They offer a succinct description of their product: anyone purposefully looking for something similar will know they're in the right place.
They only ask for an email to get customer started on a free trial. Some forms will ask for more information depending on the industry or service, like
this one by Salesforce. This type of approach also tends to help your inbound sales team qualify leads faster.
A landing page goes a long way in sending potential customers to a specific place where they can provide their information to become a lead. And it serves as a location to point all your prospects to your other strategies.
Social Media Paid social media strategies are typically associated with B2C lead generation, but it is known to be just as effective in the B2B market, if used properly.
Whether done organically or paid for, social media campaigns have the potential to
drive growth by 400%, as was the case with Airtable. A good chunk of their initial growth came from Instagram, with a combination of paid Instagram Ads and organic stories.
Another great example of the use of social media as a B2B lead generation strategy is 2018's
Best Lead Generation (over 200 employees) winner at the LinkedIn Marketing Awards, Dropbox for Business. A dual effort by Dropbox and marketing agency Transmission, their use of social media as a way to appeal to marketers led to incredible success.
They were able to obtain a 29:1 return on investment and achieve 235% of their marketing qualified lead (MQL) targets, proving social media campaigns can definitely be used for B2B lead generation strategies.
If you're just starting out, a good idea is to use
LinkedIn Lead Generation Ads or
Facebook Lead Ads so that anyone clicking on your ads fills out their contact information right away.
In both cases, you can have it set up so it sends it to your CRM right away, for your inbound sales reps to start qualifying and adding to the pipeline.
Blogging There are three major advantages to
business blogging: driving traffic to your website, converting traffic to leads, bringing back old customers into the fold, or getting referrals.
Content marketing has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade. When done right, it has resulted in more leads and higher conversion rates.
After all, if you place yourself as an expert and are able to walk the walk you're talking about, customers will recognize it.
Just as I'm doing right now writing this blog post ;)
A great example of the power of business blogging as a B2B lead generation strategy is
HubSpot.
HubSpot is a popular CRM software option that has grown in renown thanks in a large part to their inbound marketing team:
over 90% of their leads come from their blog posts. Their pieces even surpass Forbes or CNN on Google results depending on the search.
Lead Magnets Another great B2B lead generation strategy is
a lead magnet.
Lead magnets provide access to a free resource you provide in exchange for contact information to add to your email list as a lead. The offer of the free trial in exchange for your email seen in the ActiveCampaign landing page fits here.
But it doesn't always have to be a free trial - this is just the easiest way out. Other examples of lead magnets include:
- Access to webinars or courses
- Upgrades to the service or product
- Quizzes and surveys
- Free shipping or discounts
- Case studies
- eBooks or white papers
And many more.
For a lead magnet to work properly, it's not enough to simply offer anything. Companies have to know their audience and what works best for them.
Slack is a good B2B lead generation example. It can be used for free, but messages begin to get deleted in this version. Companies lean on the organization and chats of Slack for day-to-day operations, and anything that interferes with it could cause trouble.
Cold Emailing & Email Marketing We can't ignore email when it comes to B2B lead generation strategies.
A lot of what we've covered is related to an inbound approach. But cold emailing is different.
As we saw previously, in cold emailing your
outbound SDRs are out amongst the weeds telling everyone relevant about your product or service. From these initial prospecting emails you have your leads. But only if
your cold email structure is right.
A good example here is ourselves at SalesPipe, as this is our primary offer for all companies looking to expand their outreach by
outsourcing their outbound sales efforts.
Email marketing is like cold emailing minus the SDR.
A great way to approach warm prospects that have provided their information to you, email marketing can be used in a variety of ways depending on your goals.
A great example is
Grammarly's Insight reports, where they show you how you're doing and promote healthy competition. It personalizes your experience, reminds you of the services, and incentivizes you to keep using it.
With email, in any instance, the key is to be continually experimenting with the messaging and trying new things. Give your team the space to do so and find their rhythm, and you're guaranteed to see results.