How B2B companies use digital marketing to generate leads

by | Dec 15, 2020 | Digital Marketing, Digital Marketing Agency, Digital Marketing Tools, Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Social Media Marketing | 0 comments

B2B companies leverage digital marketing for effective lead generation.

Every new client starts as a lead. We are constantly helping clients find effective digital marketing B2B lead generation strategies to help establish their sales funnel, increase conversions and drive traffic to their website, into their stores, and more.  

But before we dive into digital marketing tactics, it’s important to identify who the B2B target customer is. Many B2B companies’ segment these by department, company or leads with different priorities. B2B customers have different identifiers like company size, job function, order volume, prospects and more.  

What is B2B lead generation? 

B2B lead generation is short for selling to other businesses, or business-to-business sales. This differs from B2C sales where products and services are sold to consumers. Making a B2B sale requires several steps that begin with lead generation. It involves gathering prospect company names, email addresses, job titles of decision makers and other information used to personalize communication and make sales. The goal of B2B lead generation is to create a sales pipeline for prospects that turns them into customers. 

Steps in the lead generation process 

There are 4 steps in the lead generation process we want to talk about today.  

Step 1: Finding the leads. The first step is to find potential businesses/customers that are looking for what you offer. There are several ways to do this with digital marketing including running social media ad campaigns, creating landing pages for those campaigns and adding call to actions on your website. You can also optimize your website using keywords that your prospects are searching for online. SEO can increase your ranking on Google so you show up higher in search results. 

Step 2: Reaching out to leads. Once you have a list of (hopefully) qualified leads (from forms they filled out in step 1), you need to start reaching out to them. This could mean sending email campaigns or engaging with them through social media posts and blog posts.  

Step 3: Qualifying leads. When you interact with leads, you’ll be able to gauge how far down the sales cycle they are, or how likely they are to buy from you. There are typically three stages here:  

  1. Research and awareness. The customer is aware of a need that they have and are researching solutions (you!) 
  1. Consideration. They’re considering their options. 
  1. Decision making. They begin narrowing down options and vendors that meet this need. 

Step 4: Closing the sale. When the prospect knows they want to purchase from you, they will do this in step 4. They then become a customer you can market to. 

With digital marketing strategies like email campaigns, social media posts, blog posts and pay-per-click ads you can easily reach your different target markets (i.e. prospects, customers, returning customers that haven’t purchased from you in a year, etc.).  

Here are 3 tips for B2B lead generation that you can implement today… 

  1. Add CTAs to your website, email campaigns and PPC ads. CTAs, or call to actions, ask prospects to sign up, share, follow or fill out a form. Check to make sure your website, email campaigns and social campaigns contain to a CTA. A few best practices to keep in mind include:  
  • Keep the CTA above the fold/scroll or pin it to the screen so it scrolls with the webpage. 
  • Limit to one, clear CTA that encourages someone to act now 
  • Create visual buttons with text that describes the action you want them to take (i.e. Download Now, Request a Quote) 
  1. Create and repurpose content. Create content that contains your keywords. You can also group existing content into new content such as creating a “best of” list and offering it as download or eBook. Repurpose blog posts on LinkedIn or bundle several blog posts into an eBook with a landing page to collect new leads. Use content to create slideshows, infographics or videos that can be shared on social media accounts. 
  1. Create enticing offers. Offer things like a free assessment, trial or demo in exchange for their contact information.  

Our team at PSC can help you strategize, create, run and analyze each of these to help you generate leads quickly and efficiently using the resources you already have. 

Call us today to get started! 

Learn more about how social media can impact lead generation here.