From Sven Martens
The biggest challenge for sales employees has always seemed to be acquisition, but doesn't digital lead generation offer the absolute opportunity to master this challenge? So how does digital lead acquisition work and how can you incorporate it into your process?
What are B2B leads?
B2B leads are nothing more than (new) business contacts that are qualified to varying degrees during your sales process and ideally become new customers.
In digital marketing, leads are generated through various forms of advertising. The term "lead" comes from the English language and means to lead, in this case to guide a contact along the funnel on the way to becoming a new customer.
How do you qualify a lead?
After you have persuaded a prospective customer(digital marketing) to visit your website and they have given you their details, you qualify the prospective customer as a lead.
As a rule, the e-mail address of a contact is recorded as the main characteristic. It is always important to make an initial assessment of a lead's potential. Do they only want to find out about the topic (Knows) or do they also want to carry out an action (Do's)? You can see assessment aids for this from the behavior of the lead on your website.
In the next step, you can qualify your lead. Common classifications here are:
- MQL
- SQL
- Opportunity
You should define the division into several lead qualifications for your company yourself. Parameters here are, for example, the degree of automation and team division. However, there are characteristics that speak in favor of the following classification. Please bear in mind that a lead is still completely "unqualified" after qualification.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) corresponds to an extended extent to your target group, or the so-called buyer persona, the person you see as a potential customer. The interest of the MQL is shown by reactions to your nurturing offers, e.g. downloading white papers, offer sheets, etc. The lead has a need or interest and is processed in your lead nurturing process. From our point of view, several touchpoints are required to further qualify the customer.
From the moment the MQL shows concrete interest in buying, it becomes a..:
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
The characteristic of the SQL is the concrete buying interest. The moment when you establish contact with a sales representative. At this point, we recommend video meetings and product tests to establish a direct relationship with the SQL. The personal touch plays a decisive role, especially with products or services that require explanation, complex offer structures or high prices. The degree between automation and personalization is often an impulse for the purchase.
Opportunity
The SQL becomes an opportunity when he wants to buy your product and you agree on a concrete deal. After the purchase, it is then important toretain the customer and if he is convinced of your product/service, he will recommend your brand/product as a loyal brand ambassador.
Who does lead generation?
Sales means passion for those who do it, but also a certain amount of effort that also entails costs . The more I invest in the personalized explanation of my products and services, the higher the case-related costs.
Generating qualified leads is therefore a highly effective method of minimizing wastage(digital marketing) and keeping costs in check.
With this set-up, you should decide for yourself whether your sales department is responsible for generating leads or whether this can be automated in marketing . Pre-sales tasks such as collecting and enriching leads can be mapped in marketing. Of course, this does not mean that every operational employee cannot collect data in CRM systems, including sales employees in social media, business networks, trade fairs, symposia, etc. However, the qualification/enrichment of these contacts should take place in marketing.
How does B2B lead generation work?
Now that we know what leads are and what they mean, let's take a look at how generation works.
First of all, content marketing, social media marketing and other forms of advertising are used to generate as much attention as possible for your product or service. Search engine optimization provides better organic findability. At the end of the day, traffic is generated on your website or social media channels.
You now try to use this traffic, in the form of valuable content, to offer promotions to your prospective customers. The simplest form is to have the prospect's contact details filled out in lead forms in return for added value (whitepapers, downloads, add-ons, trial versions).
Lead forms
With lead forms, it is important to request as much data from the interested party as necessary, but as little as possible. They are not yet a contact and you can certainly add data that is not primarily relevant during the subsequent process.
The fundamental question for you could be what is a prospective customer willing to pay for the content on offer. A recipe for a food buyer may be worth less than the 14-day trial account of a product configurator provider.
In the course of primary lead generation, you should consider exactly what interested parties are willing to disclose about themselves at this point and what you can learn from them in the subsequent nurturing process. As a basic formula, the following can perhaps be said: the less data is entered or the higher the automation in lead forms, the more conversion can be achieved.
Use of lead generation
Without the use of efficient automation tools, a multi-platform presence and multi-channel sales are almost impossible to achieve(Sales & Distribution).
A CRM tool (for example: (Hubspot, Pidedrive, Zoho, Echobot) that maps all customer and prospect data, ideally also at the traffic generation stage. Many of the systems offer lead generation forms and links to advertising channels.
Where do I create the most traffic for my lead generation?
Content is king and little will change. The impetus for starting a search is usually the still weak but existing interest in a topic. Without latent interest, it often takes high advertising expenditure to get people interested in a topic, or valuable content that offers the searcher help, a solution, benefit or added value.
Creating relevant information for your target group or prospective customers is the most effective and relevant source for lead generation. Your website forms the basis for this information.
Landing pages
On your website, you should ideally present topics for which you want to generate leads on separate pages, so-called landing pages. In order for these landing pages to be found, it is important to permanently optimize them in terms of usability and engagement on the one hand and search engine optimization on the other. There are also various tools for this. Basically, the easier you make the content accessible and the more relevant the topic, the better your organic findability in search engines and therefore the more likely it is that interested parties will reach you.
What is used in content marketing:
Whitepaper
In order to convince a contact to take an action, several touchpoints are required to confirm the prospective customer on their customer journey (AIDA rule). After generating interest in something, the prospect often wants to deepen their interest in a topic before generating demand. Impulse-driven, emotional purchase decisions are almost impossible in B2B sales. Instead, interested parties gather detailed information before even considering a product or service provider.
White papers offer an interesting method of generating B2B leads. By demonstrating your own expertise, you can offer professional support and help the prospective customer in their search.
Screencast - Videos
In B2B acquisition, very high response rates can be generated with so-called screencast videos. Specifically, the screen of the potential customer's website is filmed (with or without your face in the picture) and you describe suggestions for optimizing the prospect's experience. This can be used to generate concrete leads. Well-known providers are Loom, Adobe Captivate or Screencastify.
Webinars
Since the B2B sector often deals with products or services that require intensive consultation, it is advisable to offer interested parties an opportunity to deepen their interest or confirm their action.
Webinars in which you can further present your products or services are suitable for this purpose.
As these webinars can be accessed at any time, people are more likely to give you their contact details than if you communicate directly with the prospective customer.
Online demo / live webinar
Nevertheless, live demos with the prospective customer also offer advantages. For example, the specific needs of the prospective customer can be determined and thus later stages of lead qualification can be skipped.
Blog
In a blog, you can position yourself as an expert on your topic. This is less about teasing your product and more about confirming your expertise to interested parties.
A blog forms a good basis for organic searches in search engines. The more valuable content you offer, the higher your ranking in the SERPs of search engines. Pay attention to the optimization of your keywords to reach your target group as often as possible and with relevant topics.
Remarketing
Not all visitors to your website will fill out your lead form, but they have already shown interest in you and your offer. Through remarketing on your pages by using tags and pixels on them, you can and should target visitors to your website again. A prospective customer needs between 5 and 7 contacts before they make a decision. Use this as a decision-making aid for your prospective customers through remarketing.
Social selling
Alongside sales technologies, today's social selling is an integral part of a company's virtual selling. LinkedIn and Xing (for the D-A-CH region) are the standard for professional networking.
The basis of these networks is certainly networking with former and current colleagues and business partners with whom you want to keep in touch. Of course, you can also find out about current trends and topics.
Of course, you can also actively use these networks to generate leads by regularly creating content and sharing it with your contacts. Over time, you will generate relevance for your topics, get reviews and recommendations and generate leads. Sales tools such as the LinkedIn Sales Navigator give you the opportunity to actively address your target group.
With a company page, you can also directly generate leads on exciting topics. Lead Gen Forms offers the direct lead generation option or the use of call-to-action buttons with corresponding linking options. The ideal feature is the direct data transfer option of the respective contact.
You can also increase interaction with your website by linking to landing pages or your blog to generate more traffic.
Advertising
As with the other measures, the aim of the funnel approach is to generate as many interested parties as possible in the top of the funnel, which then generate leads.
The consideration of which forms of advertising you choose depends on your target group definition, the competition, your budget, etc.
It is important to reach the prospective customer several times on the way to their purchase decision. In addition to native/organic search, such touchpoints can also be achieved through advertising.
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Interested parties search for terms and topics in search engines. If you place relevant keywords for these search terms in advertisements, you can direct interested parties specifically to your landing pages. The best-known advertising platform here is certainly Google Ads, but you can also place ads in Bing.
Community Management
Regular posts in forums or advertorials on industry platforms are also a traffic magnet. The possible backlinks to your website here are an additional benefit, as they improve your organic ranking in the SERPs.
Lookalikes:
If you already have a customer base or have defined the characteristics of potential customers, modern heuristic sales tools offer the possibility of finding interested parties who are similar to your customers, your lookalikes, so to speak.
On the marketing side, you can also focus on lookalikes for your target group or your website visitors in the course of traffic generation and then advertise these specifically.
Conclusio:
Sufficient leads are the basis for success in the B2B sector. With a suitable marketing strategy you will be able to generate promising and sufficient B2B leads.
The basis of the go-to-market approach is the target group analysis and definition, the possible customer journey of this target group and the touchpoints at which you can reach them. After generating attention and traffic, it is up to you to consolidate the leads at touchpoints in the funnel and achieve conversions. Good luck!