B2B Lead Generation: Most Effective Strategies That Work

Lead generation is the fuel that drives the engines of modern businesses. That’s why marketers and strategists from different spheres seek and value up-to-date and effective tools, strategies, and technologies to get them. Since DataOx assists businesses in various niches, we know firsthand that the key strategies of lead generation for B2B are unique to your business.

Therefore, in this blog post, we share the most viable lead generation tactics and technologies that may help.

Before we jump into the discussion of specific B2B lead generation strategies, we must mention that to get an excellent result, a business should make sure that the foundations are right. When you take lead generation up, make certain you can capture and convert the leads you receive through the campaign.

Make your landing page generate leads! It should become a tree from which your potential clients can take a tempting fruit. Consider the following steps to make your customer’s journey quick and rewarding for both parties:

1. Write a catchy headline.
2. Back up your information with social proof
3. Create a relevant call-to-action (CTA).

There is no use generating traffic until your marketing funnel is well-structured. Check your landings, the forms, and the buttons they contain. Optimize the forms to avoid leakage at the filing stage. Ensure that your staff is ready to handle the challenge of leads inflow. After your marketing funnel is perfect or at least near to it, you can proceed to planning your B2B lead generation strategy to tailor your specific approach to a potential buyer in your market, industry, and niche. The inbound and outbound marketing practices combined will help you find the shortest path of the least competitive resistance, gain clear insights about your customers’ decision-making, and tailor a strategy that will bring you quality leads.

The key difference between lead generation B2B and B2C is the target audience. Though there are many common goals and approaches, this ingredient determines the whole strategy you follow. Unlike focusing on personal traits in B2C, you should take your target customers’ professional needs and business goals into account. You should offer lead magnets and assets, which will help your target customers relieve their work-related pains and resolve certain professional or business issues. Additionally, you should consider the corporate-related materials, sources, and channels.

Some time ago, HubSpot conducted a research study that bewildered most B2B lead generation specialists and everyone who deals with sales leads. It turned out that the major source of lead generation for B2B is still largely undefined. In the picture below, you may see it hidden behind a strange category: “other.”

However, this ambiguity should not be an obstacle to your efforts. You can always try to generate B2B sales leads in the way you can and then find your own unique tactics and approach. Keep in mind that 99% of successful B2B lead generation campaigns are the sum of multifaceted moving parts that are successfully combined and rely on proper detailed planning and a ton of effort. Let’s look at the table in more detail. It clarifies that email and content marketing stand out as the most effective B2B lead generation tactics, followed by social media and advertising.

Though lots of experts consider cold calling a dying approach, there are still many examples of quite productive lead generation in B2B even through the first telephone contact. However, cold calling always needs to be a part of some holistic lead generation strategy to ensure success. Frankly speaking, in the modern world of hyper-connectivity, cold calling is shifting to more of a “warm” calling. It’s not difficult nowadays to learn a little about your prospect by connecting via LinkedIn or another social media channel before you approach him or her in a more personal way. Finding out some facts about the person you are going to reach out to in advance will help you enhance this outbound marketing tactic. No matter if you are going to reach out to a person by phone or to launch an email marketing campaign for B2B sales lead generation, you should first identify your target clients and collect their contact details. Read also: Social Media You can collect the necessary data from your leads in several ways. Start with the visitors of your own site. Extracting data about those who are already interested in your business comes in handy for this purpose, because you can then warm them up, so to say. By scraping your website users, you get all the details you need to take action on the leads either by phone, email, or social media. By parsing the visitors of your site, you discover the key decision-makers, the pages they visit, the content they look at, and the industry they are from so you can follow their visit up with laser-focused, industry-related, pain-point solving content or even a case study. It’s also important to scrape publicly available resources to get information about your potential buyers so you can decide whether you want to target them directly or through influencers.

The sources of information can vary, but for businesses, you’d better turn to professional platforms and business directories like:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• Owler
• AngelList
• CB Insights
• DataFox
• DiscoverOrg
• YC List

But how can you harvest the necessary data quickly and efficiently? You may follow up in at least 4 ways:

• Using the scraping tools off-the-shelf available on the web
• Coding yourself and implementing proxies
• Buying a web scraping software from a reliable provider
• Ordering a data delivery service that includes all the requirements for the data you need to get.

Keep in mind that you should remove duplicate, incorrect, or incomplete data points from your datasets to increase ROI and to not erroneously reach out to dead contacts. As soon as your contact list is ready, you can start warming it up and earning credibility by sending out regular, useful, and insightful content. As a rule, there are 3 to 5 steps between the first meeting and the inquiry from the potential client, so just start your journey and be consistent and patient. Soon the right newsletter, relevant email, or some kind of trigger content will hit the target.

Undeniably, content marketing remains one of the major sources of lead generation for B2B sales, however, there are several requirements you should keep in mind. First, provide your target client with high-quality copy that reveals your expertise and competence. You need to pack the maximum value into your content when you write for businesspeople. In any case, the way of B2B sales lead generation is neither short nor simple. Business buyers are often serious in their research and encounter on average 13 content pieces before making a purchase. The content they study can be vendors’ website information, analyst reports, feedback, and reviews. You can use this fact to your advantage and become the company your users browse for research. Interview field experts, survey your clients, and cooperate with industry influencers. This will help you surge forward with your inbound lead generation.

Second, be consistent in what you offer your potential clients. To attract a wider audience, you can play with content a bit and use diverse types like:

• Articles
• News roundups
• Long-form guides
• Infographics
• Audio clips or podcasts
• Videos
• Webinars

Remember that your presentation should always be strong, logical, and consistent. Exclusive content isn’t the only thing that makes your site stand out. A great SEO (Search Engine Optimization) increases your site’s visibility and, consequently, page views. Write your articles to target the right keywords, add a descriptive headline, use correct H-level subheadings, and don’t forget about alt texts for the site images. Plenty of instruments are offered nowadays to research competitors, their content, keywords, and backlinks. Scraping this competitor information can help your company stay ahead of the game.

Third, to attract your potential leads, create something to interest them and offer them in exchange for something you want: email addresses, contact details, subscriptions, or something else. It’s important that your lead magnet offers actual value and possibly immediate benefit to your target customers. The most effective lead magnets have proven to be

• In-depth case studies
• Comprehensive how-tos
• Tools and calculators
• E-books
• Free demos or trials
• Reports or white papers

Offer your potential clients a piece of some solid information or product demo, and don’t be afraid to mention impressive data points and make bold claims. These tricks work really well to increase B2B lead generation results.

B2B advertising may be complicated, however, when done right with attention to detail and proper timing and the right targeting and tracking, targeted advertising will bring you a bunch of leads. Ads can be posted in various ways on the web. Google AdWords is the most well-known platform that allows posting all across Google’s search and display networks. The great thing about Google is that search intention is there already, and only those who are interested in your product or service will see your advertising. To make your advertising more effective, you can

• scrape SERP results and detect the most popular search terms,
• see who tops the list and check their marketing strategy to follow their best practices, or
• scrape your competitors’ ads and find out what works best.

Once you learn all these factors, you can tailor really engaging advertisements and target the most responsive audience. Display network ads are usually visual and appear on various web resources that agreed to cooperate within the Google Network. With a display network ad campaign, remarketing works great for B2B lead generation since the ads are shown to people who have visited the site earlier. In fact, you just keep reminding them about the product or brand they are interested in. LinkedIn, Facebook, and other banner ads can also be a viable source of B2B leads, but they work well when you have a great combined creative and messaging lead funnel.

Social media allows businesses to use a more targeted approach toward their customers. The potential of LinkedIn B2B lead generation is already proven, since it’s the major platform where businesses and brands interact directly. However, other social platforms should not be discounted. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and some other networks can become real B2B lead-generating machines and make your marketing even more effective. Each platform does in its own way. Creating your own online community is a good and workable idea. The power of social network communities is strong. With an online community, create a good development strategy and always have something valuable and fresh to offer your members. Though social media users are hardly leads before you have captured their contact details, you can always direct them to your site. Make this process easy and direct people to the landing pages that will seamlessly capture those leads with free offers, email sign ups, and more. Don’t be afraid to promote your business, invite feedback, link to landing pages, and use clear calls to action. Another great option is to allow newsletter sign ups right on social media, because you get the emails of your social media visitors right away. You can even go the direct route of B2B lead generation on LinkedIn and use the integrated tool for lead collection. Alternatively, you can always order a B2B lead generation service from third parties and get a list of required contacts without much effort.

With billions of active users worldwide, social networks have become effective platforms for advertising. More than that, your ads can be highly targeted because you can set up multiple factors to focus on the users from a particular area or of a specific age, gender, interest, and so on. Advertising on LinkedIn opens a direct line from you to those who make the key buying choices. No other network allows you to reach out to business decision-makers directly. Read also: LinkedIn Scraping Service

Everyone who is eager to try B2B sales leads generation should arm themselves with patience and be ready to conduct careful research, work out a strategy, and make all their actions consistent. This process is not going to provide you with a quick result, however, if planned and carried out properly, it can be more than rewarding. We can’t help but mention here that data scraping tools and services can simplify your work almost at any stage of your B2B lead generation process, freeing up time for more profound analytics and creativity. In case you are interested in how to generate B2B leads quickly and efficiently with the help of web scraping technology, schedule a free consultation with our expert.