribute Press Releases
Write a press release to announce any new product launch, partnership, or achievement. These announcements inform current customers about new offerings and achievements and allow your story to get picked up by relevant media outlets. This can extend your reach and increase visibility among a broader audience.
4. Be a Guest Contributor
Reach new potential leads by publishing guest content on other well-established industry platforms. Identify where your target customers are getting their industry insights and contribute a post to that platform. It could be a trade association blog, an industry newsletter, an annual event, or a podcast. Guest contributions can build brand awareness and further establish your expertise.
5. Publish In-Depth, Gated Content
Create long-form, in-depth content like ebooks, whitepapers, and research reports to attract high-intent leads. By capturing lead information in exchange for high-value content, you can determine where they are in the buying process and how likely they are to convert.
6. Answer Questions in Online Communities
Join online communities like Quora, Reddit, and LinkedIn Groups to find your potential customers and answer their questions. By connecting directly with consumers and serving as an advisor, you are more likely to earn their trust. To turn those contacts into leads, be sure to include a link to a relevant landing page on your site.
7. Host a Webinar
A webinar is an opportunity to share your industry knowledge, position your brand as a thought leader, and address potential clients’ pain points. You also collect valuable lead information when attendees register for your virtual event, providing you with a pool of contacts likely to be interested in your product or service.
Optimize Your Digital Presence
Leverage powerful web tools to transform your website into an automated, AI-powered, lead-generating machine. Here are some strategies to power your online lead generation efforts.
8. Optimize Landing Pages for Conversions
A landing page must include clear calls-to-actions (CTAs), attention-grabbing headlines, and content that directly addresses visitors’ pain points to generate leads effectively. Use A/B testing to experiment with different variations of page elements to see which versions yield the highest conversion rates. Continue to test and refine your landing pages on a regular basis.
9. Build Dynamic, Personalized Web Pages
A website built with dynamic content can adapt a webpage’s content to be more relevant to a visitor’s unique needs and buying habits. Imagine a potential lead visited your website weeks ago, and has finally returned. A dynamic website could recognize that visitor and display a personalized content section of “previously viewed” products. This streamlines the buying process and boosts conversion rates.
10. Add Web Chat or Chatbot for Instant Engagement
Consider adding a web chat widget or chatbot to connect with more website visitors and collect leads. As chatbots become increasingly advanced in understanding human language, they are becoming a must-have for your B2B website. A chatbot can engage with leads 24/7 to answer questions, gather lead qualification data, and provide a personalized experience based on previous interactions.
Boost Visibility with SEO and Paid Ads
Your digital presence is only effective if people can actually find it. To help B2B buyers find your brand when they’re searching for solutions, take steps to optimize your website for search performance. You should also complement your organic SEO efforts with paid advertising.
11. Target The Right Keywords
An effective SEO strategy begins with keyword research. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Semrush to identify high-traffic keywords that are relevant to your product and the solutions you provide. Incorporate those keywords into your web pages and blog posts so you can attract searchers who are looking for your solution.
12. Create Backlinks with Directory Listings
Generating backlinks to your website from reputable sources is an excellent SEO tactic. Search engines use backlinks to determine a website’s relevance and authority, which plays a significant role in search rankings. One way to generate backlinks is to submit your product or service to appropriate directory sites. For example, G2 and Capterra are two of the top directories for SaaS products.
13. Add Paid Search Campaigns to Complement Organic Efforts
Pay-per-click advertising allows you to target certain keyword queries and place ads at the top of search engine results pages. By combining a Google Ads campaign with your organic SEO efforts, you maximize your ability to generate leads. Paid search works quickly, supplementing the more gradual impact of SEO. Plus, people are more likely to click on one of your links if they see both a paid and organic link in search results.
14. Use Retargeting To Re-Engage Visitors
Retargeting is a type of paid advertising that targets people who previously viewed your website or advertisement. It’s an effective tactic for re-engaging visitors who didn’t fill out a lead gen form during their first visit to your website or view of your advertisement.
15. Advertise on Social Media
Social media advertising, especially on LinkedIn, is another effective B2B lead generation tactic. The Linked Ads platform provides advanced targeting options, including job titles, industries, company sizes, skills, and even specific companies. You can use LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms to capture contact information directly within the platform, so the user doesn’t have to click to go to a new site.
Build High-Quality Lists for Cold Outreach
New technologies have made it easier than ever to obtain quality contact data, build targeted email lists, and send effective cold outreach at scale.
16. Leverage B2B Data Providers for ABM Marketing
Enlist the services of a reputable B2B data provider like Nimbler, Apollo.io, or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to build email lists. These services allow you to use detailed search criteria to identify leads that fit your ideal customer profile. Be sure to choose a lead data provider that specializes in B2B and provides comprehensive, high-quality, accurate data. Once you have these lead lists, you can engage in ABM marketing, which involves targeting high-value accounts and key decision-makers.
17. Use Website Visitor Identification Tools
A visitor identification tool can give you information about who is browsing your website. Depending on the complexity of the tool you are using, you might be able to determine the visitor’s name, company, geographic location, exact pages visited, time of visits, and more. This can be a valuable tool for identifying people who are already interested in your product or service and, therefore, are more likely to engage with your cold outreach.
18. Attend In-Person Industry Events
The traditional trade show is still a great way to expand your network and collect contact information. In-person events give you the opportunity to build rapport and form new relationships — and these “warm” contacts will be more likely to open your email when they receive it.
19. Use AI Tools to Send Personalized Emails
Personalized emails are six times more likely to drive conversions. Make sure your email marketing platform includes an AI tool that can leverage contact data to generate personalized individual email messages at scale. This will save you time without compromising on personalization.
20. Leverage LinkedIn InMail for B2B Connections
LinkedIn InMail allows you to directly message other LinkedIn users — even if you’re not connected to them. This is a great way to bypass gatekeepers and reach company decision-makers directly. Pro tip: Don’t try to sell your product immediately when reaching out via LinkedIn. Instead, provide them with a helpful article or an offer that entices them to open your message.
Lean on Referrals
Referrals are an extremely cost-effective lead source. Leads that are referred to your business by an existing customer typically come pre-qualified, with built-in trust and a high likelihood of converting.
Here are some strategies to help you get more leads from referrals:
21. Establish a Referral Program
Provide incentives for your existing clients or partners to refer new business. You can offer a monetary reward, a product discount, or other special perks. Make sure it’s easy for customers to submit referrals. You should create a dedicated landing page with an easy-to-fill form, include clear CTAs throughout your website, and add a link to your email signature.
22. Provide Exceptional Customer Service
For your referral strategy to work, you must consistently provide great service and maintain trusting client relationships. Be proactive and responsive to your clients’ needs, provide tailored solutions, and always deliver on your promises. Happy customers will be more likely to participate in a referral program.
23. Ask for Referrals After Positive Client Experiences
Don’t sit back and wait for referrals to roll in. Proactively reach out to clients — particularly after a successful project or positive feedback — and ask them if there’s anyone they could send your way. You can ask them over the phone, via email, or even SMS if you have their consent.
Streamline Your Approach to B2B Lead Gen with Nimbler
A strategic approach to B2B lead generation is essential for staying competitive and driving growth. By focusing on high-quality leads and leveraging various tactics, your B2B business can maintain a consistent flow of potential customers.
Ready to simplify your lead generation process? The right tools can make all the difference. That’s where Nimbler comes in—our platform lets you search the largest database of U.S. business contacts to identify leads that are most likely to convert. Nimbler can also help you create personalized email messaging, automate cold outreach, and score and qualify leads.
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