12 B2B Lead Generation Tips & Strategies prevail in 2020

If you landed up on this page searching for B2B lead generation strategies this year, let me tell you one thing, I can feel your pain of overwhelming lead generation goal and expectation set by your management. Accept it or not, B2B lead generation is like finding a pearl in the deep Blue Ocean. What makes it easy is finding a sweet spot of right market research, right target audience, right channel, right message, and the right time to reach your audience.

With digital marketing space evolving at breakneck speed, it has now become a mandate for B2B marketers to re-iterate their lead generation strategies quite frequently. According to the HubSpot Inbound report, 61% percent of businesses are saying that lead generation is their biggest marketing challenge. Another study from Marketo unveiled, approximately 96% of website visitors aren’t ready to purchase.

So, how you make up to your Lead Generation numbers, what are new B2B lead generation tips and strategies that will help you scale up your ROI?

While many free tips and tricks will fetch you good leads for the short run, but they aren’t consistent enough to help you maximize your ROI considerably, here, I have tried to compile 12 best-of-the-best B2B Lead Generation tactics and strategies that will prevail this year.

In a hurry? Can’t go through the entire article –

1. Focus on Content Marketing & SEO
2. Social Media Marketing
3. Use Marketing Automation Tool
4. Participate in Q&A Forums
5. Give Referral Marketing A Shot
6. Leverage Power of Review Portals
7. Try Lead-Gen Ads
8. Don’t Miss out on Retargeting and Remarketing
9. Employee Advocacy
10. Go Mobile Friendly
11. Live Chat and Chatbots Integration
12. Launch ABM Campaigns

Oh, you’re still here, great! It seems like you need more food for thought. Let me give you a brief explanation of every point in the list, and how these strategies can help you generate qualified B2B leads.

Lead Generation Strategies prevail this year

1. Content Marketing and SEO – Both content marketing and SEO, when done right, yield immensely mind-blowing results. Content marketing isn’t a cheap affair and takes a lot of strategic study and observation of your users who are continually engaging with your content, analyzing their behavior building up high-quality, relevant content pertaining their position in buyer’s journey and delivering right communication to the right person at the right time on the right channel. A study by Demandmetric states that content marketing yields 3X more leads than outbound marketing strategies and cost 62% less. Another survey by Marketing Prof and CMI unveils that 63% of businesses don’t have a documented content marketing strategy. The same study revealed that 32% of marketers affirm that their content creation workflow is weak, and 60% fail to create content consistently.

Google’s mission to provide the most relevant results to searchers has made them smarter than ever before. Gone are days when people use to create keyword-rich content and adopt black hat SEO techniques to be on top of the search results. With the introduction of Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence in SEO in the form of RankBrain, BERT, and many other updates, now SEO strategies have gone on a 360 degrees flip.

Search engine optimization’s primary objective is to drive high-quality traffic to the website while content marketing aims to deliver valuable and relevant content to your website visitors to attain the desired action or generate business.

So to say if today your content creation, content strategy, content flow, and promotion method are not aligned with what users want and ultimately with search engine algorithms, you are not going to ripe any benefits from either of them [Content Marketing and SEO combined].

Some of the content marketing and SEO trends you can embed in your marketing strategy are –

• Video Marketing – Video is “THE MOST CONSUMED” type of data by the users over the internet. With the emergence of new short video content platforms like TikTok, SnapChat, IGTV, and others, video consumption rates are skyrocketing across the globe.

TikTok crossed 1.5 Billion downloads on the app store in 2018, recording over 52 minutes of average time spent by a user in a day. While on the other hand, YouTube became the most-downloaded iOS app in 2018, with over 2 billion monthly active users.

Videos can increase organic traffic by 157% – ConversionXL.

According to Wistia, on average, people devote 2.6x more time on pages with video.

How can videos generate B2B leads?

Create irresistible content which your target audience is craving; it could be one of the forms mentioned below –

• Live Streams
• Webinar
• Explainer video
• Vlogs (Video Blogs)
• Tutorials [WH type Videos]
• Video Testimonial
• Product Demo Video
• Exclusive Interviews

AI-based Content Personalization – Gone are days when businesses used to send bulk marketing communications to databases, show random ads to audiences, and other spray and pray marketing tactics to generate leads. If you are not using personalization in content marketing, you are already lost the battle.

As rightly said, personalization is not only using the first name and last name in email or communication. With the emergence of Artificial intelligence and machine learning, marketers can now personalize their content far deeper level than ever. Content personalization can now be done on the bases of visitor/users browsing history, activity, behavior, interest, and on other personal information too. 

To give you the taste of it, you would be amazed to know that –

• 35% of the sale is triggered by amazon’s recommendation engine
• 72% of consumers in 2019 only engage with marketing messages that are customized to their specific interests – SmarterHQ

Voice Search – Voice search is the next big thing after the video. Voice search has been claimed to be a never miss bucket list trends in 2020 by many marketers and studies. In 2018, voice search was said to be accountable for more than 50% of searches by 2020. Although I don’t see that to have reached the mark, it is not also deniable that it is gripping the ground at a very steady space. And any business or SEO experts need to optimize the websites for voice search as the rise of households is now getting equipped by Amazon Echo, Google Home, and other smart voice assistant devices of this world.

Another good reason is the google updates and search engines quickly adopting AI and ML for serving best and intent-based results for users’ queries. Google updates like BERT, RankBrain, and HummingBird are enough reasons for any marketer to catch up to this trend.

Featured Snippet – Rise of mobile and voice search has pushed Google to come up with something that suffices the user’s intent, relevancy and provides the best results for the query, and that led to the evolution of POSITION ZERO or FEATURED SNIPPETS.

Featured Snippets is usually the best answer to users’ queries extracted from the webpage that is google thinks most relevant to the user’s intent. Introduced in January 2014, it is stealing almost 8% of organic clicks from the top-ranking result in google SERPs.

Want to get started with content marketing and SEO for your business? Let’s connect now!

Social Media Marketing – Many businesses in B2B arguably says that social media is not their cup of tea as their business is boring. I recently, in conversation with one ex-coworker, heard that since they are into the finance business, Linkedin is an excellent platform, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are not a place for them. And I said, why not? You need to be present wherever your target audience exists.

It’s not always about promotion, create, and share content that your ideal customers like, be present in their social feeds, don’t give up on your visibility, brand recall. If you serve them what they need, they will get attracted to you.

Need some inspiration?

Check out, ShareKhan, Marketo, HubSpot, NASA, Piramal Group, Oracle’s Instagram profile.

https://www.instagram.com/nasa/

https://www.instagram.com/sharekhan/

https://www.instagram.com/marketoinc

https://www.instagram.com/hubspot

https://www.instagram.com/piramalfoundation

https://www.instagram.com/oracle

Use Marketing Automation Tool – Today’s customer behavior is highly unpredictable, complex, and volatile. It now becomes essential for B2B businesses to understand with their customer presence is not restricted to a single platform/channel/medium. With the storming digital evolutions that have happened this decade, your target audience is now almost omnipresent.

The ideal customer persona that you have identified to target might be using multiple devices to access information or probably search for a product or service that you offer. And that’s enough reason for you to use an effective and affordable marketing automation tool that helps you reach out to your target audience at the right time, on the right channel, and with the right communication.

A marketing automation tool lets you –

• Identify and map your customer journey
• Analyze their behaviors
• Track engagement
• Segment your database
• Provide comprehensive reporting
•  Identify the right channel working for you

“Businesses that implement marketing automation experience an average of a 451% increase in qualified leads.” – Business2Community

If that stimulus you to think about implementing one for your business, here are my personal favorites based on my hands-on experience –

• HubSpot
• Marketo
• NetcoreSmartech
• WebEngage
• CleverTap

Participate in Question and Answer Forum – Another great way to generate B2B leads is Participating Question and Answer forums like quora.com, answers.com, WikiHow, Yahoo Answers, and many more. Let’s take a typical example of quora; the question-answer platform has more than 300 million monthly unique visitors.

That’s not very far from Twitter [335 Million], Reddit [330 Million], LinkedIn [294 million].

Quora, on average, gets 85.1 million monthly organic traffic with close to 62 million keywords ranking in search results pages. To give you more stats about the platform –

• Quora has over 400,000 topics available
• Total monthly organic traffic contributes more than 63%
• 35% of the US population uses Quora
• Out of all businesses on the platform, 60% are in B2B space

Source – [Foundationinc.co]              

These stats are just for Quora, imagine the presence and opportunities you will have by participating and contributing to these communities.

Referral Marketing – As the name suggests, referral marketing is a marketing tactic used by marketers that employs word of mouth promotion of a product or service to new customers by existing customers, in-house employees, referral business partners, or business collaborations, which includes incentivization to referrals.

It is more prevalent amongst B2C business promotions and works pretty much wonders for them. For B2B lead generation, this tactic seems a bit difficult but not impossible deal to crack.

Some of the best referral marketing use cases are –

• Trello incentivizes with a free one-month premium for each recommendation on-boarded by the user.

• WordPress Monetary Referral Program that offers to earn $300 for a referral

Leverage Power of Review Portals – Online consumer reviews plays a vital role in purchasing decision of consumers. Consumers always look for experiences from other people who have already used a particular product or service. A recent study by BrightLocal unveils, more than half the customer doesn’t opt for a product or service that has ratings less than 4*. Online reviews more or less work like one-to-one promotions or word of mouth marketing that your loyal customers do for you.

While these are broader level picturesque, B2B businesses need to leverage this eternal power of online business reviews on review portals like g2.com, capterra, financeonlinereviews, trustradius, softwaresuggests and many more and don’t forget Google.

“Google, in general, accounts for more than 57.5% of all reviews worldwide.”

“82% of consumers visit review sites because they want to purchase a service or a product.” - RevLocal

Hungry for stats?

 “A single business review can lift its conversions by 10%.”- RevLocal

“Customers could spend 31% more on a business with great reviews. ”- Martech Zone

Some business review portals offer you PPC campaigns, lead generation campaigns that can drive more targeted and sales-ready leads to you in bare-minimum budgets. As these portals have different categories and customers come on these platforms with a specific goal of search products or services, running PPC campaigns on these platforms, high possibilities of hunting some ready to sale leads.

Try Lead-Gen Ads  – You want leads and haven’t tried running lead generation ads yet? High time you should dive into it. Almost every social media platform, ad network, or even search engines give you the option of running lead generation ads on their platform that can yield high-quality MQL & SQL for your business.

This year in September, Google announced lead form extensions that help advertisers to capture leads directly from SERPs. Here’s how it looks like –

Not only google but also platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & Quora provides the option of running lead generation ads which help businesses to reach the target audience who are highly interested in your product or service. JD Prater, Evangelist, and Product Marketer, Quora says that of all the companies using Quora Ads, 60% are B2B, and 40% are B2C. Adults spend 2x times more than the general population, and 37% of them are more likely to be in management positions that involve decision making.

Enough, a reason to start of your first lead gen ad on quora? Let’s move to Facebook then, more than 5 million businesses use Facebook advertising, and 78% of marketers are satisfied with the performance of Facebook ads. And to amaze you, the average click-through rate (CTR) in Facebook ads is 90% across all industries.

And what to tell you about LinkedIn lead generation ads, it’s no brainer that being a professional network, LinkedIn gives you more penetration and reach to your target persona than any other target audience for B2B business. If I have to go by LinkedIn claims, it has 3X higher lead conversion rates than any other platform and dispersion into audiences that has 2x more buying power than any other web audience.

Want to get started with Google Ads for lead generation? Let’s get in touch now!

Don’t Miss out on Retargeting and Remarketing – You did everything to attract visitors on your website but couldn’t make that first impression to get the desired actions or engage them or convert them into a sale, retargeting, in that case, can help you big time. Retargeting in layman words is a process of following your website visitors’ digital footprints across the internet and reach them.

Remarketing, on the other hand, is again following your “known website visitors” or users online to promote your product or services.

Two terms have been perceived wrong most of the time by the people. Retargeting is best when you want to convert your website visitors to your customers by promoting your business wherever they spend time. For, eg. A visitor of your website can be served ads on a sports column; he spends time or on news daily or social media through retargeting.

Remarketing is your surefire weapon when you want to cross-sell/upsell a product or service to your know customer. For instance, you want to offer a free trial of your product to a blog subscriber of yours. And to do that, you can take the help of email marketing, ad networks, social media, and many other channels too.

Employee Advocacy – Well, for most of the B2B business, this seems of no value, but let me put it in simple words; employee advocacy is the promotion of your business or company by the people who work for it. Guess what? If your employees are happy with your company, business, product, or service and they have been taken care of by you all the time. They feel motivated, satisfied, and comfortable and in turn, what they do, they express and let people know about their overwhelming experience with you. And you don’t have to pay them extra for that kind of promotion.

This helps you create more positivity about your brand, culture, sentiments and eventually trust. No one can promote or market your product or service better than your employees. Just like the saying – Charity begins from your home, I believe – Marketing or Promotions starts from your own company.

Many businesses fail to understand this simple fundamental plan and lose out on attracting opportunities for attracting new business, new talent, sales, and much-needed branding through employees’ social networks.

On average, collectively, employees’ social networks are 10x larger than the brands. Employee shares get double the clickthrough rates than the brand. And Salespeople who post quality content regularly are 45% likely to exceed their quota. – LinkedIn

Do not miss to include this strategy in your 2020 marketing plan.

Go Mobile-Friendly – Gone are days when people used to sit in front of their personal computers to fetch information online. According to a report, consumers spend more than five hours a day on their smartphones. Up to 70% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, and 69% of smartphone users likely to do business with companies with mobile-friendly websites.

These statistics are sufficient to go mobile-friendly landing pages, websites, or even a simple emailer to generate quality leads.

While on search, 96% of people use Google, and you can’t deny the fact that Google strongly supports fast-loading, mobile-friendly sites more than others. Of entire PPC clicks, 52% comes from mobile devices. A 100-millisecond delay in load time can cause a 7% drop in conversion rates. – Akamai

And if your landing pages are not mobile optimized and fast loading, you’re going to lose on your leads big-time. Although, your website load speed also depends on the type of your hosting service viz. Shared hosting, Dedicated Hosting, or VPS Hosting. Make sure you opt for a reliable hosting service provider and everything else in terms of developer-level optimization; Page Speed Insights can be your best resource to identify the areas of improvement.

Live Chat and Chatbots Integration – Another way to convert your inbound traffic in your customers is by implementing live chat and chatbot integration within your website. Today’s consumer is impatient and highly reactive. 51% of customers want businesses to be available 24/7. Live chat is also a great way to enhance your serviceability towards your customers.

Live chat is a preferred way to reach out customer support team by 41% customers.

AI-enable chatbots are also the best way to cross-sell and upsell your product or service to your website visitors based on their past engagements with your website or their behavior, interest, and demographics.

According to Zendesk’s blog, live chat drives 82% to 92% customer satisfaction, and 48% of consumers favor companies with proactive support.

And I am sure you don’t want to lose out on such an opportunity!

Launch ABM Campaigns – ABM or Account-based marketing is a strategic tactic for marketing to businesses with the marketing resources to engage a specific set of target accounts. ABM calls for a high level of sales and marketing alignment to achieve maximum ROI on their lead generation effort on key prospects account by targeting them with highly personalized marketing communications.

ABM is the most effective lead generation tactic for B2B companies for marketing their product or service to a few key accounts or a specific industry.

A typical example of an ABM campaign could be a SaaS marketing automation company generating infographics, ebooks, videos, conducting webinars for FinTech Companies and how their solution is best fit for automating their marketing activities, cost optimization, and reduced man-hours.

ABM uses the same marketing channels and methods of targeting users but the communication has to be highly personalized to that account, industry, or target audience.

According to LinkedIn, 84% of businesses using ABM say it delivers higher ROI than other marketing campaigns.

Companies that implement ABM have reported an 84% improvement in reputation and a 74% improvement in customer relationships. – Itsma.com

And a joint report from Marketo and Reachforce reveals that companies that use ABM become 67% better at closing deals when they sync their sales and marketing teams.

Conclusion –

While B2B companies see lead generation as their biggest challenge in marketing. Careful observation of the target audience, channels that work best for your market, new ways of reaching the customer base and adoption of new channels can make a massive spike in your lead no.s, and abiding tactics mentioned above in your marketing strategy can help you become a lead generation machine for sure.

If you need assistance with setting up, execution, and optimization of B2B lead generation campaigns for your business, feel free to reach out now!

Article originally published on - winaybari.com