B2B lead generation might be challenging for some businesses, but the benefits are worth it! As a brand that relies on other businesses for survival, you need quality leads that can convert to sales. It is like the oxygen your company needs to survive.
B2B lead generation is basically how you get potential customers for your business. It can be inbound lead generation with strategies like content marketing, blogs, white papers, or Facebook ads, as well as outbound, which is cold calling, cold emailing, advertising, and the use of events like conferences. However, our focus today is on three key actions that should guide your lead-generation efforts for optimal results.
What Business Owners Should Know about B2B Lead Generation
The essence of lead generation is to help potential customers see your business, boost your awareness, and let them know who you are. The aim is to encourage them to engage with your brand and ultimately patronise your business.
You must understand that B2B lead generation requires some strategic actions for success. These actions must be integrated into your lead generation strategies for a desirable outcome. Let’s go through them briefly below.
Create Your Ideal Customer Profile
The first step to getting your lead generation efforts right is knowing who you want to sell to. Toyota and Ferrari are car companies, but their audience segments differ. You can’t sell a Toyota car to a Ferrari customer, no matter how cheap.
Your ideal customer profile is therefore, a picture of the perfect customer with whom you want to interact with your product or service. They are people who probably know or don’t know about you, but you want to get their attention.
So, basically, if you’re doing lead generation, you are marketing to get the attention of your ideal buyer. However, you’re getting their attention through a sales process so that you can solve their problems by giving them value.
Here is what an ideal customer profile should consist of:
- Description
- Demographics
- Business objectives/desires
- Pain points/challenges
- Behaviours and traits
Know the Channels That Work
Having worked with different clients in both B2B and B2C, we have noticed that not all channels work for each category at the same level. Hence, we will work you through the channels that have performed the best for the B2B companies we have worked with.
One of the places we’ve found where you can really target your ideal customer profile and get quality people to get to know your business is LinkedIn. While you may find your customers on other platforms like Twitter, they are not there to buy your product.
While there may be exceptions to the above statement, core business buyers are on LinkedIn, and the most important thing about LinkedIn is that it gives you organic reach. When you compare this to platforms like Facebook, where your followers may not see most of your content without paid ads, you can actually get more people to know more about you on LinkedIn. This is why LinkedIn has been one of the most effective platforms for growing B2B companies.
How do you grow on LinkedIn? One way is to make consistent posts on relevant topics in your niche. This should consist of useful and value-driven content that can help other businesses and professionals in your industry.
Another way to grow on LinkedIn as a B2B business is by connecting with people and directly messaging them. If you connect with people and make posts consistently, your connections will see the posts you are making.
YouTube
This might come as a surprise, but YouTube is one of the best platforms to acquire customers. It is especially good for SaaS B2B lead generation. Here’s an illustration for clarity:
For instance, if you run a lead generation company, you can create YouTube videos to teach people different things about lead generation and marketing in general. When you create these free courses or tutorials, you draw people to your channel, where they get valuable information and, at the same time, get to know what you do.
While this might be a lot of work, it is worth the effort. You can also host webinars and events and post them on YouTube and other channels. This will help people know more about you and trust you because of the useful knowledge you offer.
This is important because it will help you cut through the noise, as so many people do what you do. So trust is important, and gaining it makes the sales and conversion processes easier.
Create the Content They Want
Content, they say, is king, but the right content brings paying customers. Identifying customer pain points is super important to help you grow your business. The better you understand your customer’s needs, the easier it is to sell to them. This is why you need to know what your audience desires. This includes the problems they are seeking solutions for. When you discover this, you’ll be able to create content that can meet their needs, and in the format they want it.
You might also want to check out our thoughts on SaaS B2B Content Marketing Strategy | By Pandora Agency.
Summary
While several companies offer different lead generation tools, it is important that you know the basic principles we’ve discussed and how to apply them. Knowing your ideal customer profile, the channels that work for them, and the information they want to consume is important. In addition, the channels we shared in this article are relatively cheap or free.
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