B2B Lead Gen - What's the Secret?
Why are some B2B companies so successful, and others need help maintaining a steady flow of leads? Is there a secret to success? The truth is, it’s not just one secret. Its different components working together to create a successful B2B brand and marketing strategy that supports an inflow of leads. Our agency has lots of experience helping B2B companies build and maintain their brand.
As an agency specializing in branding, strategy, and digital marketing, we believe each plays a unique role in B2B lead generation. Keep reading to learn more about how strategic lead gen helps you grow your customer base.
Branding for B2B Lead Generation
Establish a Consistent Brand Voice and Identity
We've worked with many brands that, in the early stages, struggled with maintaining a consistent brand voice and identity. The best way to combat this is to establish concrete brand guidelines.
Brand guidelines are a brand's framework and standards to maintain consistency. Your brand guidelines should include visual brand elements, such as logo usage and brand colours, and a brand voice guide (which includes how the brand talks). Other brand identity elements include your brand's positioning statement and values.
This framework will guide how you manage future brand communications and help boost your lead generation efforts. These future communications will include digital channels (such as social media, the website, emails, and more) and other collateral (such as case studies, presentation decks, and press releases).
Send the Right Message
Another issue some of our clients have challenges faced is creating a brand message that resonates with their target audience. Brands should be confident that their customer base understands their offering, which is more challenging for some companies than others.
For example, some software companies that deal with complicated statistical analyses may need help to convey their message in a way that is still accurate to what their company offers and easily understood by their target audience.
A good rule of thumb is to have messaging surrounding the benefit of your product or service, not the product or service itself. For example, a marketing research company might say to a small office supply company, “We’ll help your company get the actionable insights you need to boost sales,” instead of “We offer statistical analyses on your company’s data.” The first example speaks directly to the benefit and is much more likely to resonate with the target audience.
Once you establish your brand voice and identity, review your brand messaging. Craft your brand’s message with your brand guidelines and target audience in mind and should remain consistent (unless, of course, you update your strategy).
Build Brand Values Around Customer Trust
Why is customer trust so essential for B2B businesses? Ian Bruce, a VP Principal Analyst at Forrester, says, “Customers who trust are more likely to renew, entertain a new product or service, and recommend the company to others”. In addition, B2B business decisions tend to be much larger than B2C, which makes trust even more important. This reality is especially true for B2B companies that sell products or services requiring an ongoing relationship, such as a packaged goods supplier or software service provider.
So, how can B2B brands earn this trust from their customers? One of the simplest (and most effective) ways is through social proof. Do you have any customer testimonials? Or any stats that speak to your brand’s success in helping customers? Either one of these is absolute gold regarding social proof and will help build trust with potential customers.
According to the fascinating research of psychologist Robert B. Calidini, we view behaviour, such as working with a particular company, as correct to the degree that we see others doing it. So, for example, if a specific company has 100s of 5-star reviews, that tells potential customers that many people have worked with this company AND had a positive experience. Therefore, working with this company would be appropriate.
Another way to earn customer trust is by offering informative content before asking the customer for a sale. Of course, it's important to sell, but selling too hard can be a turn-off for customers. Take it from Gary Vanyerchuk, the creator of the “Jab. Jab. Jab. Right Hook” method, before you even have the audacity to ask for a sale, subscriber, etc. (right hook), you need to first provide value to your customers through the content you put out, the ways you convey your appreciation and more (the jabs). All too often, you’ll see brands trying to get customers to sign up for an email list or buy something while only offering limited information about their product or service.
Instead, B2B brands should focus on building up their credibility in the industry by offering industry news, opinions, and other informative content. Of course, we’re not suggesting you don’t sell at all. We’re simply suggesting this shouldn’t be the main focus right away.
You’d be surprised at how well potential customers respond to industry information, news, and more from a company that isn’t trying to sell them something. This approach will also keep your brand top of mind for when these companies are ready to buy.
Strategy for B2B Lead Generation
Connect with Your Audience Where They Want to Find You
Although this may seem obvious, too many B2B companies have abandoned all forms of traditional marketing and opted for a digital-only approach. Of course, digital is very important (we will get into that more later), but so are traditional forms of marketing, especially when it comes to B2B lead generation.
For one, don’t under estimate the value of a tradeshow. Yes, trade shows are expensive, but for B2B companies trying to reach large prospective customers, they’re still one of the best methods. Large companies often attend trade shows, making them ideal for B2B brands looking for this type of customer. In addition, trade shows provide the ability to converse face-to-face with prospects and demonstrate the product or service.
Another excellent way for B2B brands to connect with customers is to host webinars. This option is perfect for B2B companies with a more significant following, with a larger organic reach when advertising the webinar.
Webinars allow salespeople to demonstrate the product or service in a virtual setting. While less effective than trade shows, webinars are less expensive and more flexible while still providing the ability of product demonstration, allowing prospects to ask questions, and inviting attendees to connect with you - either on your company's social channels or as part of your email list.
Develop a Strong Outreach Plan
A key piece to a successful B2B lead generation strategy is to develop a strong outreach plan that will push members of the target audience down the marketing funnel. There are a few different versions of the marketing funnel, but the one we use is in the image below.
Members of the target audience will move through the funnel, going from simply someone aware of your brand (awareness) to someone who shows some interest, maybe by liking a post (interest and engagement) to someone who shows a desire to work with your brand (the desire phase is where the individual officially becomes a lead), then makes a purchase (action) and finally continues to make purchases and recommend your company to others (legacy).
Thinking about the nurture sequence as a funnel is essential to understand how to get to each step clearly. No one will become a legacy customer the first time they hear about your brand, especially if working with your brand requires a significant financial commitment.
Instead of trying to sell to a cold audience immediately, start by giving the audience something. For example, social media audiences can quickly go from awareness to interest/engagement by providing valuable industry information. Ask social media followers to sign up for a newsletter if you want to turn them into a lead.
This way, you’ll have their contact information. Of course, your newsletter shouldn’t just be a sales pitch. With the right combination of industry news and company updates, the newsletter will keep your company top of mind. It can be an excellent tool for pushing the leads further down the marketing funnel (we’ll explore this more in the next section).
Digital Strategies for B2B Lead Generation
Harness the Power of Social Media
Social media isn’t just for B2C! B2B companies have had lots of success on social media. But which channel should you choose? The channel that makes the most sense for your brand depends on where your audience spends time online.
LinkedIn is an excellent place for B2B companies in financial services, IT, advertising, and more to connect with their audience. Although LinkedIn is the most commonly used B2B channel, it doesn’t make sense for all B2B businesses. For some, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter may be the better option; if you’re unsure where you should be, read our previous blog post!
When considering social media, using a healthy mix of paid and organic content is essential. We’ll start with organic. For B2B companies, building a solid relationship with your customer base is especially important before attempting any hard selling.
That’s why most organic posts should center around trending articles in the industry and insightful industry facts. This approach will establish you as an industry expert and thought leader and encourage your target audience to follow your page and engage with your content. Remember, if you’re using visual content, ensure it follows your brand guidelines!
Paid content should be more on the salty side. However, this doesn’t mean the paid content needs to drive a sale. Instead, one option is paid content to drive users to sign up for your email list.
There are many great paid targeting tools. One of the best for B2B is LinkedIn’s campaign manager, which allows you to target down to job title. Of course, be careful about getting too specific and excluding potentially valuable members of your target audience. Other platforms don’t have quite the same B2B targeting tools as LinkedIn but still have great targeting options.
Use Email with Your Nurture Sequence
Earlier, we wrote about how thinking about the nurture sequence as a funnel is essential. For B2B companies, especially those with longer sales cycles, a great way to move prospects down the sales funnel is by getting those at the top of the funnel to sign up for an email list. Now, typically companies don't just give out their emails. A great way to get them to provide that information is by offering something in return, such as a monthly newsletter packed with relevant and actionable information.
This newsletter should include industry information, industry stats, some company updates and multiple links. Specifically, the newsletter should link out to where readers can find more information on the industry news you are discussing, as well as link back to your own website. Your company information shouldn’t overshadow the industry news. This will be a turn off for readers and open and click rates will eventually start to drop.
Remember, these potential customers didn’t sign up for a sales pitch. They signed up for a newsletter. This idea doesn’t mean you can’t use part of the email to push these prospects down the funnel (you absolutely should include at least a button to get in touch), but this shouldn’t be at the forefront.
Some other ways you can ensure these newsletter emails are a success is by keeping it short (no one wants to read a 2000-word email, so try to keep the text under a couple of hundred words), personalizing the emails (don’t say “Dear customer,” actually use the customer’s name), and finally by keeping track of all metrics. By keeping track of which links subscribers clicked on, who unsubscribed, which emails had the most opens, and more, you can adjust your future emails to ensure they align with what seems to be working with your target audience.
Now It’s Your Turn…
You now have the tools to get started! Remember, there is no one secret to B2B lead generation, the components of branding, strategy, and digital marketing all work together. Specifically:
Branding
Establishing a consistent brand voice and identity
Sending the right message - one that will resonate with your target audience
Building brand values around customer trust
Strategy
Connecting with your audience where they want to find you - which may not be strictly on digital platforms
Developing a solid outreach plan that will push your target audience down the marketing funnel
Digital Marketing
Harnessing the power of social media by being on the right platforms and using paid and organic media in the right way
Using email newsletters in your nurture sequence
Of course, B2B companies also need to be able to adapt their strategies based on what resonates with their customer base, which is why it's so important always to keep track of metrics! If you're looking for assistance with your B2B marketing strategy, book a discovery call with a member of our team.
Sources:
Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: Science and Practice. Pearson, 2009
Ingram, Thomas N. et al. Sell. Trust-Based Professional Selling. Cengage, 2020.
https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5917/5-best-practices-for-lead-nurturing-emails.aspx
https://www.g2msolutions.com.au/blog/bid/117115/email-nurture-campaign-strategy-for-b2b-marketing-made-simple#:~:text=The%20goal%20of%20the%20email,content%20that%20addresses%20their%20problems.
https://www.forrester.com/blogs/closing-the-b2b-trust-gap/
https://garyvaynerchuk.com/the-one-thing-i-didnt-clarify-enough-in-jab-jab-jab-right-hook/