What Channels Are You Using For B2B Lead Generation?

Adopting multichannel strategies is crucial for marketers. Your content needs to meet your customers where they live online. Through following best practices and testing different strategies, businesses need to focus on what works best for them.

The key here is testing. Your brand won’t get far duplicating another company’s strategy. There are a multitude of nuances in the way brands operate that could negatively affect your outcome.  That being said, there are certain channels that have proven to work.

Here’s a quick video from Patrick Dang talking about B2B lead generation to bring you up to speed.

Quick Takeaways:

• Lead generation is the backbone of your sales numbers
• Deciding on what metrics to measure how your lead generation is performing is crucial to overall marketing efforts
• There are tons of online resources designed to make lead generation easier

Digital marketing has brought B2B companies a lot of value over the past few years, making their marketing more easily managed and giving them better control over their budget, optimizations and data. Digital marketing has taken the wheel from traditional advertising efforts, changing the marketing landscape for good. More and more facets of marketing are being streamlined in the digital landscape.

Digital marketing channels aren’t just important anymore, they’re necessary for your marketing strategy to thrive.

Here are the top B2B lead generation channels and what these channels are best used for:

Content Marketing

It’s extremely rare to find a credible, reputable business nowadays that doesn’t implement some form of content marketing. Any B2B business would benefit significantly from using content to establish their brand as an authority in their niche or industry.

For more than half of B2B marketers in this report, whitepapers are the content type that performs best in terms of lead generation, with webinars closely following suit.

By consistently publishing valuable and educational content, you can build strong relationships with prospects and establish trust with your audience. A common way to achieve this is to build your business blog to provide your target consumers the information they need, nurturing them towards keeping your brand top-of-mind when they’re ready to make a purchase decision.

Social Media

Social media marketing works to grow connections, cultivate relationships, build a positive brand image, and of course, generate qualified leads. To get the most out of your content you need to be sharing it everywhere you can. A social media audit is the best place to start. Where is your company online most and where do you have a voice?

Having a social media presence opens your company up to a whole world of communication and an effective means of getting your content in front of potential customers eyes. By utilizing different platforms, you can reach a myriad of people with your message.

Plus, your comment section is a valuable place for your community to interact with your brand. The engagement a comment section brings to your company also benefits your viewership and brand value.

Email Marketing

An essential aspect of nurturing new sales leads is email marketing. It’s a strategy that allows you to reach out to your prospects on a more personal level with relevant content.

According to a report by Salesforce, 49% of marketers claim that email is directly linked to the success of their business efforts. Direct Marketing Association also noted that there is a 4,300% return on investment when it comes to email marketing for businesses in the United States.

There is now no question that marketers should believe in the power of email.

Apart from being cost-effective, there are many reasons why email marketing can be a successful channel for businesses. A well-crafted email campaign is personal, action-oriented, and measurable.

Virtually every professional your B2B business is targeting has a work email that they check daily, if not several times a day. Most importantly, it’s cost-effective. On a per-lead basis, email beats other digital platforms in terms of return on investment (ROI). This makes email an effective channel for pretty much any business operating in a B2B context.

Paid SEO

Source: Finances Online

As a B2B company, one of your ultimate goals is to be found on the first page of search engines for targeted keywords. Once you start building a reputation on search engines, more prospects will be able to find you when they’re looking for products and services related to your offering.

Google something. Anything. Chances are that the top 2 or 3 sites are promoted or paid to be ranked that high. Companies in every industry often commit funds to put their sites above the competition and generate the most leads.

Google ads sponsors their own form of an auction that you can bid on. Typically, you’d bid on keywords that are relevant to your topic or business’ product or service.

Wordstream.com lists the typical list of criteria that contribute to the likelihood of your link getting promoted:

• The relevance of your ad to the search query
• The relevance of the keyword to your ad group
• The relevance of your ad to its landing page
• The historical PPC click-through rate (CTR) of the ad and its ad group
• Overall historical account performance

Costs for this service vary, but it often depends on cost per click and keyword popularity.

Offline Marketing

Face-to-face interaction with potential clients is still the best way to convey sincerity and personalized service. This is why offline lead generation is still important.  A little marketing personalization goes a long way, and it’s arguably one of the most important aspects to remember when marketing.

Studies show that conversion typically hovers around 40% for face-to-face prospects, whereas that number takes a big dip at an 18.5% conversion rate for online virtual sales prospects.

In essence, these offsets the incremental costs incurred in traditional lead generation efforts, which proves that a highly personalized approach to selling is still effective if you want to turn qualified prospects into buying customers.

Building and nurturing relationships also increases the chance of converting leads into loyal customers as well, thereby increasing their profitability and lifetime value.

Continue to test a combination of each methodology until you find the lead generation method that works for you. Once you discover the perfect combo tailored for your business, build on it and watch as a steady stream of generated leads result in a healthy bottom line.

Wrap Up

In this highly competitive business landscape, it’s important for B2B marketers to be visible in multiple channels that are integrated through an omnichannel strategy. There’s no one-size fits all, but the aforementioned marketing channels have proven to work tremendously for most B2B companies.

However, it’s crucial for each business to test, measure, analyze, and refine their strategies according to the results they’re getting. If there’s a specific channel that’s getting you more qualified leads, then you should increase the resources spent on that channel to maximize your ROI.

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation.