Let’s start with the basics …
Lead generation is the process of filling up your sales funnel with qualified leads that your sales team uses to vet potential clients and customers. Making sure that your funnel is full of the right leads is essential to any B2B company’s success. Which begs the question …
Simple – a fully integrated lead generation strategy. That’s … maybe not so simple.
Lead generation strategies are made up of tactics that fall into two buckets – inbound and outbound.
If you want to fully maximize your lead generation efforts, you need to be doing the right mix of both inbound and outbound tactics.
But time and resources are finite, so this list will be ordered by priority.
Think of it as “need to have” vs. “nice to have.” We’ll start with the foundation – solid inbound lead generation efforts. These are the things that you NEED to be doing. If you have those bases covered then feel free to skip to the outbound stuff – this is where the fun begins.
Without further ado…
We’ll start with inbound because these are tactics that you need to be using in your lead generation strategy.
Inbound marketing is great for many reasons, but maybe the best of them all …
It’s pretty much free – if you do it right.
These are the “need to have” items – especially in 2022. Your customers expect things like a well-functioning website and loads of informative content. Without them, it’ll be a challenge to gain any traction with leads.
If you’re just starting up or refreshing the way your business works, here are the most important tactics to focus on building that foundation.
When you want to build a house, you start with the foundation. And the foundation of any inbound lead-gen strategy is a website that fires on all cylinders.
A well-designed, easy-to-use website filled with educational content is the cornerstone and an absolute must-have if you want to generate leads. Point blank – clunky websites are frustrating.
Here are the things you need to focus on…
The blog is one of the pillars of a successful B2B inbound marketing strategy. You need to create engaging content to keep your audience’s attention and those SEO juices flowing. And you need a place to go with that content. A blog scratches both of those itches.
Blog posts are great for capturing those long-tail keyword queries with high search intent. They allow you to answer the specific questions your prospects are asking.
On top of that, one of the main goals of good inbound marketing is to be viewed as a thought leader in your industry. When people see you and like what you have to say, they want to work with you.
Once you have a good blog going, it gets easier to create other content like eBooks, guides, and case studies.
Go beyond the written word!
Think about the content you consume. A big part of that content comes in a form other than the written word. The same goes for your prospects.
Here are some content formats to try in 2022.
Between your blog, premium assets, and dynamic content, you got a lot of cool stuff to share. So, share it!
But …
Be intentional with where you share it. Social media is great, but if your audience isn’t on Facebook, then you don’t need to be on Facebook. (And let’s be honest: Should you really be on Facebook?) When used precisely, social media is a great way to target your prospects with relevant content and drive high-quality traffic to your website.
PPC campaigns (e.g., Google Search ads) are a great way to get in front of people searching for exactly what you offer.
PPC helps you solve one of the most important tenants of good inbound content marketing – being able to offer the right content at the right time to the right people exactly when they need it.
When you hear the term “outbound marketing,” what do you think of?
If it’s cold calls and emails and lots of trade shows, then you might need to update your thinking. Not that these are necessarily bad tactics,
Outbound marketing has gotten a lot of love over the past few years, and there are a lot of automation tools and tactics that are designed to bring in leads with less cost than traditional outbound methods.
If you already have a solid inbound lead generation foundation, then 2022 is your year to dip your toes into the new outbound waters.
A good outbound strategy all starts with a robust customer relationship management solution.
These solutions help you find new customers and win their business. They do this by giving you a complete suite of tools to keep detailed records of contact information, past communications, and preferences.
CRMs give you a consolidated view of each prospect and customer. This allows your sales team can speak to each prospect with complete information. Empower them to provide prospects with the right offers at the right times, moving them down the pipeline quicker.
Outbound is no longer as costly as it used to be thanks to automation.
There are a lot of automated workflow and communication solutions out there like automated email campaigns, automated social messaging, and automated calling.
The problem with outbound in the past was scalability. These automated solutions allow your business to personally communicate with prospects at scale.
One word of warning here – be careful not to go overboard with automated communications. These automations are good, but people can tell when they are talking with an AI.
Make sure to supplement these efforts with true personal communication.
One of our favorite new tools is Copilot AI. Essentially it’s an automated LinkedIn messenger that allows you to create personalized and highly-targets communications with prospects.
It allows you to target specific positions and companies on LinkedIn. From there you can create automated messaging campaigns specifically designed to elicit a response. Once you get that response, you can respond yourself.
Copilot helps make your LinkedIn outreach easier, more targeted, and infinitely more scalable.
Lead generation takes time and a coordinated effort on multiple fronts. There are the “need-to-have’s” and the “nice-to-have’s.” Every business is at different points along its lead generation journey.
The way to move forward for your journey, focus on the needs first and then move on to the nice.
It takes a fully integrated lead generation strategy to fill up your sales funnel with qualified leads, so make 2022 the year where you beef up your lead generation.
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