Here’s a great article from WebFX Blog
Companies can choose from dozens of strategies when it comes to business-to-business (B2B) lead generation. With so many lead generation ideas to choose from, however, it’s not surprising that almost 70 percent of companies struggle with B2B lead generation.
Your company doesn’t have to, though.
With these five powerful (yet often overlooked) B2B lead generation tactics, your business can launch a smart strategy that attracts high-value leads. You can even use the expertise of our award-winning team to amplify the performance of your B2B lead generation strategy. Just contact us online to get started.
Ready to learn more about these must-use B2B lead generation tactics? Keep reading!
1. Give your lead generation forms an overdue update
While some leads may call your company directly, many use your website to contact your team. That’s why contact forms across your site play a critical role in your B2B lead gen efforts. If those forms underperform, so does your lead generation strategy.
Companies, however, tend to overlook their contact forms.
Instead, they focus on their website traffic and conversion rates. While you want to monitor these metrics, you also want to determine what’s influencing their performance. When it comes to your conversion rates, your contact forms carry significant influence.
If you ask the wrong questions, include a problematic design feature, or use a poor location for your contact form, it can result in low conversions. Your company isn’t losing leads because of your product or service, but because of a contact form on your website.
That’s why it’s essential to adopt this B2B lead generation strategy: optimize your contact forms.
You can optimize or improve your contact forms in a few ways. You can make global and local changes, like redesigning your contact form or modifying your form fields, for example. Depending on your site, you may require the help of your development team to update your website.
A few additional examples of ways you can optimize your contact forms include:
- Increase or decrease the number of form fields
- Modify the number of required form fields
- Change the information requested from leads
- Update the contact form’s design
- Move the location of the contact form
If you decide to use this B2B lead generation tactic, use multivariate or A/B testing to make changes. This approach allows your team to compare design differences and determine which one offers the most value when it comes to your lead generation goals.
2. Supercharge your email marketing campaigns for lead generation
Email is non-negotiable when it comes to lead generation for B2B. It’s one of the most reliable B2B lead generation strategies, which is why almost 90 percent of marketers say it’s their company’s primary strategy.
That, however, is the problem.
While companies recognize the value of email marketing, they fail to develop successful strategies for email. It’s a B2B lead generation tactic that doesn’t reach its full potential, which is why businesses need to reinvest in email marketing.
Maximize the performance of your email marketing campaign with an in-depth audit of your strategy. Look at your different audiences, segmentation strategies, automated journeys, and more to assess the performance of your plan and opportunities for improvement.
3. Create a dedicated SEO strategy for generating B2B leads
According to a recent study by HubSpot, search is one of the best channels when it comes to lead generation for B2B. For reference, search describes the organic traffic that search engines, like Google or Bing, drive to your site.
While many B2B companies use search engine optimization (SEO), which focuses on improving your visibility in relevant search results to drive organic traffic to your website, it’s common for businesses to abandon SEO.
That’s because companies expect immediate results from this B2B lead generation strategy. SEO, however, is an ongoing, long-term tactic. It can take up to six months for SEO to show results, but many businesses expect results sooner.
If you want to take full advantage of SEO for lead generation, you need to educate everyone involved in your lead generation efforts. For example, you may need to provide company decision-makers with additional information about SEO to earn their support when it comes to SEO.
Then, you can start the process of creating a dedicated SEO strategy for lead generation.
For the best results, your team can breakdown this strategy to include the different parts of the digital marketing buying funnel. For example, you may target select keywords for reaching users in the early and late stages of the buying funnel.
A dedicated SEO strategy can have a tremendous impact on your B2B lead generation strategy.
Reynolds Building Solutions, a WebFX client, provides a perfect example of the power of SEO.
With a custom SEO strategy from our team, Reynolds Building Solutions saw not only a 43 percent year-over-year increase in their organic traffic but also a 71 percent year-over-year increase in organic contact form submissions.
4. Get innovative (and creative) with content marketing
Content marketing is another area of opportunity when it comes to lead generation for B2B. With content marketing, your business focuses on developing relevant and useful content, like infographics and blog posts, for your target buyer.
Since content marketing is a popular B2B lead generation strategy, however, your company needs to get creative and innovative when it comes to your approach. You need to move ahead of your competitors, rather than follow their lead.
For example, around 80 percent of B2B companies use blogs as a part of their content strategy. In comparison, less than 50 percent use microsites, highlighting a potential opportunity for your organization’s content marketing strategy.
Your company can also leverage technology to help your content marketing strategy succeed when it comes to lead generation. ContentAnalyticsFX and PredictionGeniusFX, for example, use machine learning to assess the value of current and future content topics when it comes to your overall goals.
With this kind of technology, which WebFX provides to clients for free, your company can gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. This edge is significant, as almost 50 percent of business buyers read three to five pieces of content before speaking with a sales representative.
Compelling content can help your company become a critical touchpoint for those buyers.
5. Rethink the design of your website’s landing pages
Like contact forms, companies tend to overlook the role of their landing pages on users. From poor design to slow speed, landing pages can impact potential leads in multiple ways. They can make or break your B2B lead gen efforts, which is why landing page design is critical.
Your landing page can deliver on your B2B lead generation strategy when it’s:
- Fast
- Intuitive
- Relevant
- SEO-friendly
- User-friendly
If you’re ready to generate more leads from your landing page, you can approach it a few ways:
- In-house
- Freelance
- Agency
Depending on your company, you may not have a dedicated team for web design and development. While you can partner with a freelancer, it often results in your business partnering with someone with minimal industry experience, which can impact the design and performance of your landing page.
That’s why a web design agency offers the most value.
A web design agency connects your business with a professional group of designers and developers. Plus, full-service agencies, like WebFX, can optimize your landing page design for users and according to SEO best practices because they offer web design and digital marketing services.
With a professional landing page design, your company can improve not only your organic conversion rates but also your paid ones. York Saw and Knife, an industrial blade manufacturer, is an example of what can happen when you redesign a landing page.
A redesigned website, plus a performance-driven PPC campaign generated tremendous results for York Saw and Knife. The company’s cost-per-conversion decreased by 20 percent while its conversion rate increased by 108 percent. Its year-over-year organic session traffic also increased by 138 percent.
Put your website (and landing pages) to work by investing in the design of your landing pages.
Make lead generation for your B2B company a success
Every day, companies in the B2B industry lose leads, whether due to a poor site design, limited SEO strategy, or run-of-the-mill email marketing campaign. Your company, however, doesn’t have to be like the rest of the industry.
With a smart and well-researched lead generation strategy for your B2B, you can improve conversion rates, increase lead quality, and maximize company revenue. If it seems like an impossible task for your team, WebFX can help.
In the past five years, we’ve helped our clients earn more 4.6 million leads and more than $1.5 billion in revenue. Not to mention, our client recommendation score exceeds the industry average by more than 488 percent.
Discover how our award-winning team can help your business by contacting us online today!
The post B2B Lead Generation: 5 Underused B2B Lead Generation Tactics appeared first on WebFX Blog.