Lead Generation
What is
Lead
In simple terms, a lead
is an individual or organization with an interest in what you are
selling. The interest is
expressed by sharing contact information, like an email ID, a phone number, or
even a social media handle.
Mind map to understand the flow
Why Lead
Generation
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Ethics of Lead Generation
Two types of leads
- Inbound Lead: To give your contact info like email, subscription for any channels, giving permission to access the content. Always one should prefer inbound leads.
- Outbound Lead: Outbound Lead Generation is also called “interruption lead generation”. Using this approach, the marketer initiates the first interaction by sending out a message to potential leads.
If you toss a coin it's unpredictable for the first time that whether you will get a Head or a Tail. The more time you toss you can start predicting the outcomes.
Nature uses a law of large number all the time
Here are four B2B lead generation
strategies that can deliver better results.
1. Focus on Traffic from Social Media
Unless you have a large team of people to manage your social media marketing, it is a mistake
even to attempt to be on every possible platform with social media.
First, a concentrated
effort to leverage the B2B lead generation capabilities of a few tools is much
more efficient.
Beyond that, as Neil
Patel states, driving traffic to your website should
be a core objective of using social media.
Organizations
experience varying results with specific social tools. Analyze your efficiency
with the tools you use to figure out where the sweet spot lies.
Most
B2B marketers will agree that you have to implement a customer-centric approach
when it comes to your marketing efforts.
A blanket approach is
not the path to take. People are on different social media channels because
those channels deliver a different experience for the user.
So if you can avoid
it, don’t push the same message out across all of your channels.
You
need to tailor your messages based on who people are and what their interests
are.
Twitter
Using Twitter for
brand awareness is a useful way to deliver your message, and there is a range
of automation tools out there to help you ensure you have regular content.
But mostly you need to
use it to engage with your audience and generate traffic.
You also need to
ensure that the content you are pushing is good enough so that people will want
to come back to your site on a regular basis.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn
offers some efficient lead generation features. With an audience of 414 million and
counting as of February 2016, 100 million of whom use the platform on a monthly
basis; it has to be the number one platform for B2B sales and marketing teams.
LinkedIn has an
excellent search function where you can search for prospects based on job roles
and a range of other factors, which is great if you are a sales person looking
for new opportunities.
But I prefer
networking through groups, which is a fantastic facility for driving engagement
from prospective clients.
Posting
regular content that will be of value to readers is also an excellent service to avail of
but don’t overdo it.
Facebook
Facebook also has some
nifty opportunities through event registration, sign-up forms and very granular
audience targeting.
YouTube
YouTube offers the
ability to show off your products and services, or position your company as a
thought leader in its field (see the Forrester video below), and is the second
most used search engine by people, so you need to ensure your videos are tagged
correctly.
Google+
A personal favourite
of mine is Google+, and one of the key reasons I like it apart from the
community vibe that resides within it is its close affiliation with Google from
an SEO perspective.
You have lots of
choices out there, and the key is to focus your time on activities that drive leads to
your business.
2. Continue to Use Email
Despite periodic
efforts to tear it down as an “old technology” for qualified lead generation,
email remains highly active.
In case you missed it,
I wrote about this last week in our post “Why Telemarketing Trumps Email for Lead Generation“.
This point is
particularly the case when using marketing automation features typical in
customer relationship management software.
Using
data gathering and analytics, marketing teams can more precisely develop
campaigns that target the right prospects with the right messages.
Sales teams can also
set up automated campaigns that deliver messages at predetermined intervals.
A call-to-action
unique to the needs of the target recipient can contribute to clicks on your
site and help with acquiring new leads that you can nurture over time.
If used correctly,
email marketing can be a very powerful medium for staying in touch with your
prospects until they are ready to engage with you more directly.
A
word of advice – segment your users into their relevant categories and only
send relevant content to each segment.
3. Solve Problems with Content
Content marketing has
become a top element of digital B2B lead generation.
It includes precisely
crafted messages in such forms as blog posts, white papers, ebooks, and videos
that are helpful or valuable to the reader.
The
most successful content marketers consider the problems and motives of the
prospective customers they’re targeting.
Content outlines a
problem or concern from a prospect’s point of view and presents resolutions.
Optimising articles
for search engines can increase the eyeballs that see content. To generate
leads, though, you need a strong story that appeals to the interests of the
intended reader.
Content syndication is a significant extension of a content
marketing strategy.
It is the delivery of
your content through other websites or publishers.
You can manage
syndication yourself, but another option is to work with a company that
specialises in this method of distributing your message through the right
channels that hit your target audience.
An important part of
content strategy is knowing the types of content and delivery channels that
work best in your B2B industry.
According to a
research paper by SiriusDecisions “Demand Creation: Planning Assumptions
2015”, inbound marketing
tactics that include strategies such as content syndication are responsible
for driving more than 70 percent of enquiry volume for many organisations.
4. Engage People Directly
As important as the
tools you select, you must engage your audience directly.
Success on Twitter and
other social media, for instance, is usually sparked by inviting reactions to
your content and replying to prospects that do show an interest.
This engagement the process leads to conversations, and potentially a meeting which is positively influenced on conversion rate. I’ve often used this method for engaging with
people on a one-to-one basis and been extremely successful with it.
Social
Selling
This online engagement
has become what we all now know as “Social Selling”.
Ultimately,
it’s about building relationships. (If you run a search for that term in our search box
you’ll see I’ve written about more than a couple of times.)
The challenge salespeople
have is using it in a manner that will add value to the buyer – from the start
of the buying process.
But it is a skill that
all salespeople need to learn – and learn quickly.
If you are not using
social selling on a regular basis, you are behind your best competitors.
SiriusDecisions have
also stated that 70 percent of the buying process is now complete by the time a
prospect is ready to engage with sales.
The world of the salesperson is changing and unless you are willing to change your methods and
up your game, you, my friend are going to get left behind.
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