In this quick-read, we’ll discuss the 3 top lead generation strategies to generate more B2B leads for your business. These are the methods we use to not only get clients for ourselves but also techniques we use to generate qualified leads with a higher conversion rate for our clients to deliver a higher conversion rate
These exact lead generation strategies can generate not only leads to your business but leads to your business that consistently converts.
Let’s delve into what we consider to be…
The Best B2B Lead Generation Strategies To Generate More Sales
The real key strategy here is to take one to two different methods outlined here and implement them in your marketing strategies within your business to get the best results, rather than try to tackle everything in one go.
Become the master of one, not the Jack-Of-All!
One thing to highlight before we start is the willingness to be completely honest with yourself. If you are running some method of lead generation for your business and are not getting the results you require, you need to ask yourself why. Failed results usually boil down to one of three things:
- The product or service you are offering is not very good
- Your product or service is poorly aligned within the market
- Your outreach methods are poor and ineffective
You might not have a lead problem in your business and the problem might be your product has a poor market fit. So make sure that people are actually paying you for your product or service and people actually want it before ramping up your lead-generation tactics.
You might need to ask yourself some really cold, difficult questions before you move into asking total strangers for their money.
There has never been more noise in the marketplace than there is now.
There are literally thousands of people that are battling for the attention of your ideal prospects.
One of the key things when it comes to scaling with systems such as using a lead-generation company like ourselves is to make sure that your key service or product is needed within the marketplace.
Do you have case studies and testimonials to back it up?
Having these allows you to cut through the noise and position yourself correctly. These alongside key pieces of content that shows your audience insight and authority will place you and your brand correctly within the market.
If you don’t have one or two key pieces of content yet or you don’t have any case studies or testimonials from happy clients, then we suggest this to be your first point of action.
Call up your current clients, get some video testimonials, get some written testimonials, and spend some time creating a really solid piece of content that answers your client’s questions and positions you as the authority.
You could even implement a rundown piece on your site that gives a brief overview while offering in-depth analysis and run that piece as a lead-generation capture tactic.
Now, let’s look at the 3 top strategies we have found to be the most effective B2B Lead Generation Strategies. The first is our favourite way (and one of the key methods in our lead-generation methods for our clients) to generate new leads for your business to business.
Cold Email
A cold email has gained a bad reputation over the years, mostly due to poor techniques and people using it as a mass form of communicating a sales pitch…
AWFUL!
The reason we set up MarGen was to combat this completely as we understood what exactly was frustrating to be receiving tonnes of cold emails without ever really gaining my attention (let alone a sale from me).
When done correctly, the process can deliver incredible results and is absolutely one of the best B2B Lead Generation Strategies. This is why we focus on utilising software and personalisation in each of our campaigns to ensure that every person that receives a proposal to jump on a call is unique to them and not something copy-&-pasted to the masses.
Of course, once you have someone on your books then mass communication works OK. In terms of bringing in new business, however, we heavily personalise our outreach to ensure higher open rates, more sales calls booked while delivering incredibly higher conversation rates for our clients.
Our focus is on quality, not quantity.
This also helps with long-term planning. Don’t do anything that could be a detriment to your business or brand’s image. If you are sending out bulk communications to anyone and everyone, your brand will become tarnished extremely quick, so think long-term.
Cold Email should be the lifeblood of any business to business lead generation campaign which is why it’s important to do it right from the onset.
There are some real key factors to a successful cold e-mail campaign.
Number one is the quality of the leads that you’re actually getting. Where are you getting these email addresses from? Does everyone else have access to them?
If so, everyone is sending them the same message.
Are they from some kind of gated source, meaning they’re harder to get?
Are they from a list of people that are a lot more likely to have money or likely to be in a position to buy from you versus just everybody out there?
The quality of where you get the emails matters.
Number two is the number of messages you’re sending a day. If you send five emails a day, it’s going to take you a very long time to get any kind of meaningful response, discovery or qualification calls. Ultimately, any chance of landing a meaningful client from the data will be too far apart to sustain the business indefinitely (or at best, you’ll struggle for a very long period of time).
We constantly analyse feedback each day to understand how our data is performing. We start by drip-feeding our campaigns and tweak them before increasing send rates each day.
We use software to warm up domains to ensure that each email we send is put right into the prospect’s inbox and not their spam folder. Personalised, precise and have a clear call-to-action process that enables a much higher book rate for sales calls.
The third key component of a successful cold e-mail campaign is actually going to be the number of days that you’re sending these cold emails.
You would be surprised at how many times we hear that cold email doesn’t work when the reality is the methods within this are done poorly and while also they send 10 e-mails a day for five days and give up when they get no results.
The key is to actually make sure that you’re getting enough messages a day and you’re sending it over a long period of time to actually gauge results.
Finally, of course, is the content of the campaign, the content of the message itself.
What are you sending out?
Is it written correctly? Is it this long-form email that’s all about you and how you’re the best person in the world?
Or are you making it short, concise, framing yourself as an expert in authority and on top of that, showing how you can actually help the end-user or your client?
When done correctly, cold email… or more importantly, personalised cold email is by far one of the best B2B Lead Generation Strategies
Next on our list is…
LinkedIn is such a great tool for forming solid relationships over the long-term through both messaging and by showing your authority by utilising your feed and sharing your insight and knowledge to your circle of connections.
This method should be included in your methods of B2B Lead Generation Strategies
It’s one of the best tools out there to run alongside your website and outreach campaigns.
Make sure you have a high-quality LinkedIn profile and a message that resonates with your target market.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing some articles on how to best grow and leverage LinkedIn and there is also tonnes of info on the web – YouTube being the best one to search in my opinion.
LinkedIn outreach working alongside personalised cold email and you have one of the most effective B2B Lead Generation Strategies
Paid Traffic
When looking to generate traffic quickly, paid ads are a great way so long as you:
- Have a decent budget
- Do it correctly
When doing it yourself, paying for ads can be a minefield and in most cases, people lose money due to a lack of knowledge and the mentality that it will be easy.
You have to bear in mind companies pay agencies huge sums of money to get to this stage correctly and the market is competitive.
Depending on the type of business, products or services you are pushing, and what platforms you intend to advertise through, this outlines the process can be complicated.
Your competition is also a key factor as being in an aggressive market means you will need to be 3-steps ahead of everyone else.
For us, cold email is by far the most cost-effective to generate revenue that is scalable and perfect for any B2B marketers looking to increase revenue at scale and should be in your arsenal of B2B Lead Generation Strategies.
Our methods ensure that our leads are high-ticket, warmed and sourced correctly based on our client’s business model and service. This ensures that the money they spend on our service returns a substantial amount of revenue so they can scale effectively.
Paid traffic sources (and depending on what your desired outcome is) outlines that this avenue of generation is not for everyone. Yet it is the service that most companies pay for and try given that it is the most prominently-pushed method out there.
Anyone can set up a Google Ads account in less than a minute and most lose their budget seemingly as quick without ever achieving any return on their investment. So tread carefully if this is an avenue you wish to pursue.
It’s just as important (if not more) to understand the purpose behind people clicking on your ads and if you offer a service that isn’t available to purchase without consultation or call.
Where possible and advantageous, you should think about funnelling your process even further to fully optimise the traffic from the source.
This ensures that when someone clicks on your ad, they don’t visit your site briefly and then take no action, meaning you are paying for clicks without ever seeing a return on them.
One of the best methods for paid ads is utilising re-targeting campaigns or where you offer a service or product and essentially piggyback off your competitor’s searches.
Putting ads in front of people that have visited your website previously but have never bought from you before is an effective method when done correctly.
You can run these ad campaigns for a few dollars a day in some niches where you get the potential customers to take the next step such as buying your product, booking a time on your calendar, applying to speak with you, etc.
Again, there is a lot to think about before you put your money on the table and use this approach to gain traction and drive traffic to your website, lead magnet or landing pages.
Final Thoughts
There are many different B2B Lead Generation Strategies available and what works for your business, might not necessarily work for others.
That being said, cold outreach campaigns through email and LinkedIn are the most cost-effective for most of the businesses we work with while LinkedIn is the ultimate for any business regardless of budget.
The main focus should be to trial and test your approach in blocks to ensure your time is used effectively to achieve the best results overall.
Many fail by putting together unplanned cold email templates and send to as many people as possible. Quite frankly, this has a detrimental impact on your brand’s image as over time you are seen as generic and are seen to show no interest in what your client may actually require.
Regardless of whether you use cold email, LinkedIn or both, personalisation should always be used to ensure a much higher response rate and that your company or brand image is both secured and developed over time in a positive direction.
Think long-term always and when needing a short-term plan for things like launches and time-dependent offers, always ensure that the message your send is not having a damaging effect on your long-term plan.
Once you have the first two methods correct and are showing a good amount of growth and income, utilise some of your profits to re-target traffic that has previously visited your sites using paid ads.
Doing them in this order ensures that your budget is not wasted and you aren’t constantly finding yourself at point 1 over and over again.
You can do this in-house, or utilise an agency such as ourselves, or another decent company that does personalised cold outreach is Focus & Co.
One more important thing to be conscious of is your ability to scale up. Seeing a decent amount of growth in one area can sometimes cause companies to go all-in on every other strategy without truthfully looking at their own ability to scale and manage the workload.
Ultimately, this causes burnout and a bad reputation form extremely quickly.
Understand what rate your growth is doable with your current staffing and how you will manage growth through either outsourcing, sub-contracting or employing more staff either on a part-time or permanent basis.
You would be surprised at how many companies do not factor this in and struggle to handle the increase in contracts when a campaign (or series of) are successful.
Using services such as ours for cold outreach or working with an agency for paid campaigns is an investment and there is more to it than simply investing in the process and seeing a return on investment.
When we speak with potential customers we always ask questions about scalability and how this would be managed.
We don’t and will not work with any business. Working with a company that isn’t ready to scale is not something that we would do and in this case, would ask them to work on ensuring they are ready before providing them with the ability to grow.
We work on longevity and like to see our clients thrive and a big part of this is being able to manage effectively with an increase in new business generated we must discuss this before we sign any new client with us.
Lead generation is complicated. It’s a fun process for us as we understand the intricacies around it while holding strong attention to detail to ensure the results we achieve are cost-effective and scalable.
When looking at mastering business to business lead generation, it’s important that you follow these steps right for your business model and in most cases, the approach we highlight above is the most cost-effective route.
Always make sure that you have a few case studies or testimonials and some core piece of content that can show that you’re an authority in your industry.
You really want to prove your messaging and offer to any lead generation sources of organic methods before you consider using services such as our cold email or LinkedIn prospecting.
Once these have been implemented within your business model, scale up even further and utilise lost sales to previous visitors using paid traffic methods.
It’s important that you really spend some time in each of these processes and really automate and systemise as much as possible. The primary focus in such a marketing campaign can be on doing what you do best and delivering a product or service that really matters to your customers.
Once you have removed yourself from the process of cold outreach and paid traffic methods, converting the sales, then you can grow your business effectively and most importantly at a manageable rate.
If you’re curious to learn a little bit more information on how we can help you in the first two stages of this, set up a call with us to discuss potential partnering with our outreach services.
We hope you have found this information to be useful and it helps you decide on the best b2b lead generation strategies for your business.
and if you have any questions, book a brainstorming session with us below, send us an email or give us a call.
