B2B Lead Generation – How To Get Started [GUIDE]

When talking to startups, software companies, FinTechs, or conventional service and manufacturing companies, the shared frustration is often “How to get started”.

Whether they are approached by B2B marketing agencies, or reaching out themselves, they get quickly get overwhelmed with “strategies” and “approaches”, and the inevitable feeling that there is more they need to know in order to get a simple and clear view of “How To Get Started” in order to learn and avoid paralysis.

What is Lead Generation?

The simple way to look at lead generation is to understand:

Who is your ideal client?

What are they struggling with?

How can you solving their problem?

The choice of which marketing channels to use, how to qualify, nurture and qualify your leads is A LOT easier to to find the answer to once you know the answer to these three questions.

Step #1 Is to Know Your Ideal Client Profile

Looking at your current base of clients, which ONE type of clients is it that you would select to focus on, if you could?

What industry they are in?

What is their revenue level, amount of employees?

How many of your services do they buy from you?

What is their lifetime-value to your business (order size, purchase frequency, length of relationship)?

What is your cost of servicing them?

Understand their 5 biggest struggles

Understand their biggest struggles, and what makes them look for a solution that can help reduce or eliminate their struggles. Sales will know all or part of the answer that are crucial to understanding what answers they are searching so you can create the content.

Are your audience engaging on this topic in online fora like LinkedIn groups or Facebook groups?

You have to have an intimate understanding of your ideal client, and once you have you will realize how much easier it is to create content, lead magnets and campaigns that “teach to solve” their struggles and build their trust in your ability to help them.

Read more “4 steps to create your Ideal Customer Profile”

Create Content That “Teach to Solve”

Now that you know who your ideal client is, and their 4-5 biggest struggles, you can start to create content (blog posts / landing pages) that

(1) describes the struggles the client experience and the consequence,

(2) offers alternative ways to solve the problem(s), and

(3) perhaps a downloadable “guide” or “description”, which they can use for reference and sharing.

Create a lead magnet and email follow up flow

You want the visitors to download the valuable, well-designed, glossy lead magnet you have designed to help them solve their struggle, but you want a name and email address in exchange so you can identify, track and keep your prospects engaged.

The purpose of the lead magnet and email follow-up flow is not to sell your service, but to keep adding value and “educate” the visitor on how to solve their struggle.

NB: Remember to include links, contact details, and tracking in downloadable content so the prospect can find their way back, engage and click on additional info, and you can track the effect of lead magnets.

TOOLS:

To capture name and email address, is a basic Form-7 on a WordPress site or maybe you use a free Hubspot CRM tool connected with a MailChimp account that can help you send follow up emails and track if the prospect is engaged.

Increase website traffic with paid ads

Based on your ideal client profile you will have a good understanding of where they consume content on professional topics and where they engage and network online. This will help you understand where to engage with your paid ads campaigns to test the campaigns ability to generate leads.

Once you know which ads are working and generate leads, you can build search engine optimized content a scale up your inbound marketing efforts. For now you just want to test what works and what doesn’t

Always set up remarketing Ads to re-engage visitors

A visitor will most likely not convert on their first visit. The prospect’s buying cycle usually starts with building an understanding of what to search for, awareness of the problem and alternative solutions, level of investment etc. This means research and visiting different alternatives. Make sure you have remarketing pixels from the marketing channels required to reach your audience, installed on your website.

Full funnel tracking

“If you are not measuring and keeping track, you are only practicing”

– Coach Wooden

Web analytics tools will provide you with general meta data on traffic, source, engagement, and conversions but you will need more details, for tracking engagement of your identified name/email so that you can act on it, automatically.

Example: ….

What tools should I use for automating lead nurturing?

What you are looking for is a CRM tool that can track downloads, emails opened, pages they have visited on your site, the company they work for etc. This will help you qualify your leads and eventually understand what a “qualified lead” should look like before handover to sales.

We recommend starting with Hubspot CRM (free) which will provide you with lead capture forms for your website, tracking of downloads, engagement, and open to integration with almost all other B2B lead generation and marketing automation tools.

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