One mistake when talking about B2B leads is to think that our target is another company, in reality, who we direct our strategy to is a person. The only difference with B2C is that in this type of marketing, the lead often still has to convince his boss or a decision-maker inside the company to try your product.
Therefore, when talking about B2B leads, it is necessary to focus on the person and not on the company. If you manage to get to the right place, this lead will be in charge of speaking well about your product in their own company. But how do you make the right person fall in love?
Check out our Inbound Inlove Free Guide
80% of social media leads for B2B businesses come from LinkedIn (Hootsuite)
27% of B2B leads are ready to buy when generated (Marketing Sherpa)
Only 2% of leads buy in the first meeting (Marketing Wizdom)
Generating a lot of leads is useless if they are not well classified and if they are not really potential users. It will be worthless if you invest your efforts in reaching the most junior employee of the company since he will not be able to do much to take you new business.
Define a Buyer Persona
As with any marketing or sales campaign, the first thing to do is create a profile of who your customer really is. This helps you give yourself an overview of how to talk to him and what to ask for in return. It is not the same reaching a Director of Human Resources -unless your product is related to HR- than a CEO or COO of a company.
Don’t think that just defining your demographics is enough. Think about how this person’s day to day is, how they invest their time, how they make decisions, and any behavior that helps you define it. In addition to defining the buyer persona, you also have to take into account the company it represents, how it operates, and what are the main pain points that it needs to solve.
This article by our partners at HubSpot, explain in detail how you can build your Buyer Persona. Once you define both, end-user and the company they represent, you can start implementing a strategy to generate valuable leads that have the potential to become real customers.
Generate content
Content is the core element of any inbound marketing or sales strategy for one simple reason: it works! If you want to attract new leads, the best way to do it is by educating them and positioning yourself as an expert or reference in your industry. No one is going to Google “How does Company X help me in my business?”, But something more in the line with “How can I make my processes more efficient?”
Unlike other ways of generating leads, when you do it through Inbound, you manage to meet your potential client halfway.
Create blog posts, videos, webinars, podcasts, and any other medium that you can use to explain to your potential customer what problems their company has that you have already detected, as well as how your B2B company can solve them.
Always have a clear and striking Call to Action. Remember that in the B2B world conversions can be trickier than in other businesses, so if you forget to take your lead to your purchase landing page, schedule a call with you, or downloading your content offer, you run the risk of losing it forever.
Don’t let them forget you
With any Inbound campaign, in addition to bringing customers to your website, you must also target an essential element: their email. This will help you to constantly remind them of your value proposition with email marketing campaigns, newsletters, or cold contact from your sales reps that help you stay present in your potential customer minds.
Check Inbound Marketing for B2B Companies
It is important that with each email you send or contact you make, do not push direct sales, but take the opportunity to offer more content that may interest your leads and thus become their trusted expert. And if, for some reason, your lead decides to go for a service other than yours, adding value to their life with content can help turntables in the future.
Advertising or PPC
As long as you segment your target audience well and have worthwhile keywords at your disposal, and it suits your budget, it’s good to explore the possibility. A good Google Ads campaign coupled with landing pages with clear messages is still a strategy that deserves an opportunity and, although it is not advisable to invest your entire budget in advertising, it is an alternative to reach a different audience.
To get to this step, you should have created a very well-defined buyer persona that helps you have a segmentation that reduces the cost per click so that it is profitable. There are other platforms like LinkedIn, which is awesome in terms of Ads for B2B companies, that you can explore, this one is usually more expensive, but if you have a great ROI and conversion rates, it is worth trying.
Everything you do to generate new leads needs to be accompanied by a good follow-up and a product that meets the customer’s needs. The purchase journey in B2B companies is very different, therefore it is important that your free trials and after-sales service are very good.
This post was not only helpful with the comment issue, but had also great links to other blogs.
Some of them I will most likely keep visiting!
Thanks and greetings..
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