The question I get asked more than any other is how do I generate more quality sales leads? It is a question asked by companies of all sizes and industries. I have been in the business to business lead generation sector for over 20 years, lots of things have changed in that time so I thought I would compile my top techniques to ensure B2B lead generation success.
1 Understand Your Market
I’m going to come back to this point time and again in this blog and every blog that I do. Understanding your market is probably the number one aspect of any B2B lead generation campaign, yet it’s often overlooked. I’m not talking about a database here, but actually understanding your market. This means you need to understand your company, the offerings you are taking to market, who your ideal customer is, how they buy, why they buy, when they buy, how often they buy, who influences the decision and why they would buy from you.
You may have multiple markets that you target or you are able to segment your market by different criteria. You need to understand each of these markets or segments individually.
The reason I say it is so important is that you will know what you have to communicate to get their interest, where to market yourself, what information to give, when to communicate etc. By spending time here you can save significant time and effort in your business to business lead generation campaign further down the line.
2 Your Strategy and Goals
When I’m at seminars and events lots of people say to me what should your social media strategy be, or what should my telemarketing strategy be. This is a very difficult one for an outside person to answer but one you should try to do so. Your company should have a business strategy, within this will be a sales and marketing strategy. Your marketing strategy will be created from understanding your market and seeing how it fits in with your business goals.
The key part for me is that every element of your marketing activity should be driving you towards your business goals. If you need to get 25 new customers and to do that you need to attend 125 qualified appointments then you will have a very different strategy to a business who only wants 5 customers over a year in a very small target market.
3 Data
If you’re doing outbound campaigns, and I don’t know why you wouldn’t, then good quality data is crucial to the success of your lead generation campaigns. So often we are doing an integrated telemarketing and email campaign into a clients target market but find that the database is 10 years old, they don’t really know what industries the companies are in there are missing job titles and the companies could be any size because they don’t have the information needed.
In this case, any lead generation campaign would be doomed to failure. Once you’ve gone through the process of understanding your market, you need to source data that meets your exact criteria. If you have multiple target markets or segments then you can build this database up over time as funds or resources become available.
One thing I do know about lead generation data is that you get what you pay for. It is possible to get 100,000 email addresses for £500. The only certainty with this is that you will lose £500. Always buy data that meets your exact needs it pays dividends in the long run.
We do offer a free data analysis if anybody is interested.
4 Unified Keyword Strategy
This is something that many people will think is strange for successful B2B lead generation. To me it’s vital. Keywords were first talked about in terms of SEO and online marketing; yes they are important for this, but I think they go a lot further.
The keywords that you use are the terms and phrases that your target market knows and uses themselves. These will change on a regular basis, so it comes down to the very first point again about understanding your target market. These keywords will be dotted around your blog, used in the subject lines of emails, used by your telemarketing staff, spread on your social media communication and written about on your website etc.
It’s your keywords that can help ensure you are engaging with your target market and positioning yourselves as experts.
5 Your website
Your website is a crucial part of your B2B lead generation campaign. Your telemarketers or telemarketing agency will direct people through to it, your social media and blogs will link to it, emails with drive traffic to it, people will search it and following meetings prospects will visit it.
It’s vital that your website meets your marketing goals, talks about the terms written in your keyword strategy and is created from your understanding of your target market.
