BY TONY FONTANA
You know what they say: marketing is a sales team’s best friend. Or am I mixing up my metaphors?
Some data support this adage to be true. LinkedIn has found that nearly 9 in 10 sales and marketing leaders point to collaboration between their teams as an enabler of critical business growth. In reality, sales and marketing teams aren’t always BFFs, but alignment is critical to run your lead generation on all cylinders.
Marketing serves as a pivotal first step in any company’s sales process, and B2B lead generation is no exception. There’s a variety of digital marketing strategies that act as an entry point for gathering prospective customers’ contact information. This validation—strangers sharing their contact information in exchange for a product demo or more information—doesn’t come quickly or easily.
Lead generation marketing requires a blend of creativity, savvy, and nuance to meet people where they are: in need of a clear, compelling message that helps them easily understand how your solution can make their professional lives easier.
Before investing resources in various lead generation tactics, ask yourself: How are we opening our door to potential clients? At Hencove, we consider your current website your front door—and once it’s open, you’re inviting people into your brand and down the path to purchase. The marketing methods and channels you choose will drive traffic to your website and kick-start the lead generation process. Here’s how a typical B2B lead generation process flows.
With this framework in mind, let’s explore a few strategies we turn to the most for lead gen success.
Blogs
Even though it seems like a no-brainer, we’d be remiss not to mention blogs (you’re reading this, after all) as a key component of content marketing—and the foundation for any lead generation strategy. While a blog post alone might not seal the deal, a robust B2B blog provides the reader with valuable, free information and serves as a launchpad to related content on your website—prime for lead generation.
Gated Content
White papers and case studies and webinars—oh my!—are a few cornerstone B2B content types. We recommend gating these content assets—such as prompting a prospect to fill out a form—because they’re rich in data, details, and provide an insider’s perspective into your business and offerings. Those who are eager to get their eyes on this content are on the fast-track to becoming a marketing qualified lead.
How you gate your content matters, too. To increase the likelihood of form fills, we advise taking the “less is more” approach: ask for a name, company, and email address. And remember, landing page design, relevancy of copy, and a crystal-clear CTA are also essential for generating leads from gated content.
Email Marketing
We’re officially squashing the rumor that email marketing is dead. As a B2B lead gen channel, email is alive and well, but there’s a right way and a wrong way. To stay on the right side of history, consider what you’re giving your prospects in return for a few minutes of their time. Obviously, your emails should have a sleek design paired with compelling copy to entice CTA clicks.
It’s also important to have a clear understanding of who you’re emailing. Are they long-time subscribers who are familiar with your brand? Or are they new contacts who need to be introduced to your company and cultivated? Segmenting your lists into levels of brand awareness—and designing campaigns, resources, and landing pages around that—is one aspect that should not be overlooked in your lead generation strategy.
Google Advertising
We often hear clients tell us they want to rank at the top of Google’s organic search results (what business doesn’t?!). But like most marketing tactics, success doesn’t happen overnight. Staking a spot on the first page of search results requires patience and persistence with your SEO strategy and content creation. Alas, for those of us who are inpatient, Google Ads allows businesses to move up the search ladder faster…for the right price, of course.
We recommend building a targeted list of keywords and creating a landing page that matches exactly what is described in the ads. At Hencove, we’ve implemented campaigns and landing pages on a custom scale, launching dozens of ad groups in multiple states, that direct people to a landing page created specifically for those visitors.
Nearly every social media platform has made it easier for users to engage ads with just one click or tap. In the B2B space, we consider LinkedIn as the most trusted social platform to target, reach, and engage your core audiences.
Whether your goal is to gain followers, optimize sponsored content ads, or drive traffic to your website, the LinkedIn advertising suite has something for every business. You can even generate leads through a form directly on LinkedIn. Of course, the same rules for content and landing page relevancy apply here, too.
Surveys
An industry survey is one of the savvier tools in a marketer’s toolkit. Surveys can be a springboard to help you better understand the current challenges and opportunities facing your most engaged, and sought after, audiences. And when done right, this pulse check can have even more legs by way of driving media interest, coverage, and thought leadership.
HubSpot, a widely-used and reputable CRM platform, has its own custom feedback survey feature which enables businesses to gather information, data, and sentiment from a group of people using a series of targeted questions. We’ve engineered these workflows from scratch and built them to be a concise (10 questions or less) but in-depth market research survey to gather general customer feedback.
Video
We already know that video has a long shelf life. And the possibilities are endless. Beyond animation and explainer videos, we’ve had success adapting Zoom product demos and webinars into polished marketing assets. You can promote video across multiple marketing channels and even consider gating it in exchange for sales leads.
So, there you have it: sales and marketing go together like peas and carrots (sorry, big Forrest Gump fan here) in the name of lead generation. And digital marketing has become the focal point for creating interest and gathering information for sales teams to act on. Try pairing these strategies with a public relations plan to position your company as a trusted thought leader and you’ll have a recipe for B2B lead generation success.
What B2B lead generation strategies on this list are your favorite? Or what would you add? Drop yours in the comments and let’s chat about how Hencove can help you achieve your lead gen goals.