What is B2B Lead Generation? Top 7 Expert Strategies for Brand Growth
B2B companies worldwide work on creating cutting-edge solutions for other brands to solve their pain points and generate revenue for their organization. Your company can grow exponentially by interacting with customers in high-value target organizations.
However, the competition grows more cut-throat with each passing day, and you must reach out to your prospects early in their buyer’s journey if you want to move them through the stages of your sales funnel faster and close deals by encouraging them to convert for your company.
You can implement the seven B2B lead generation strategies verified by industry experts to maintain a steady supply of qualified leads who can benefit from your brand’s products and services, thus achieving the conversion rates and ROI you have always wanted for your organization.
What is B2B Lead Generation?
A “lead” is defined as any individual who indicates interest in your brand’s products or services by interacting with your marketing efforts or company representatives to learn more about your solutions or make a purchase directly.
B2B lead generation is identifying prospective businesses and strategically targeting them with outreach efforts to entice them into converting for your company by moving prospects through your sales funnel.
Lead generation (lead gen) is a crucial task sales and marketing teams undertake to fulfill various activities that are part of a buyer’s journey, like raising brand awareness, providing information about brand solutions, and guiding prospects to close deals.
Most companies use email marketing, SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and other inbound marketing strategies to attract leads and acquire their contact information for further interactions.
Types of Qualified Leads
While all leads you capture with your B2B lead generation strategies are added to your sales funnel as potential customers and must be taken through the various stages to successfully convert, they aren’t all equal.
Businesses and entrepreneurs that fit the characteristics of your ideal customer profile (ICP) with high purchase intent can be categorized into two types of qualified leads:
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
Marketing qualified leads (MQL) are high-value prospects who have shown interest in your brand’s products and services by interacting with your marketing teams or business efforts.
Despite their interest in your company, these leads are not yet ready to receive a sales call and convert. They must be nurtured further to confirm whether they can talk to your sales representatives.
Activities that qualify a prospect as an MQL include repeated website visits, multiple form fill-ups, downloading gated content, attending webinars, etc.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
Sales qualified leads (SQL) are MQLs that have progressed further into your sales funnel and are prepared to receive a call from your sales representatives.
Unlike MQLs, these qualified leads have indicated a purchase intent by signing up to receive your product demo, interacting with your sales reps, or communicating with your company directly to convert for your brand by making a purchase.
SQLs are high-value leads that can be guided through your sales funnel rapidly and require the collaboration of various teams to close the deal.
The B2B Lead Generation Process
Although I have described “What is B2B lead generation?” and categorized the two categories of qualified leads, acquiring these leads is the critical challenge every company must face.
You need a robust lead generation process that involves your sales and marketing teams to create a framework for long-term revenue gains and brand growth.
Here are the steps every B2B lead generation process requires to unify inbound and outbound marketing strategies:
Identifying the Ideal Customers
Lead generation begins with acquiring the contact information for prospects to reach out and interact with them. However, most companies look over a critical prerequisite before taking this step: identifying their ideal customers.
You can locate prospects that fit your ICP by creating a detailed buyer’s persona. You can reliably map out a list of potential leads by leveraging information like technographic and firmographic data, budget, purchase habits, pain points, etc.
Selecting the Outreach Strategy
Now that you have a list of contacts, the next step is to reach out to them through proper communication channels.
Every lead is different, and targeting them requires multiple strategies like cold outreaches (cold calling and emailing), social media marketing, content marketing, etc.
You can choose from my list of the seven best B2B lead generation strategies I have compiled further down into the article to target your ICP effectively.
Prospecting and Qualifying High-Value Leads
The effectiveness of your inbound and outbound marketing strategies is responsible for how leads find your brand and the quality of leads you generate.
As leads start pouring into your sales funnel, you must prioritize them based on where they stand in their buyer’s journey. These stages are awareness, consideration, and conversion/decision.
- Awareness – After identifying a pain point the prospect wants a solution for, they move ahead in their buyer’s journey by researching possible solutions through blogs, white papers, and other content.In this stage, prospects can get a first impression of your brand.
- Consideration – With the research phase completed, the prospect evaluates their choices. They aren’t ready to purchase yet but are contacting vendors for more information.
- Conversion/Decision – Finally, prospects reach the decision stage, where they schedule multiple meetings with decision-makers in your organization.
You can use services like Fozzie to reach out to high-value leads in this stage of their buyer’s journey by booking one-on-one meetings to present your brand offering.
Your B2B lead generation strategies must adapt to where you and your prospects are in the sales funnel and the buyer’s journey.
The correct strategy and effective collaboration between your sales and marketing teams will ensure your qualified leads follow your sales funnel to eventually convert by making a purchase.
Importance of B2B Lead Generation
B2B lead generation is the backbone for any organization to gain revenue, drive ROI, and provide key information to your sales and marketing teams and sales development representatives (SDR).
Without lead generation, you cannot identify prospective customers, nurture qualified leads, convert leads into long-term customers, and thus, lose your business.
A robust lead generation strategy can assist your B2B company in the following ways:
- Learn More about your Target Audience: During your lead generation efforts, you and your teams are collecting data from a plethora of sources like website analytics for user interactions, signing up for specific forms or demos, messages to your reps, etc. The more information you gather, the more you can gradually work towards creating an accurate model of your target audience. You can work on optimizing your brand messaging and marketing tactics to shape the perfect outreach campaign for your leads.
- Build Brand Awareness: Lead generation tactics also involve spreading information about your brand’s solutions to inform prospects in their buyer’s journey who aren’t aware of your business. Measures like strategically crafted SEO content can help you gain visibility on the SERP while giving your brand authority in your niche by providing accurate information that customers can trust. Similarly, targeted advertisements in platforms with high user engagement can entice more prospects to your brand’s optimized landing pages.
- Discover your Total Addressable Market: With more leads, you can identify the exact demographic demand for your brand solutions. You can scale your strategies to accurately encompass the full extent of your total addressable market (TAM).
- Mutually Benefit Buyers and Sellers: Lead generation benefits B2B companies and their customers. Businesses gain more exposure and attract more prospects, while target businesses can benefit from solutions to long-standing pain points with your company’s solutions or collaborations.
- Drive ROI: Finally, B2B lead generation strategies help you identify potential customers to add to your sales funnel as qualified leads and eventually close the deal by encouraging them to convert to paying customers.
You can drive up ROI reliably and sustainably by implementing a successful lead generation strategy.
Top 7 B2B Lead Generation Strategies For Brand Growth
Now that you understand what lead generation looks like in the B2B industry, it is crucial to understand what tactics must be implemented based on your audience base and the stage your high-valued leads are in your sales funnel or their buyer’s journey.
While your company can choose from various methods that suit your brand and its customer base, you can follow the seven best B2B lead generation strategies for exponential growth:
Build Content Campaigns To Beat Competitors
Content marketing campaigns are a vital pillar for any inbound marketing strategy. Since your prospects want more information in their buyer’s journey before purchasing, you can assert your authority in the field by being a source of trustworthy knowledge.
Researching keywords to identify the ones with purchase intent that drive more clicks helps you hinge your content creation based on what your target audience is searching for. You must also closely monitor what your competitors are doing with their content.
You can find out what kind of content ranks on the first page of Google, the topics they discuss, long-tailed keywords, etc. Detailed research helps you understand how to create better blogs, white papers, and other content that beats their points.
Optimizing your SEO helps you stand out from the competitors by catering to what your ICP is searching for before converting. These can also be sent to qualified leads through sales reps or emails to answer their questions or provide solutions.
High-quality branded content can be gated in exchange for your prospect’s contact information.
Run A/B Tests on Key Landing Pages
Your marketing efforts will not be perfect the first time, and that’s alright!
Lead generation channels are perpetually optimized based on how your target audience interacts with your web pages, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, landing page elements, etc.
While these might look like minor tweaks, new elements such as background images, CTA button placements, color schemes, etc., can evoke various reactions from your target audience, which can be the difference between a bounce and a conversion.
Personalize Lead Magnets For Buyer Personas
Lead magnets are anything your prospects find valuable enough to exchange contact information to gain. By nature, these lead magnets must come with incentives that address your prospect’s pain points for which they seek solutions.
You can harness your understanding of your buyer personas to provide guides, tutorials, templates, case studies, etc., that prospects can acquire by following the designated lead magnet buttons.
Lead magnets can help increase demand, share detailed information, and generate interest in your brand’s products and services.
Leverage Social Proof and Referrals
Consumers on the internet are more likely to believe other verified customers of your brand, even if they are anonymous!
Incorporating social proof in your lead generation strategy can significantly impact your conversion rates by showing customers who successfully solved their problems by purchasing your products.
Adding testimonials on your web pages can confer better credibility for your brand, remove doubts a prospect may have by reading user reviews, and move further down your sales funnel as they gather more information about your brand offerings.
You can also ask for referrals or set up a reward program when existing customers refer people from their social circle to try out your brand. Referred leads follow social proof and have the potential to be better long-term clients.
Create Lead Generating Video Content
Video-hosting platforms like YouTube are as essential as Google for prospects when gathering information.
Depending on the demographic, videos are statistically proven to be a more engaging format to help viewers retain information for longer. Your brand offering can stay memorable for longer when put into a video format.
You can also repurpose your content, like blogs, into an audio-visual experience to convey details about your company to other B2B leads who might not want to spend time reading through your content.
Integrate Organic Search and PPC
Pay-per-click (PPC) brings numerous leads when implemented correctly, giving your company the appropriate budget to sustain a PPC strategy.
You can combine two strategies, like running a paid search campaign for organic keywords your company’s website is ranking poorly in.
Utilize LinkedIn
While it might be an obvious answer to some, most B2B companies overlook LinkedIn as the premier social media platform to connect with industry professionals and generate qualified B2B leads.
You can manage your LinkedIn profile by applying every strategy mentioned here, i.e., using keywords to stand out from your competition, creating and publishing unique content, adding customer testimonials, etc.
You can also leverage display advertisements on LinkedIn to target specific companies and generate quality leads.
Despite these strategies, the initial investment in capital or time can be too steep for many B2B organizations. Reaching out to key decision-makers in target companies is not guaranteed, even if you generate quality leads.
Fozzie helps you communicate with high-value leads through online meetings at a fraction of the cost of advertising and other conventional sales campaigns.
Fozzie: Simplify Your LinkedIn B2B Lead Generation Strategy
Fozzie is an easy-to-use online meeting scheduling platform that lets you search for industry professionals based on their job titles and roles to arrange meetings with key decision-makers where you can present your brand offering in a one-to-one sales pitch and convert quality leads.
Fozzie connects your sales and marketing reps with experts at a fraction of the resources you would have required if you resorted to conventional B2B lead generation strategies.
You can start arranging meetings with prices starting from just $1 on our central platform, which enables you to search for LinkedIn-verified profiles and schedule online meetings with them. A personalized interaction helps you convert B2B leads faster by skipping several sales funnel stages.
Fozzie lets you search for prospects manually by typing out the names of leads directly onto our search bar to look for profiles that fit your ICP. You can also narrow down your search by configuring the “Company Size,” “$ Range,” “Job Title,” “Role,” and “Industry” filters.
In Fozzie, you can directly contact your choice of experts by sending them a message requesting an online meeting. When the request is accepted, a meeting takes place on the agreed-upon date, and the meeting fee is deducted after the meeting successfully concludes.
Industry professionals can sign up for our platform and select your custom meeting fee to communicate with interested companies. We also offer native integrations to Calendly and Pledge.to.
Conclusion
B2B lead generation is a process every company constantly optimizes to cope with the dynamic requirements of consumers worldwide to attract more potential customers and drive ROI by providing solutions for their pain points.
Whether your prospects are researching solutions or indicate purchase intent, you have to reach out to high-value leads early in their buyer’s journey to present your brand offering as the best alternative in the market and convert them into long-term paying customers.
The best lead generation strategies list can help you build and maintain a steady supply of qualified leads. Still, it can require considerable resources to set up, which can be too steep for smaller organizations.
Fozzie provides a hassle-free experience of connecting with industry professionals on one-on-one online meetings that you can schedule for prices as low as $1. You can present your detailed brand solutions and convert target companies ready to collaborate.
Simplify your sales outreach and meet quality leads faster with Fozzie today!