Business start-ups are fragile and vulnerable when it comes to being able to survive. Leads are a key factor in their survival because leads can be turned into customers. So you have to acquire quality leads in a lot of ways to increase your chances of conversion.
But beyond that, we also have B2B or business to business leads. B2B leads are also a great asset in your business because they have lots of benefits as if you are in a partnership.
So they are basically partnerships or companies that will become customers as a whole. For this article, we will be talking about B2B lead generation strategies. Mainly to help business start-ups and give them some advice regarding lead generation strategies.
A good example of B2B are businesses outsourcing to a network company or advertising company to possibly promote their brand. This means that a certain business availed the services of another business. This is the main concept behind B2B.
A lot of businesses want to know where business to business leads really come from. Actually, an article from Crazyegg stated that no one really knows where they come from. I would like to agree to this simply because it’s the truth.
No one really knows where or how to acquire them directly. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no effective strategies for B2B lead generation. Because there certainly are a lot.
We will mainly focus on direct and easily applicable strategies to allow us to get a very clear understanding of what to do.
B2B Lead Generation: Effective Strategies for Start-Ups
Some start-ups might even think that they don’t need B2B leads. Well, that’s true in some cases but there are surely a lot of benefits in acquiring B2B leads. It actually depends on what type of business are you and what do you directly sell to the consumers.
One of the best benefits in B2B lead generation acquisitions is actually achieving a high conversion rate. One converted B2B lead is actually really good already since you will have lots of customers already or you will have someone who will constantly buy or avail your products and services.
But it’s not all glory and getting them in a steady flow, as a marketer, you will have some mistakes when it comes to B2B lead generation but it’s totally fine.
Start with actually giving quality service.
Build your business portfolio by actually providing quality service to your average consumer. Your business clients can tell how professional you are by the service and products you normally produce.
Because some just focus on making income and making their business grow. They overlook their customers’ needs and how they can help which is totally wrong. So this will be your starting point and this is actually for all businesses out there.
Alongside giving quality service for B2B lead generation acquisition, you can also identify your strengths. All this will lead to increased brand awareness as well.
So by giving quality service and identifying your good features, you will increase people’s awareness of your brand which will result in all kinds of leads. In identifying your strengths, you can focus on answering the question of how you can help your customers.
Also, you can identify a relation between your brand and what your consumers do. This will also help in getting relative and quality leads.
Conduct surveys and interview current clients and customers and get feedback. Accept all feedback even if they are negative because this will be your main factor in making changes to provide quality service. Now that’s one of the best effective strategies for B2B lead generation.
Gather all the contacts you can get.
One of the best tips to increase B2B lead generation is to gather all the contacts you can get. This will give you a great tool to acquire all kinds of leads. Basically, contact is a direct equal of leads. The more you get them, the more leads you will have which will increase your chances of conversion.
You can get them by incorporating fill-out forms on your landing pages or getting them from social media channels. Contact information refers to any kind of demographic information they tell you.
You have to absolutely treat their demographic information as a go-signal for you to contact them if they provided it to you personally. So make sure you use a tool like CRM(customer relations management) to keep this information safe and accessible at all times.
Once you have gathered some demographic information, you can start campaigns to contact each of them strategically. An important note about this is that you should focus on being too invasive as to calling them every minute of the day.
Start by doing some warm calls, look at the time you talked to them the first time of when did they provide information to you then call them then. Ask about how you can help or tell them about your brand.
Remember, there is a thin line between warm calls and cold calling where you will just simply pitch to sell a product right away.
Another great way to utilize your collected information is to do email campaigns. Depending on how you wrote these emails, your message will always turn out on the inbox rather than the spam folder.
And 80% of people open their messages on mobile phones and they are always notified so that’s a great tip to keep in mind.
Create a blog.
Creating a blog means you are already doing content marketing. Blogging is great because it shows your level of professionality in a way that you are telling everybody how much you know about a specific industry or service.
Writing articles is also great to increase web traffic, brand awareness and will attract relevant people to your website. So this means that most of the people who will visit you looked for you because they have a challenge where you can help them. Therefore.
you will have a higher chance of converting them to customers. Another great benefit to creating a blog is it will significantly lower your bounce rates.
Basically, bounce rates are when people visit your website and just simply close the tab or go away immediately. Either because they didn’t find something helpful or you’re just not the one.
You can prevent this by starting a blog. As long as everything is organized in your blog and your topics are relevant, then there is a high chance you will get B2B leads. Simply because business-minded people tend to look for clues or proof before they venture into something unknown.
Guest blogging is also another great way for B2B lead generation acquisition. Basically, guest blogging refers to writing for other blog sites where they feature you as an author of that article.
Then they provide reference links to your website. So in a way, you are incorporating a discreet call to action to visit your website and learn more. Plus, it can also increase your traffic.
Do social media marketing.
In order to get a boost in B2B lead generation acquisition, you will have to clearly define who your target audience is. This is the main purpose of social media marketing. Start by creating accounts in all social media channels like Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter.
Linkedin will have some business and corporate people in them so might want to check it out more than the other two channels. Once you have defined who your target audience is, then you will now focus on getting them as leads.
If you acquire them as leads, then you will have more chances of having B2B leads as well. As long as they are quality leads, some of them will be business owners who will be the ones to make critical business decisions.
So what I’m saying is that B2B leads are business owners and marketers who make business-level decisions whether or not to go for partnership and office scale buying. In addition to creating social media accounts, you can also attend seminars or webinars to further attract relevant leads.
Also, you can talk to those relevant people personally either on chat or just by inviting them for lunch to brainstorm. What I’m saying is that you must do everything you can if deem this lead as crucial for your business.
Advertise discreetly.
As an average browser myself, I always hate those intrusive advertisements that pop up every time you click a word or finish reading a sentence. Additionally, you can’t opt to temporarily remove those ads so you just have to bear with some of them if you really want to read your articles or visit a website.
Some bloggers intentionally do this because it earns them money maybe from google ad sense or some advertising company. But this is a typical strategy that should be changed, especially for business owners who have websites.
This is more for personal blogs only. So if you want to attract people, you should really prevent this from happening.
However, you can perfectly promote and advertise as long as you do it discreetly. There are lots of ways to promote your brand. Like guest posting and linking back to your websites. Hyperlinking to words and sharing them on social media is also a great way.
Ninja pop-ups are okay too as long as people will only see it once. Also, an option to temporarily remove the pop-ups are great so that people will know that they can browse or read articles freely without any intrusive advertisements.
You can even create a call to action in a visual and clickable button. Just remember to put it somewhere where people can ignore it. You must do quality marketing and push out content to make your visitors and leads really want your products and services.
This is called inbound marketing, in a way, you are only attracting them instead of forcing them. And that’s one of the best ways for B2B lead generation acquisitions.
Use analytics.
Analytics is the heart of every business that is thinking of long term solutions and who really wants to grow. They are the main ingredient that drives every change for the better and beyond.
Analytics refers to statistics and measurable data for every aspect, strength, and weakness that your business will show. Basically, you will mostly see numbers and observations directly from how your business and company perform.
Now there are a lot of ways you can utilize analytics to boost B2B lead generation acquisitions. Like if you want to know when or where they are online, or when are they most active.
They are also helpful in getting information and creating business personas. Imagine if you have the power to understand the way your visitors and leads work.