16 minute read
Where To Find More Quality B2B Leads
The business-to-business (B2B) model focuses on selling products and/or services to other companies for a profit. In order for you to make a profit you have to make a sale, and before you make a sale you need someone willing to buy whatever it is that you’re selling.
So, how do we find these prospect buyers? There are many ways to do this and they all fall under one umbrella called lead generation.
What exactly is B2B lead generation? It refers to the methods marketers and salespeople use to attract potential customers to their business. Learn more.
Think about it like a wide net thrown into the ocean at the specific latitude and longitude where a school of fish is swimming. The ocean represents the different places we expect to find potential clients who are the fish.
10 examples of Where Your audience Might Be
- At a place such as a home or office.
- In a location like a state or country.
- Using a search engine such as Google or Amazon’s Alexa.
- Surfing through apps and websites on Q&A forums or review sites.
- Viewing from a browser like Safari or Chrome.
- Scrolling through social media newsfeeds on Facebook or LinkedIn.
- Watching videos online via YouTube or from their TV cable provider Comcast.
- On devices ranging from an iPhone to an Android tablet.
- Maybe even at an event like a trade show or seminar.
- How about a certain time of day or day of the week?
There are so many ways today to find solutions to problems, and most likely there are several platforms being used, over a period of time, throughout your buyer’s journey. It’s not always a direct sell either, there are cross platform assists and multiple touches before a decision is made.
How To Successfully Capture More B2B Leads
Successful B2B lead generation strategies involve four important aspects:
- Educating buyers when and where they want to be reached as discussed above.
- Providing quality and unique content in the format they want to view it such as a blog article, video tutorial, case study, infographic, eBook, comparison chart, etc.
- Building trust with your audience and positioning your company/brand as a thought leader in your respective
- Capturing your interested parties’ contact information.
Essentially, your efforts should go toward answering your potential customers’ questions, telling them how you can solve their problems, and helping them overcome their many challenges.
Once your potential lead views your landing page content or content offer, they need to know exactly and clarify what the next step you want them to take is. This is called the call-to-action or CTA. You are going to want them to either buy a product or service, or do something such as download or sign up for something that pushes them further down the buyer’s journey depending what stage they are in.
If they are not ready to buy, that’s okay, because it rarely happens that easily and quickly. So you need to get them to enter their contact information into a form through some kind of offer. This offer can be a free webinar that requires pre-registration, a free sample that requires a signup, a download of premium information that is gated, etc.
This is what we call a give and get situation. You give your target audience a little of what they want and they give you a little of something you want. Just make sure the give is pretty equal to the get. Giving away too much, they have no need to buy and giving away too little make them not want to provide their personal data.
Now, after the viewer fills out the form they officially become a lead and should be immediately (if not automatically) entered into your marketing and sales system, also known as a CRM. Once these leads enter into your system, an automated workflow will mark them as a potential customer so you can then nurture them through your marketing and sales funnel, and into ultimately becoming a long-lasting customer.
This process will ensure you are continuously building your customer database and generating profit from it, which will make your business prosper.
Whether your company is a start-up, which needs rapid growth or a more established organization that is focused on nurturing your already existing customer database, there are many B2B lead generation services out there to help you achieve your goals. Many of these services are cutting edge and data-driven.
Let’s take an in-depth look at some of these lead generation services designed to help you generate more quality leads and make your company more profitable.
B2B Lead Generation Services Designed To Convert Into Sales
SEO Audit Tool – Get An Assessment Of How Well Your Website Is Optimized For Search
The SEO Audit Tool is free and analyzes your website and compares it to other websites for competing keywords. Based on this information, it generates an estimate of how well it is ranking and gives you suggestions about how to improve the ranking.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a fundamental tactic for acquiring B2B leads online. An effective SEO strategy allows your company’s website to be found online when someone searches for a product, service or solution to their current problems or challenges. Optimizing your website to land on the first page of an online search for a targeted keyword, can drive valuable traffic to your business long-term. This marketing tactic offers tremendous value for closing leads.
The SEO Audit Tool assesses your website’s level of SEO optimization, grading your website on a scale from 0-100. Zero means your website is basically non-existent online and one hundred indicates that it has achieved a sterling optimization score. If you want to know how your website stacks up to your competitors, start with this tool. It’s a great jumping off point for determining where you stand so you’ll better understand the level you need to reach.
YEXT – Manages 70+ Online Profiles All Under One Hood
YEXT manages all your digital footprints, combines them using one centralized tool to track & analyze local search & reputation activity, as well as help improve your local SEO campaigns in real-time.
YEXT was developed to unify and streamline all of your locations’ data while maintaining each location’s individual uniqueness such as hours, address, phone number, descriptions, images, social profiles and much more.
To understand why YEXT is so important for your business, especially if you have multiple locations or service areas, let’s look at a couple of stats:
- 76% of people who use location search on their mobile devices visit a business within a day, and of those prospects, 28% will result in a purchase.
- 59% of consumers use Google to locate a local business and 71% of those searches value the information contained in those search results.
- 73% of online search activity is related to local content.
- 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations.
- 78% of location-based mobile searches result in an offline purchase.
- A study by Forrester Consulting quantified the benefits of YEXT and discovered companies average a 169% ROI.
Now, that it’s clear how important this powerlisting service is to businesses, think how powerful it is when combined with lead generation tactics that force people to find your contact information or driving directions. Check out the YEXT business listing auditor tool here for free.
HubSpot – Inbound Marketing & Sales Software
HubSpot is a B2B company who developed an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps attract visitors, convert leads, close sales, and nurture customers.
HubSpot is an all-in-one Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution that applies the concept, methodologies, and philosophy of inbound marketing and modern sales.
Through research and observing how technology changed the marketing and advertising landscape, the founders realized that people didn’t want to be hard sold all the time with ads and cold calls so they thought that it was time to take a more human approach to marketing and sales – to treat buyers like people, not numbers. Based on this goal, they built a community of marketers that help businesses achieve their goals with more empathy.
HubSpot provides almost everything sales and marketing departments need to succeed. Their software includes a CRM, website builder, media library, contact forms, CTAs, automation, workflows, social media publishing and monitoring, blogging, email campaigns, paid ads, content strategy tool, goal and analytic reporting, buyer personas, competitor tracking, URL shortener, and so much more.
SEMrush – All-In-One Marketing Toolkit For Digital Marketers
SEMrush is an analytics-reporting and research platform that tracks Internet activity through constant web monitoring.
The SEMrush software is used for competitive intelligence research, online presence tracking and website analytics reporting within the online marketing industry. It ties in your website’s organic SEO, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, social media insights, video campaigns, keywords and more.
SEMrush provides more than 30 tools and reports that help B2B companies market better online and adjust strategies in real-time. You can use this service to spot opportunities you may be missing compared to your top ten search competitors. From there, you can come up with ideas for your SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media campaigns. SEMrush is a must-have weapon in your arsenal for B2B lead generation.
MailChimp – Comprehensive Email Automation Tool
MailChimp is an email automation tool that allows you to segment and optimize your contacts into lists so you can send targeted emails to multiple recipients at once.
MailChimp is an all-access email automation tool that allows you to send the right emails to the right people at the right time. Essentially, it’s an email delivery system that helps you stay connected with your audience and connect with people who exhibit buying behaviors similar to your customers. Great for helping nurture leads, notify subscribers, resell clients, and close sales.
The automation allows you to eliminate repetitive tasks so you can focus on important aspects of your business. MailChimp reaches customers and potential leads by scale and allows you to send thousands of personalized emails to your audience, resulting in more B2B leads and customers. It now also auto publishes to your connect social media profiles, has a coupon delivery and tracking service, offers direct integration forms, survey requests and more.
Optinmonster – Coverts And Monetize Website Traffic
Optinmonster converts abandoned visitors into leads through real-time data, analytics and offers.
This B2B lead generation service helps businesses convert lost website visitors into new leads and revenue. It’s used to boost conversions by personalizing remarketing offers on your site.
Optinmonster uses multiple lead capture forms, A/B testing, page level targeting, analytics, reporting, and more when a returning visitor enters and leaves your website.
Unbounce – Build And Test Landing Pages
Unbounce is the easiest way to build and test custom landing pages, website popups and sticky bars. Improve your post-click conversion rates and launch campaigns quickly.
If you understand how important landing pages are to online marketing, you’ll realize how important Unbounce is to creating and testing landing pages along with pop ups and sticky bars. Unbounce allows you to rapidly build and launch your landing pages so you can assess how well they will perform in the real world.
The better your landing page experience is for visitors, the better you’ll perform in AdWords, which reduces your Cost-per-click (CPC) and increases your ad budget.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator – Relationship Building And Conversion Tool
LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator helps you find and build relationships with potential leads on LinkedIn.
The sales navigation tool developed by LinkedIn allows you to search for prospective leads on the LinkedIn platform and segment them into groups. When these potential leads are placed into groups, you can see their LinkedIn activity and begin the lead nurturing process by messaging them directly. It’s a great platform for developing relationships and building leads.
Lead Forensics – Helps Find Quality Leads Through Site Visitors
Uses data and algorithm to track site visitors who have bounced to re-target them for conversion.
Lead Forensics is a tool used to engage visitors to your website who have you’re your website in search results, but haven’t clicked on it. These types of visitors are important because of the way in which people search the web. They search a keyword and run through a list of websites recommended by the search engine.
Most of the time they are just scanning, so even though they didn’t click on your website, the fact is your website is related to their search, which increases the probability they will find your product or service valuable.
Lead Forensics captures these leads and uses an interactive user interface (UI) to display important data about visitors such as location, name, social profile, and place of work. This information is precious to sales, making this service super valuable.
Turnstile by Wistia – Email Capture For Video
Turnstile is email capture application that pop-ups on video content.
Turnstile is an email collector application that appears in your video. You can ask the viewer to enter their email before watching the video or during the video. It’s a great way to capture leads through video. You are undoubtedly aware of how widely distributed video content is and the rapid rate at which it is growing. Turnstile directly connects with your email provider so that you can capture leads and automate emails in one fell swoop.
Qualaroo – Uses Consumer Feedback To Develop Better Products
Utilizes online user feedback to provide better service and user experience.
Qualaroo is a user feedback tool with built-in analytics that helps you attract more buyers, develop better marketing tools and improve customer loyalty. Feedback is essential for your business to grow. While asking for feedback is easy, obtaining it can be challenging. Qualaroo helps you ask the right questions, target the right audience and ask them questions at the right time. It’s a valuable service for boosting your website and products, ultimately improving lead generation.
Content Services: Unlock The Floodgates Of Leads
Content is King. All of the aforementioned services are basically useless unless you have the right content, and to understand the importance of content to a B2B lead generation strategy, you must first determine your target audience.
In lead generation, the buyers are business people. They are highly informed. So, where do they get their information? They derive it from conducting research using various sources including eBooks, whitepapers, blogs, industry authorities, etc. The process they follow requires a lot of reading, analyzing, and comprehension before deciding to make a purchase.
Because B2B buyers have to be informed before making their purchase, it is essential that you provide them with valuable content. The more valuable your content is to the potential buyer, the better your chances are of closing the deal. Rich content sells itself.
You have to provide the buyer with insights and show them how your product can make an impact on their own business. In fact, content marketing has grown over the years to become one of the main forms of marketing used by organizations around the world.
Now, let’s discuss the different types of content formats used to attract potential buyers and generate leads today:
Blogging – A Frequent, Informative And Reliable Content Format
When we talk about generating B2B leads there is one digital content format that has really shown how vital it is to the entire ecosystem – the blog. Blogs are a go-to marketing tactic for business people. Blogs are simple and effective, which is one reason they are so popular among the various content formats.
Because blogs are concise articles about specific topics, it makes them highly favored by search engines. So, if you want to be found when your potential buyer is searching for topics related to your business, improve your prominence among your competitors and receive acknowledgement as a thought leader in your industry, you have to create and publish phenomenal blogs frequently.
Video Marketing – A Visual & Highly Engaging Content Format
If your brand, product or service has a visual component, then video is one format that deserves your attention. Great for 360 tours, product launches, tutorials, interviews and so much more.
YouTube is the undisputed leader in video content. YouTube receives over 1 billion users on a daily basis. It’s the go-to platform for people looking for instructional videos and for those wanting visual content on virtually any subject. Videos are an ideal source for those looking for quick, visual aids on specific topics.
Creating engaging and informative YouTube videos is an excellent way to promote your brand and business. It can also serve as the first means of contact between your business and your prospects. Providing a link to your website or having it in your video is key to funneling viewers to your website.
Webinars – A Visual Format That Explores Topics In-Depth
The webinar is also a visual format for content creation. Unlike regular videos, webinars go more in-depth into complex topics and are lengthier than videos. B2B buyers typically prefer an exhaustive explanation about products or services they hope can improve processes or minimize risk.
Webinars are also extremely valuable because they humanize your business. This increases prospects’ level of comfort with your brand, thereby making the idea of purchasing from your business more attractive. This is yet another free form of advertising that, with the right planning and execution, allows you to capitalize on the opportunity it offers to spread the word about your brand.
The Research Paper – Gives A Real Break Down & Analysis Of A Topic Or Related Topics
Similar to the webinar, research papers are very detailed documents that provide a great deal of information to the buyer. B2B buyers are constantly looking for ways to educate themselves on how they can improve operations.
This is one reason that publishing research papers is a valuable B2B lead generation content strategy. When formatting your research paper, make sure there are calls-to-action (CTAs) and other subtle features to engage the reader and usher them into the sales funnel.
Content Distribution
The Highways That Drive Your Content To Potential Leads & Current Customers
We’ve discussed what content marketing is and the various forms of content you can produce to attract and convert potential buyers into paying customers. Now, let’s shift focus a little and discuss how this content should be distributed in order to maximize your content creation and drive leads.
Your content marketing efforts are futile if you don’t get anything in return for them. The whole purpose is to create this valuable content and give it to your target audience for free. A well-known saying about economics, “there’s no free lunch,” can also apply to marketing. You’re not creating content just to give it away. It is useless unless you get something in return for your time and effort. One example of a valuable “win” in lead generation is obtaining a prospect’s email address, phone number or whatever else you need to qualify a lead.
Yes, a simple, but powerful, piece of information such as an e-mail address can prove valuable to your business in the long run. Make sure you always provide a form or other method for website visitors to provide their contact information.
Giving away “free” stuff is core to content marketing, so don’t be stingy. Just remember why you’re giving it away in the first place, which is to convert traffic into leads, and ultimately into customers.
Your All-In-1 B2B Lead Generation Service Agency
You may be asking yourself, “How do I utilize all of these services and create content while conducting my everyday business activities?”
The fact is, learning and mastering all of these services and tools can take you months, even years, and technology is changing every day. So, by the time you think you finally know what’s going on, there’s already something new on the market.
This is one compelling reason to hire an experienced B2B lead generation service agency like Tag Marketing. You don’t need to worry about becoming a master at marketing, or spending an arm and a leg setting up an in-house digital marketing team. The latter option is far more expensive than hiring a fully functional, professional external marketing agency like Tag Marketing.
At Tag Marketing, we specialize in capturing leads for our clients. We are 100% client focused and results-oriented. We love to partner with local B2B companies that want to unlock their true potential and accelerate their growth (short-term and long-term) with focused, creative, growth-driven, well-executed inbound marketing plans.
We are a family company and we treat our clients as part of our family as well with respect, professionalism, and dedication. We pride ourselves on capturing audiences, building your brand, protecting your reputation, and taking your business to the next level.
Our clients often come to us uncertain about the transparency of marketing their business, gaining new clients, nurturing their current customers, and increasing their revenue. Many are concerned about their conversion efforts and not quite sure if the money they’re spending is an expense or investment.
We believe in meaningful results, versus presenting you with random numbers. In doing so, we validate your inbound leads based on your qualifying criteria. We close the gap by looking at conversions and sales to report your true return on investment (ROI).
Our team reviews lead quality with your team for each channel, so we can get the most out of our marketing efforts and campaigns while staying within your budget. By doing so, we can correctly gauge the success and failure of each marketing service or strategy in order to adapt and refocus, staying on-target with your goals.
We like to be transparent, and in full disclosure, tell the story exactly as it is. After all, the measurement of our success is in direct relationship to our clients’ success.
Call Tag Marketing today for a free consultation at 773-680-6952.
If you’d like to learn more about lead generation, check out our Beginner’s Guide to Generating B2B Leads. Its jam packed with the top lead generation channels you should be using, optimizing content, best practices, social media, helpful tools and more.
