4 B2B Marketing Strategies for Lead Generation
Driving qualified leads is a pain point for many B2B marketers, as the pressure to generate these leads is increasing.
Increasing overall site traffic is good; generating leads from this traffic is great. This not only tells you that you’re getting more eyes on your website but that they are highly relevant and qualified eyes.
Below I’ve outlined a few B2B marketing strategies to increase lead generation. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather comes from my experience with clients and what I have seen as successful.
1. Optimize Your Website for Conversions
This may seem like an obvious one, but you’d be surprised how many sites I see lacking key elements for conversion. I suggest taking a look at your site from an unbiased perspective and evaluate how easy it is for users to contact you, fill out a form, or download a whitepaper.
I’ve seen tremendous success by adding easily accessible CTAs to landing pages. For example, a few of my clients use CTAs (like the below) on the bottom of blog posts to drive leads.
One thing I will point out is that these CTAs need to be straightforward and stand out and, for goodness sake, test, test, and test some more to find out what works for your audience. The easier and more obvious you make it for your website visitors, the more conversions you will drive.
Whatever you decide, just remember: keep it simple and make it obvious.
2. Optimize Your Website with SEO
Once your website is structurally sound and has a great user experience, it’s time for another crucial element: increasing your website’s visibility.
Enter our good friend SEO.
To put it simply, SEO helps increase relevant organic traffic to your website by optimizing your content for items your target audience is searching for (through various on-page and off-site tactics).
This not only brings in more traffic but also highly r-e-l-e-v-a-n-t traffic, thus increasing the likelihood of leads. One way to determine if traffic is relevant is to look at the bounce rate on landing pages as well as how engaged users are with your website/content.
Increasing your overall website visibility and optimizing your site with relevant keywords and content will draw more qualified users and increase the chance of converting them.
3. Demonstrate Expertise Through Blogging/Content Marketing
Consistent, relevant, and informational blogging can help educate your target audience as well as answer their pain points. Content marketing can help build trust and authority for your brand, thus giving credibility to your solution or offering.
It’s important to optimize each blog post with applicable keywords in order to draw in visitors and increase visibility.
I recommend doing research in Search Console, SEMRush, and Google Keyword Planner to not only find out what terms are driving traffic to your site, but also what your audience is searching on.
As I mentioned above, blogs are a great place for CTA buttons; I recommend having these lead to gated content in order to get these potential buyers information.
Quality content that is written for your target audience, increases the chance of driving conversions.
4. Engage on Social Media
Another great way to increase leads on your site is to start interacting and engaging with influencers and your target audience off-site.
Using social media to create interest around your products or solutions is an easy first step into the sales funnel. Not only is social media cost effective but it also is effective in driving leads.
According to Sprout Social:
- Social media marketing has reduced costs for 45% of businesses.
- Revenue increased for 24% of businesses when they utilized social media for lead generation.
It is imperative, depending on how large your organization is, to pick one or a few platforms to focus on. It does your business no good to half-ass 10 platforms if you really should only be on one.
I have had tremendous success [humble brag] driving B2B leads through LinkedIn with organic and sponsored posts. LinkedIn’s ad targeting capabilities have grown by leaps and bounds in the past few years, allowing you to identify your target audience by title, location, industry…etc.
In addition to LinkedIn, Twitter is another great platform to drive B2B leads. In fact, KoMarketing recently published an in-depth piece on this topic.
Last But Not Least
As I said before, this is by no means an exhaustive list of B2B tactics to drive leads. The important thing to remember that whatever you decide, make sure that your B2B marketing strategies and tactics are cohesive.