In the cutthroat competition of B2B sales, a steady stream of good leads is the lifeblood of your business. But with growing buyer journeys and a crowded digital landscape, attracting the right customers can feel like an uphill battle.
In B2B operations, generating leads and driving sales are crucial components for sustained growth and success. B2B lead generation involves identifying and attracting potential business clients who might benefit from your products or services. B2B strategies include social media presence, uploading blogs, and hosting webinars. 53% of B2B marketers rated webinars as the most effective way to produce high-quality leads.
Lead generation B2B companies can convert their sales-qualified leads into actual sales by nurturing and educating them about the products. After reading this article, you’ll be able to initiate your own B2B lead generation and sales for your company.
Understanding Your Target Audience
There are thousands of businesses out there that are looking for the right audience. You might be one of them, so we have listed the top best ways to understand your target audience that you can check below:
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Acknowledge the Needs of your B2B Target Audience
Your business should fulfill the needs of targeted businesses to generate leads. The audience must find value in your products and services before buying them. Understanding how to address these needs is crucial for effective b2b customer service.
Let’s understand it with an example, company A needs computers, but you are providing televisions, and they won’t find value in your product. However, if company B is looking for televisions, they will find value in your product. Hence, Company B is your target audience.
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Target Audience Demographics
Target audience demographics include age, gender, education, industry, and income. These are some very important points to consider in order to understand your target audience.
Let’s say your products are for kids (from 0 to 12 years); then your target audience is businesses for kids, not adults.
Similarly, gender plays a vital role in understanding the target audience. For example, products and services targeting a female audience should be marketed in a soft tone. It should touch on their emotions and needs.
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Budget
Understanding the budget of your audience is important. How so? This is because if you sell luxury products, a small or mid-size company won’t be your target because of their defined funding. Therefore, in such cases, your target audience is those companies and businesses that have large funding and big budgets.
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Decision-Making Capacity
Your target audience must be able to make decisions to purchase your products. Therefore, you can look for two targets: decision-makers and influencers. Why influencers? They are one of the best ways to recommend and advertise your product to their viewers, which can lead to massive sales.
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Target Company’s Size & Location
The size and location of the company also play a crucial role in tailor your marketing campaigns and strategies. There are factors like number of employees, company’s annual revenue, and the number of company branches that can affect the target audience.
Tips to Find the B2B Lead Generation Target Audience
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Create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
An ICP, Ideal Customer Profile, includes all the qualities that you want in your target audience. The qualities may include the industry, company niche and location, company size, demographics, and their pain points. Once you know your ideal customer profile for your products, you can initiate market research.
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Carry Out Market Research and Examine the Competitors
Go through various market aspects, such as market trends and customer surveys. There are similar B2B companies out there as yours that are targeting the same audience. Learn about their marketing strategies, marketing materials, pitching plans, website functions, and more. This will help you understand and create a better plan for your business.
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Make a Buyer’s Persona
List down the detailed interests and hurdles of your potential buyer. Subsequently, build a buyer persona for each of your target companies. It will include your target audience’s pain points, goals, and patterns.
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Analysis and Rectify
Now that you have understanding of your target audience, market research and other important factors, you are ready to begin your marketing campaigns. Run feedback surveys, analyze what is working for your business, and make changes accordingly.
B2B Lead Generation Strategies
Before jumping into B2B lead generation strategies, you should know the types of B2B leads:
- Marketing-qualified leads are the leads who show interest in your product but are not yet ready to buy it.
- Sales-qualified leads are the leads who actively might have used the product trials and sent an email showing buying interest in your product and services. These leads are more potential buyers that you must focus on.
We have listed many effective B2B lead generation strategies below that will help keep your customers coming back and generate sales:
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Content Marketing
This is the top B2B lead generation strategy. Everyone looks for desired products online, so it is important to have your company’s website. Your website works as a landing page with all the detailed information about your products and services.
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Social Media Marketing
Having a social media presence is so important because the major audience is there. From small businesses to MNCs and unicorn companies, everyone uses the power of social media marketing. You can also advertise many products and services there, targeting your audience, which will result in lead generation.
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A/B Testing
Experiments and trials are the basis for finding the best buyers for lead generation in B2B companies. You can run an A/B test in which you experiment with different methods, considering different aspects. This helps you know which marketing strategy is working for generating leads.
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High value leads on LinkedIn
On LinkedIn, you can find the right audience for your business. Through LinkedIn, you can generate high-value B2B leads because of the presence of big businesses on the platform. You can also advertise your business by running ads on LinkedIn or reaching out to your target audience.
B2B Lead generation tools
A list of B2B lead generation tools is mentioned below for different aspects:
| Website visitor identification tool |
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| Email follow-up tools |
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| Sales lead generation tools |
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| Email Marketing Tools |
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| CRM Tools |
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B2B Lead Nurturing and Conversion
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Email Marketing & Website Optimization
Email is the first and most successful lead nurturing channel; 89% of marketers say that it is their first choice. Websites are generally the main landing page for your B2B business. Therefore, it becomes important to optimize your website with SEO. Adding high-quality content with meta description and keyword embedded headings can skyrocket your website’s reach and increase sales.
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Blogs
Blog posts are an effective way to nurture prospects in the first place. You must also know that businesses in the B2B sector that blog produce 67% more leads than those that don’t. B2B lead generation examples through blogs can be seen at Salesforce, Hubspot, Dell, and similar companies.
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Testimonials and Reviews
Earning the trust of your audience can be achieved by presenting proof of your good service. This can be done by showing testimonials and reviews from existing customers. You can request that your buyer provide testimonials after using your service. This will build trust in the sales-qualified leads, which will be converted into sales.
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Personalization
Have you seen Amazon’s or Upwork’s emails? They are personalized for the consumer. They personalize the emails, and advertisements address your business type or sometimes your name, too. They use a conversational tone that sounds like they are directly talking to you. It also feels like they understand your problem and are ready with a solution. According to 91% of users, marketing automation is essential for effectively nurturing prospects across many channels.
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Event Marketing
You can set up webinars (online or offline) or in-person events to educate the audience about the need for your services and how they can benefit from them. You can also let them test your services and ask them about feedback and how you can improve. Many business stakeholders attend such events and end up buying your product.
Best Practices and Tips
To help businesses navigate this complex market, here is a list of best practices and tips that can significantly boost your lead generation and sales efforts.
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Video Content
Video content is more appealing, and it makes it easier to understand the value of the product and services. You can simply make an informative video and post it on YouTube and other platforms. YouTube, one of the popular search engines, can help you increase leads and sales with the right audience.
Robert Weiss, President at MultiVision Digital, has said, “As humans, we are all drawn to video because of the connections that video allows us to make with buyers. And when we can do that we win more business.”
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Optimize your landing pages through SEO; it is a great way to increase visibility on various platforms. For example, you can rank your business on Google using SEO strategies. Now, whenever a potential customer asks for a particular service on the internet, Google will automatically show your page at the top.
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Free Trials
Free trials convince buyers that their money is worth investing in your products. Hence, you can run free trials on your products and services, for example, one week or month free trials, and then later pitch your price.
For example, lead generation B2B companies like Canva and Mailchimp use free trial techniques to generate leads. This allows prospects to test their services, and if they are impressed, they’ll convert into sales.
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Case Studies and Survey Results
Case studies enhance the credibility of your products and services. Therefore, it is recommended to promote your case studies as an active process. The surveys you have performed from time to time are one of the coolest ways to increase sales. The survey depicts the analytics and data, which is a proof of your good service. Therefore, use your survey results to promote your business, that will definitely lead to sales.
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Mobile View Optimization
Mobile phones are handy, and everyone looks up desired products quickly on their phones. Hence, lead generation B2B companies need to make sure to optimize their business online in mobile view as well.
Imagine if your website is only desktop-friendly. The consumer’s phone will not show your website on their page. This will result in the lead generation of some other businesses that have their landing pages optimized for mobile viewing.
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Referrals to Contacts and Friends
You can generate leads by sending referrals through contacts and connections. Confused how? You might have seen a service on a platform where they ask you to forward the product to your friends or someone who is looking for it, and they give you a reward in return. The rewards can be discounts, cashbacks, free trials, or cash prizes. This is how you share the service with your friends and connections, which certainly increases sales for the business.
B2B businesses like Hubspot, Adobe, Amazon, and Canva are some examples of referral programs for lead generation.
Conclusion
B2B target audiences are other businesses, such as software-as-a-service providers (SaaS), marketing and advertising agencies, medical equipment suppliers, wholesale suppliers and distributors, or IT service providers. As we have discussed the main points of B2B lead generation and sales, we would like to wrap up with effective tips that will help you in further lead generation.
First, never spam your target audience and prospects, for example, through calls or emails. They might lose interest. Secondly, running regular ads on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn will help you increase the visibility of your business. Keep your B2B business up-to-date with the latest industry trends, and keep experimenting with your marketing strategies. You can even try a reward system and provide some benefits to your buyers, which will definitely lead to sales.
About the Author: Yogesh Bhagwani is a link-building specialist with three years of experience in the industry. He has written for a variety of industries and collaborated with numerous clients to enhance their online presence. In his leisure time, he enjoys dancing and playing cricket.
Email: yogesh@saasate.in
