21 Proven B2B Lead Generation Strategies

B2B marketing is about acquiring new customers as well as focusing on repeat business. 

However, acquiring a new customer needs an effective marketing strategy. 

Being in the B2B industry for a long, we have helped a lot of clients with a strong product or a service who lacked brand awareness. When they got enough exposure, the revenue spike never came down. 

If people don’t know about your business, it doesn’t exist for them. 

Agree?

No matter how good your product or service is, It is important to get more people to know about your products or services and generate quality B2B leads. 

Why?

To accomplish your revenue goal, B2B lead generation holds the key. But, what’s more, important is the quality of leads so that salespeople can take accountability, contact them, meet them, and make sales.

According to Forbes, 85% of B2B marketers consider lead generation their first challenge. 

Yeah! That’s a big number.

However, there are different ways to deal with B2B lead generation challenges. 

So, let’s look at a set of 21 best B2B lead generation strategies to generate quality leads.

1. Avoid One-Way Communication

Sales reps approaching prospects without a systematic approach often rely only on one-directional communication such as websites, blog posts, and videos. However, it is important to have a real conversation with your prospects as often as possible.

For instance, If your prospect asks about features of your product or benefits of your services over chat or email, don’t stop by only sharing the link to a knowledge base. Instead, share the link followed by a request to have a call for a brief conversation to break the ice. 

If you are having an email conversation, try to schedule a video call and if you are on a video call, ask your prospect to meet at their convenient time and place. 

2. Use the Website as Your B2B Lead Generation System

A website plays the role of your sales rep that’s available for your prospect to consume information anytime and at any place. Thus, B2B businesses need to focus on getting the website right. 

Having a website without a conversion-focused approach is not more than a digital brochure. Thus, make sure you have all the necessary information in the right place in a clean and presentable way on your website. 

You can integrate tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, Tag Manager, Heat Map, etc., and get valuable data and insights to check the performance of your website.

You can also integrate tools like HubSpot CRM that allow you to track the activities of the website visitors when they fill out the form. This will help you to know their interest before approaching them. 

3. Use Contact Databases

Using a database for B2B lead generation is a common practice often followed by startups. However, with rising competition to reach decision-makers, using B2B data has become a part of the sales process in large enterprises as well. 

As mentioned at the start, B2B lead generation is all about the quality of the leads. Make sure you are using reliable B2B data as it will save you time while prospecting. 

If you are a startup and want to skyrocket your lead volume, SalesIntel can be the extra source of leads you need. 

SalesIntel is a trusted B2B data partner of B2B companies from startups to Fortune 500 companies offering human-verified contact data as well as company data. The portal also offers additional data including technographic and firmographics to support your prospecting.

4. Take Advantage of Guest Blogging

Guest blogging can be an effective way to promote your content to a wider untapped audience. 

You might have a limited set of audiences to engage due to a lack of brand awareness. Guest blogging allows you to reach someone else’s audience which is also relevant to your offerings.

All you need is to reach good guest blogging sites and a good piece of content to provide them for publishing on their blog. 

Tools like Justreachout will help you find people with influence and contact them. You can even outsource the whole task to content experts or freelancers who can ghostwrite an article for you and pitch it to blogs and other publications.

5. Use Marketing Automation

If you have not started collecting the email addresses, you need to start collecting them to take advantage of the marketing automation tools. 

You can start with the best sales tools like RevDriver to collect email addresses and use marketing automation to nurture them and convert them into qualified B2B leads. Once you are able to convert the prospect to a qualified lead, sales can pick them up.

If you segment your customers to send as relevant messages as possible, it will be effective. Otherwise, sending the same, generalized material to a new lead, there are very fewer chances of getting a response.

6. Use Email Signature

A smartly set email signature with hyperlinks to social media profiles can aid your prospects to learn more about your offerings.

You must be sending a lot of emails from your professional email account to the clients, and prospects. You can promote the company information and valuable articles in your personal email signature. You can even ask the other employees of your company to add the content links in their signatures while sending emails outside the organization. 

You can also add a link to your LinkedIn account so that your prospects can go through your profile to know you better.

If someone clicks once out of every 20 emails you send, it’s already very useful given the number of emails you probably send per year.

7. Answer questions on Q&A Portals

Q&A portals like Quora can be a great source of gaining website traffic and generating new sales leads. Your audience is already searching for answers to their queries relevant to your offering or their pain areas. 

The situation gives you the best chance to offer a solution to their problems and take it ahead from there. 

8. Use Live Chat

Even though you have all the required information on your website and have designed it to convert the traffic into qualified leads, having a live chat option turns convenient for the prospects as well as helps you engage them in real-time. 

According to studies, 42% of customers prefer to live chat for their customer support questions, while 73% of website visitors and customers who take part in a chat are happy with the results.

Live chat creates an opportunity to get the email Id of the prospect using which you can nurture them using a drip campaign. 

9. Hosting Webinars to Generate Leads

Hosting webinars is a great way to attract potential customers when done right. However, if you want to generate high-quality leads that are more likely to convert, you need to pay attention to every detail.

Webinars give you a great opportunity to get in a conversation with your audience. You can address any question or solve their concern in real-time, share your views and ideas with them, and pull those who are drawn to your approach further into the funnel.

10. Participate in Conversations

Are you already a member of relevant Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups? While some groups allow you to promote your services or product directly, many professional groups on both platforms have a strict rule book. 

You cannot promote your offering in every group. It is better to get into the conversation, share your views, and share unique content related to the pain areas of the members to drive engagement and traffic to your website.

Remember to make sure your profile looks professional and effective when taking part online!

11. Use Different Content Formats

Content marketing is not limited to writing articles and promoting them. Your prospects can consume the content on different platforms and formats. Some professionals prefer to download PDFs and read them later while some prefer consuming content through videos and infographics. You should be providing for all needs.

Create the right content for each stage of the sales funnel and repurpose content in all possible channels to multiply your reach to generate leads from various channels. If you have overseas clients from other regions, you can consider translating your content to widen your reach.

12. Prospecting Using LinkedIn 

When it comes to sales prospecting, you cannot keep LinkedIn out of your lead generation strategy. In addition to joining LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn has more opportunities to target people.

Connecting prospects on LinkedIn is a common way to reach your audience. However, with so many connection requests from professionals trying to sell, connection requests might get ignored by the prospect. 

Another option is LinkedIn Inmails, which are widely used by sales and marketing professionals to reach their prospects. However, with the rising use of Inmails for selling, prospects take time to respond as they will visit your LinkedIn profile and activities before responding to your Inmails. Since there’s a limit to Inmails, it put limitations on marketing and sales efforts.

While getting the contact details of the prospects using LinkedIn alone requires a lot of patience, a free prospecting tool like RevDriver makes it easy in a few clicks. 

RevDriver allows sales professionals to get contact details along with the company’s firmographic and technographic simply by visiting their LinkedIn profile.

You can export ANY LinkedIn contact using RevDriver.

13. Create Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is a freemium piece of content that is valuable for your prospects for which they are ready to give their email address. 

The content can be an eBook, a case study, a PDF with industry-specific statistics, a recorded webinar, a free tool, a free trial of your software, or whitepaper content. 

Creating something of high value and giving it for free is a great way to build authority and generate B2B leads. 

Information to be collected might vary for different content types. However, make sure you don’t ask for too much information in your lead form at once. You also need to make sure you have set the right form validations and tested them before making it live.

14. Create Conversion-Focused Landing Pages

If your prospects are searching for your solution, you want them to land on a specific landing page. Having a well-optimized and conversion-focused landing page is important especially if you are running paid ads. 

A landing page can be an additional page that is not directly connected to your website or it can be a home page or a page with gated content. 

Remember to provide only the required information on the landing page. However, you also need to make sure that the information is convincing enough to generate leads. 

15. Collect Genuine Reviews and Ratings

According to Search Engine Land, 87 percent of potential customers won’t consider businesses with low ratings. 

Buyers from B2B or B2C always try to find honest reviews, ratings, and testimonials before they make a buying decision. With open review platforms like Facebook and Google, people are happy to share their experiences with others.

You need to accept the fact that there will be mixed reviews. However, it is important that these reviews are genuine. Dishonest reviews can kill your search engine rankings or do some other harm. Don’t risk it.

16. Ask for Customer Referrals

Most B2B businesses, SMEs, or larger enterprises believe in generating leads from referrals, as leads generated through customer referrals are often very high-quality and have the best chances of closing the deal. 

Thus, it is important to focus on every customer and provide them with the best customer experience irrespective of the deal size. An entrepreneur from a startup may refer you to a big account.

17. Try Lead Generation Ads

It’s a myth that Facebook as a marketing tool is fruitful only for the B2C industry. Well-targeted Facebook lead ads can help you collect the email addresses of your B2B prospects as every professional person on LinkedIn often has a Facebook account. When the goal is to be in front of your audience, Facebook becomes a useful platform.

Facebook ads allow you to set the audience based on the targeted location and demography of your ideal customer. You can monitor the performance of your ads, download the report, and take necessary actions to optimize your ad campaigns. 

The goal while running the ads should be to generate qualified leads and keep working on increasing the conversion rate. 

18. Attract Website Traffic with Google Ads

You might be executing SEO activities, but it takes considerable time to come up in search engine result pages (SERPs). While your website is probably generating leads, you should try to bring more traffic to your website using Google search and display ad campaigns. 

Make sure you use time and effort to create campaigns that generate sales leads and don’t just increase your web traffic.

19. Optimize Email Strategy using Accurate Data

Emails are still the most effective channel to reach prospects if you avoid the generalized approach. According to HubSpot’s recent study, 93 percent of B2B marketers use email to distribute content.

The major roadblock in using email marketing is keeping the bounce rate to minimal. The bounce rate is the result of not maintaining data hygiene (data accuracy). Businesses try to build an email list from the resources available on the internet. 

Data gets updated on average every 12-14 months as people switch jobs or are promoted to different departments or positions. As a result, one cannot rely on the email Ids and the name of the concerned person available on the websites, portals, and business directories.

Businesses have started partnering with reliable B2B data providers to maintain data accuracy and make the most of their email marketing effort. Data providers also offer additional information to help sales professionals take a personalized approach that creates more chances of receiving a response. 

As a trusted B2B data partner, SalesIntel ensures data accuracy by re-verifying the data through humans (not machines) every 90 days. That’s our data promise. 

20. Account-Based Marketing

While account-based marketing (ABM) is continuing to grow in popularity, 92% of marketers consider ABM to be extremely important to their overall marketing efforts. 

As it involves delivering personalized messages to the targeted accounts and key contacts in the account, it has a higher success ratio in B2B lead generation.

However, you must have accurate B2B data for executing ABM campaigns. With reliable demographic and psychographic data at your fingertips, you’ll always know exactly who they are, where they are, and why they’re a high-priority target for your offering.

21. Chase Your Prospect With Remarketing 

Remarketing allows you to re-engage prospects who either visited your website, landing page, social post, paid ads, or any other digital ad campaign. 

Use remarketing for those who have interacted with your marketing campaigns or spent some time exploring your website. Don’t just use remarketing for all your users. 

You can re-engage your prospects either by pitching an offer in the remarketing ad or simply by pitching the advantages of working with your company. 

Make sure you show relevant content in the remarketing ad. If your visitor has read about a certain service show them ads about a fresh case study related to that service.

Final Thoughts

When all is said and done, you need to start from somewhere. SalesIntel has created a lot of B2B lead generation success stories by offering reliable B2B data for their marketing initiatives from email and ABM campaigns to marketing events and conferences. 

Want to check our data accuracy, download our free chrome extension today!