Building a robust pipeline is just every B2B marketer's dream and they work hard to find opportunities to do so. Yet, generating leads is one of the toughest aspects of B2B marketing.
It takes time, effort, and patience to attract quality leads and build a trusting relationship that inspires them to choose your brand. When you've KPIs and monthly targets to beat, this can be stressful.
That's why we want to explore some effective lead gen strategies that may boost your efforts.
1. Create Educational Webinars
In the past, sellers got away with hard-selling and boasting about their brands, but that doesn't work anymore. Today's buyers are more aware and their greatest interest is in how your proposed solutions can benefit them.
And herein lies the benefit of educational webinars. Through educational webinars, you can highlight the benefits of your solutions and why your audience needs them—without being too sales-y.
The more these audiences understand your offerings, the higher their likelihood of converting and making purchases.
Top tips for creating educational webinars include
- Keeping things casual and conversational. While formal, high-level language makes you sound professional—it may make explanations too hard to grasp and boring.
- Encourage attendance through freebies. New entrants or companies without “star power” are likely to have a harder time getting signups. Naturally so, since people don't know you yet. Giving out freebies may help sway them.
- Add imagery. Even interesting topics need to be broken down and made more compelling through visual elements. Not only does imagery help audiences retain information, but talking endlessly may feel like a lecture and people could drop off.
2. Build an Online Community
Dedicated B2B online communities aren't just great lead generation strategies but also create a platform to glean insights and feedback from members.
As you continuously engage community members you develop, and maintain relationships and deliver personalized support.
To run an effective community.
- Determine your goal. Is it to increase demand? To identify and mobilize brand ambassadors and influencers? To increase customer satisfaction? Boost collaboration, or reduce customer support costs?
- Choose a platform. Do you want an informational forum for sharing content about your business solutions and industry or a shared-interest forum where members discuss broader topics?
- Consider what software features will support your goals. A user-friendly interface, integrations, deeper analytics, customer support, or platform flexibility?
- Identify key in-house stakeholders. Who will manage the community? Which departments will benefit from the feedback you receive?
- Set up the community. Start with a few discussion categories, display recent discussions to encourage first time visitors to sign up, and make the sign-up process easy. Set up a distinct email address for forum notifications.
- Assign permission roles. Can new members post pictures or links or do you want to restrict their participation to texts? We've seen people who join groups and immediately share irrelevant and annoying links/pics.
3. Work With Influencers
B2B influencers aren't your typical influencers who spend time on Insta or TikTok posting pics and videos of themselves. They are industry experts, thought leaders, and passionate customers who possess the ability to shape their followers' opinions.
Brands invest considerable resources to create great content, but this content doesn't get very far thanks to the brands' limited channels and followers.
When you partner with an influencer, your brand and content receive greater exposure increasing opportunities for engagement from their followers.
Influencers have a pulse of the market and can let you know how your brand and solutions are perceived by audiences and what messages work. You can then work on your value proposition to improve customer perception.
This, in addition to, building your credibility and providing social proof that says your solutions are fantastic and they work.
How do you measure influencer marketing's ROI?
In most cases, a brand's reason for engaging an influencer may revolve around reaching new audiences, raising brand awareness, improving sales, and managing online reputation.
To check its effectiveness, you'll want to measure clicks, impressions, as well as the number of conversions, and sales resulting directly from it.
4. Engage A Lead Generation Agency
Reputable lead generation service providers can help improve your lead generation efforts exponentially.
Their teams are well-versed in an array of lead-generating tactics and can leverage opportunities to capture leads. But before partnering with one, here are some questions you'll want to cover
- Is the provider familiar with your products/services? A company that has previous experience in your industry is more likely to succeed at generating quality leads compared to one that doesn't.
- Do they provide inbound or outbound activities? Inbound agencies specialize in creating content that attracts leads to your company website and social platforms. Outbound lead gen agencies rely on cold calling, email, direct mail, and other outreach channels to generate leads.
- Can the agency tailor their services in line with your needs? Are you looking for fully managed or partly self-directed services? Are the services tiered packages or custom? Does the agency offer additional services and how is the pricing done?
- What stages do they cover? With most B2Bs going through lengthy sales cycles, you'll need to establish the parts of this cycle that they will handle. In the event you already have a specific customer acquisition strategy, is the agency willing to work with it?
5. Use Live Chat
Whether it's for business or personal use, consumers appreciate live chat support. It's convenient and you don't wait for days for a response.
For the vendor, it's an opportunity to engage online visitors, learn their interests and preferences, and share educational content that deals with the visitor's queries.
Best practices include
- Adding the live support on high-intent pages. Product pages, pricing, and returns are worth having live support on to answer queries and build customer confidence in your services. If you find a visitor lingering on a product page, you can offer them a deal via live chat.
- Embed a signup form in your chat box. The visitor may not buy just yet, but that shouldn't spell the end of your conversation. Get them to sign up for your newsletter so you continue nurturing them.
- Use live chat to recover abandoned carts. Thanks to its real-time nature, you can receive triggers when visitors abandon your page and follow them up with recovery offers.
- Create a backup communication channel for offline use. Pre-recorded messages based off FAQs are a great place to start. You can also ask visitors to leave offline messages that you'll respond to when you get back.
