The 5 essential approaches of B2B lead generation

If you’re interested in digital marketing, you’ve probably heard about lead generation. But what is it? Generating Leads involves attracting and converting your prospects who have expressed an interest in your product or service. How? This is the question everyone asks and, rest assured, we are here to answer! We explain 5 approaches to B2B lead generation that should not be overlooked in this article.

Email marketing is still the #1 channel in B2B, even if it has evolved to adapt to user behaviour. They do not want to be “spammed” anymore, but to receive useful and relevant content …

“Email is 40x more efficient than Facebook or Twitter to acquire new customers. “

Email marketing includes all the techniques aimed at using emails for marketing purposes: sending advertising, contacting a company, or soliciting a sale, for example. It builds a relationship of trust with your prospects and improves your brand awareness.

By segmenting your lists with email automation tools, you’ll be able to create personalized email campaigns that drive high levels of engagement and brand awareness.

For example, email automation tools like Mailchimp let you start conversations and help you schedule a series of welcome emails, ready to be sent when a contact is added to your list.

They also make it possible to create simple and effective communication. You can create a new email campaign without having to know HTML, including your logo, images, text and buttons simply with a drag and drop system.

In addition, email automation tools are also very useful for sending emails on specific dates such as a subscriber’s birthday or to announce important news.

Finally, they provide reports on the performance of your email campaigns, which allows you to measure and compare your results.

Content is the key that will open all doors for you, including the lead generation. To generate leads effectively, you need to create a blog with articles that address the issues and pain points of your prospects. The more you know how to answer their questions, the more interest, commitment and notoriety you will gain.

Do not forget to vary your content. You can create infographics, white papers or organize webinars. The content is essential but the way you are going to convey the information is just as important. If you always offer the same content formats, you may tire your readers.

Once you have written your content, it is to promote them on social networks (in particular, LinkedIn and Twitter in a B2B context). How? By creating short, direct and engaging posts. They must speak to your readers and future prospects. Do not hesitate to share these posts in groups.

Curation or blogging platforms such as Scoop.it, Quora or Medium are also great for promoting your content.

SEO is about optimizing your visibility in search engines. There are many factors to consider. Here are some things you need to know to start your SEO strategy:

• SEO is based on keyword research. This is essential because it is from this keyword that you will guide your optimization strategy. Tools like SEMrush or Keyword Planner from Google Adwords will allow you to perform an effective and detailed keyword search.

• You must then write your content around this keyword to position yourself on Google. It should appear in the title of your content, in most of your subtitles, in the URL, or on your images (Alt tag). Be careful, however, not to overload your content with this keyword, it could impoverish the general message you want to deliver.

• Activate the Yoast SEO part on WordPressand fill in the fields “title”, “identifiers” (URL), the meta-description (very succinct summary of your content to give your readers the desire to click), and finally the part “Main keyword”.

Social selling is to use social networks to attract new customers, and SELL. This is about developing constructive relationships with potential customers that keep you and your brand on the front line to become the first point of contact for a prospect when ready for purchase. If you have a business Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile or a professional Twitter account, you are already engaged in a social selling process.

To understand what social selling is, you have to understand what it is not. Social selling is not sending a multitude of private messages, which would amount to spamming. It really involves building relationships and joining the conversation at the right time to present a solution to a problem.

Here are some strategy elements to start a social selling process:

Define and identify your targets. The more you work on defining and targeting your audience, the more likely you are to aim right. For this, you must first define your personas, i.e. your ideal customer profiles. Once defined, you can better focus on targeting, which will be more accurate and above all more effective.

Use personalized messages to get in touch with your targets. The more personalized your messages, the more they will be read and appreciated. Also keep in mind that the content of your message should be short, precise and straightforward.

Look after your profiles. Let’s be honest, if you walk past the window of a shop you do not like, you probably will not go there. Remember to heal your profiles on social platforms to generate interest and build your credibility in your industry.

Stay active. You must show that you react to the topics you know, do not hesitate to like or comment posts to boost your visibility and improve your reputation.

Use online tools to find relevant content ideas (easy blog ideas, Buzzsumo) or manage your social networks (Buffer, Socially Map).

By taking care of all these elements, you can build your online presence and give another dimension to your content on social networks to boost your sales.

You’ve probably noticed that your organic content no longer has the same reach on social networks. According to a study by Buzzsumo, Facebook posts on the pages of brands have seen their range decrease by 20% since January 2017. To offset this decrease, many companies now rely on social media advertising.

Social media advertising refers to all activities relating to the paid advertising of content on social networks. It allows targeting specific audiences through many criteria (age, sex, location, interests). The more relevant your targeting is, the more you’ll be visible on social networks.

Here are some recommendations to start:

• Publish organic content, i.e. content published directly on social networks that do not come from any other source. They allow operating the famous word of mouth, always as effective.

• Boost the most engaging postsbased on the number of likes, shares or comments. You can go to the “Statistics” tab of your Facebook page to analyse the best posts.

• Publish useful and entertaining contentto get your audience interested in your offers.

• Your ads must be responsive, i.e. suitable for mobile screens.

You now know the five approaches that will allow you to generate leads more easily. But that’s not all. These approaches, to be applied, require tools. Overview of some lead generation tools to know to optimize your social media advertising strategy.

HubSpot

Keeping your marketing and sales teams afloat is essential to turn your prospects into customers. To do this, you will have to monitor the process from A to Z by identifying the points that make you lose customers, for lack of information or because of a marketing strategy that is not well implemented. Hubspot, a reference inbound marketing, allows you to maximize your success rate with your current customers. The tool provides essential data on the effectiveness of your actions.

Google Keyword Planner

The Keyword Planner tool from Google Adwords allows you to conduct a keyword study based on relevance, competition, and the number of monthly searches; essential data to position you on untapped segments and attract new leads.

Google trends

Google trends is an interesting tool to analyse the trends of the moment and the interest of users on a targeted search. It will allow you to share good content on your social networks but also to find ideas for relevant content.

On the same model, the plugin WordPress Easy Blog Ideas or Buzzsumo are also tools to know to analyze the most shared topics in your industry.

You are now familiar with the five preferred B2B lead generation approaches email marketing, content marketing, SEO, social selling, and social media advertising. These approaches once mastered, are essential and will help you to attract new customers more easily. What must be understood is that each of these methods is relative to a channel of diffusion (the SEO, the emailing, or the promotion on the social networks), which makes the global strategy very interesting but also very complete. If you want more details on each of these essential techniques, we invite you to download our eBook on B2B lead generation.