How do you do it right? What is the biggest challenge in B2B marketing?
To get straight to the point: it's all about leads! It all starts with the lead - without leads there are no customers, no sales and no reason for existence. Without leads you are, so to speak, lost.
The truth about B2B lead generation
The question that hangs in the air for every marketing employee is: How do I generate leads? There are only unsatisfactory answers to the topic of lead generation B2B. Just type in Google: "How do I generate leads in the B2B area? Nowhere else will you find more absurd and inaccurate answers to a topic than here. Nobody wants to read today:" Tweet five times a day and your problems will disappear", "Share tweets that could arouse the interest of your potential customer" or "Expand your trade show presence to generate, use and qualify more leads! Many people in B2B marketing are frustrated and often wear two different socks because you have the most difficult job on this planet - generating leads! If you're a marketing professional in a company, have four ulcers, a cracked toenail, thin hair and bad dreams about Google Ads, I know where it comes from. You're a hero with an extremely demanding and difficult job. There are a lot of bad strategies on the internet about this topic that I don't share. You want to generate leads? Real leads? Regardless of your industry? To write this article I had to search countless content pages on the internet, screen blog posts, review customer projects and annoy employees at Thought Leader Systems, but in the end I came to an acceptable result. Of course there was a lot of nonsense on the internet, a lot of hyped strategies and business gibberish but I also found some ingenious facts and strategies. Often these were only hidden on 3-5 of the search result pages.
Where do leads in the B2B area come from?
HubSpot provides a good starting point with its chart to find out where leads come from. We see all the channels we would have expected - PPC, Social-Media, Ads, etc. - but there is also this mysterious "More" section! If we look at this bar, we see that it is the biggest bar! But what does "Others" actually mean?! It means that nobody has any idea where these B2B leads come from. Even well-positioned companies usually don't know how their leads get to the site. But what helps you to generate leads are various marketing offers, business relationships and a mix of different types of interactions, activities, behaviors and efforts. Voila, there is a new lead. But where it came from is difficult or impossible to determine. Takeaway: B2B lead generation is not about focusing on a specific and particular lead, but rather understanding that B2B lead generation is a combination of unquantifiable activities and behaviors that ultimately work.
The digital revolution has changed the playground of B2B marketing
This revolution has created a flood of new techniques, caused the decline of old techniques and their restructuring. However, the goal remains the same - conversions! How we get the leads for conversions is a completely different topic that I will not discuss here. Based on the research I have done, I have been able to find three successful ways to generate leads. These ways are independent of the industry you are working in.
1. Use social media channels for B2B lead generation
However, I would like to make one thing clear: Don't expect a social media presence to be the source of your new leads. Your social media presence is important for lead generation, but not inherently effective. But I will show you techniques for using social media as a lead generation method. But be aware that it is not enough to have a LinkedIn account or to tweet once a day on Twitter. So don't neglect the social media channels as a lead source, but don't consider them the Holy Grail of lead generation either.
Twitter as a lead generation source
In the social media networks you can find all kinds of people. People are licked, shared and posted. And there are leads that you can find there. What about Twitter in particular? Strictly speaking, Twitter is a microblogging service, but it has all the characteristics of a social network. A Forbes article fuelled the claim that Twitter is the most appropriate social media channel for the B2B lead generation. However, the article could not provide any evidence for the hypothesis, except for a reference to a "recent study". Perhaps the most significant difference between Twitter and traditional social media channels is the fact that Twitter interacts mainly via text, which can be up to 280 characters long. So if you want to use this channel for your lead generation, your messages have to fit perfectly.
Enable newsletter subscriptions on your Facebook page.
A good way to generate leads through social media is to allow newsletter subscriptions directly in the respective social media channel.
Use CTA's
Challenge interested parties to a certain action by using meaningful Call to Actions.
How do I generate leads with social media?
Forward the social media visitor from the social media channels to your website. A social media visitor is not a "lead" in the sense that no email address or other means of contact is generated. To ensure this, you must ensure that the social media visitor comes to your website. Make it easy for them to do so. Give them several links to your website, ideally to landing pages, where they can download a marketing offer by entering their contact information!
Use LinkedIn
LinkedIn has the highest rank among social media platforms in terms of B2B lead generation. Research by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs has shown that no other platform is used so excessively by B2B marketers. LinkedIn has a large number of potential customers for everyone. Nowhere else is there such a high number of experts, decision makers and executives. Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is a much more sophisticated platform. If you want to establish contacts or even relationships with a company and the responsible employees, you should definitely be represented here. But, to make it clear once again, just like the other social media platforms, LinkedIn does not generate B2B leads for you alone. You should take this into account if you want to be able to generate B2B leads:
Be present and active: Every social media presence requires these two qualities
Go online and be present
Link yourself to colleagues, business partners and experts. Make sure your company has a solid LinkedIn account. Make sure that your company's positioning and presence is clear. If necessary, complete the profile of your company. This is different from your personal profile and is essential for generating B2B leads. Join groups: LinkedIn has a huge selection of groups you can join. The best way to join a group is to join a group that also contains your potential leads. Start a conversation: LinkedIn is like a huge cocktail party, but without cocktails.
Look for help
Sometimes the best way to generate a lead is to ask for help. A small quid pro quo can be the start of a valuable collaboration. Pay for leads: If you want to take this direct route, LinkedIn has a built-in tool for that. This tool allows users who visit your company profile to contact you. In the best case scenario, these are always warm leads. To use this tool, however, a paid LinkedIn advertising account is required. Nobody said that social media leads are free. When the leads come in, you can take a look at their LinkedIn account and contact them again via LinkedIn.
To get a ROI from these sources, you must have a lead conversion process in place. To get plenty of leads, but most importantly to get suitable leads, you should: Use links and CTA's that link to your website and put a lot of your effort into LinkedIn lead generation.
Create a solid content marketing plan. Content marketing is the past, present and future of marketing. Content marketing is a good source for generating B2B leads, provided it has been properly implemented.
2. Generate leads through content marketing
Content marketing is a huge field with numerous subcategories. Below are some of the best tactics for generating B2B leads through content marketing:
Host a Webinar
Find a topic that is appealing in your marketing segment and plan a webinar on that topic.
Attention: Webinars are not intended to sell your product! They are there to inform your potential leads. A webinar is a cost-effective way to get your message across to a large audience and ideally generate a lot of leads.
Publish research reports
To get information for my blog posts or articles I constantly use so-called research reports. They are not only extremely added value and informative but also offer an incredible opportunity for lead generation.
Use videos
There is no question that videos have a great appeal and that they represent the greatest viral potential among content formats.
If you don't produce videos, you are missing out on one of the best sources for generating leads with content marketing.
Operate a corporate blog
To dominate the search results and to consolidate and improve the ranking of your company, there is no way around blogs. Of course it should be search engine optimized just like the other pages of your website.
CONCLUSION: All these content marketing techniques interlock. You can publish your research reports on your blog, put a video excerpt of your webinar online and promote your webinar on your blog. All these methods should be used together in tandem.
In summary
More B2B companies than ever before are using content marketing. It is one of the most effective forms of marketing. The best forms of content are webinars, research reports, videos, and blogs. And be sure to make content offers available for download. Because this is a very proven method to gain leads. The concept is simple: Create an e-book that could be of interest to your target group. Make it available free of charge. In return, you can download the contact details of the interested party by filling in the form provided.
More and more companies are offering free e-books. As the term e-book has worn off a little, many companies now refer to them as guides, tips or manuals. An e-book allows you to meet the needs of your target group directly with a free digital resource. The better the subject of the e-book, the more attention it will attract and the more often it will be downloaded.
E-books are not the only content offering available to you, but only one of many. Whatever you offer for free should be relevant to those of your target groups you want to address with it. Whether it is an infographic, royalty-free photos, WordPress templates, fonts, gifs or other assets - promote and offer them.
Regardless of your industry, users are always willing to give you their own email address in exchange for free content offers. Use this method to sustainably improve your lead generation and cover the needs of your target group with free digital resources.
3. Use marketing automation
Marketing automation is not simply a lead generation strategy, but a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that also includes lead generation!
There are still enough marketing teams that do not make optimal use of marketing automation in connection with lead generation. They cram their database with purchased email address lists, which they then use less than 15% in poorly thought-out and ineffective campaigns!
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation uses various software components for the automation of your marketing processes. The software components used help your company to optimize the intensive marketing tasks and reduce the time spent on them. Your job is to tell the software what kind of result you want. Marketing automation software provides you with insights into user behavior in social media and on the website and helps you generate leads. With the help of the marketing automation software, the generated leads are subsequently maintained with news or the provision and information about free content offers (lead nuturing). The leads are then guided through the sales funnel with the help of e-mail marketing, which you can use directly from the software in the best case.
Good marketing automation software subsumes everything in a single process, from market research to lead gene, lead management, lead scoring, lead nuturing, campaign management, analysis, qualification of leads and determination of the ROI.
Frequently asked questions that we are asked again and again about marketing automation:
- What does the introduction of marketing automation cost? The answer to this is that prices vary greatly depending on the provider and version. However, there are also inexpensive alternatives of Marketing Automation for smaller companies.
- How easy it is to implement Marketing Automation. Because it contains the word "automation", many mistakenly assume that it is easy to implement. They assume that the software only needs to be purchased and it will take care of everything else by itself? But this is wrong! The implementation of marketing automation requires the establishment of complex set-up processes before it can finally work for you successfully.
In summary: Marketing Automation to generate B2B leads
I highly recommend Marketing Automation as a lead generation technique because it will be very effective for some B2B companies. However, make sure in advance that the included features are suitable for your business and don't just buy software that at the end of the day is completely unsuitable for your business.
The market for Marketing Automation continues to grow, also or especially in the German speaking countries.
Conclusion
There are many ways to generate B2B leads, and no matter which way you choose, it will involve work, but in the end you will be rewarded with qualified leads if you implement and follow their measures consistently. Regardless of your industry, the three paths I have outlined are in my opinion the most effective.