10 proven b2b lead generation ideas for business growth

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Written By Ant Musker

The New Year has arrived and some businesses have already set their goals for 2019. 

Some are yet to establish their targets and are still in the search of ideas for the growth of their company.

It is generally known that one of the most important factors for the growth of a company consists of an incoming, consistent flow of quality leads.

10 Proven B2B Lead Generation Ideas for Business Growth

b2b lead generation ideas
Here are some b2b lead generation ideas for you to think about in your marketing discussions going forward for the year.

1. Get to the first page of Search Engine Result Page

No matter how good your content or business offering is, it won’t get a significant volume organically until it appears on the first page of Google or other relevant search engines.

The fact that organic traffic drives in large percentages of leads cannot be denied.

Therefore an element of SEO attention or strategy must be considered or what you are providing isn’t going to get noticed.

Of course, ranking your content or business page at the top of Google is no small matter. This is because of the saturation of online content being produced, submitted, and published every single day.

It is certainly a competitive process which will obviously depend largely on the industry or topic you are pitching for. The answer to the challenge is a keyword strategy.

Keywords play a fundamental role in ranking your website. Intelligent keyword research, selection, and powering the content around that with an effective outbound link building strategy is the recipe for results.

Also, there are some tools, like Hubspot keywords tool, that constantly track keywords to tell you if and how your rank is increasing and decreasing over time.

2. Increase your content publishing frequency

According to research by HubSpot, companies publishing over 16 blog posts in a month, generated 3.5 times more leads than companies that published only 0-4 posts per month.

So it would be wise to start publishing high-quality content as frequently as possible because that’s the way to increase your visibility and raise effective awareness of your brand.

This has the impact of building an authority that can lead to long term benefits.

High quality and high volume content strategy not only get visitors to your website but also develops a sense of trust and a healthy relationship with your visitors.

This will make it easier to sell and speed up the duration of your sales cycle.

3. Automate your business process

Marketing automation is required because it simplifies and streamlines the business process.

When you run a business, you need to focus on various things simultaneously. But you’re only a human, who can only do so much over a given time.

Creating automated workflows for specific, repetitive marketing tasks, whether it is email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and other tasks will hugely improve your own productivity.

This will also have a huge impact on other significant aspects of your business.

4. Look into mobile marketing

Since mobile is the most used device for making searches, you must take this into account when organizing campaigns.  

In 2018, most people will be addicted to their phones. There is an application for everything and it is a prime communication channel. Therefore, it acts as a hub for marketing opportunities.

Your website should be mobile-friendly. The contents on it should be appropriately formatted to make it easily readable.

Be sure to avoid irritable features which will negatively impact your bounce rate.

Finally, make sure that your email campaigns are optimized and mobile-friendly. This is because 20 percent of smartphone users access their email on their phones and you don’t want to waste their interests.

5. Intelligently choose your social media platform that fits best with your work and audience

Social media has always been a favorite channel both for networking and for advertising. Of course, there are many other benefits due to its outreach potential.

You have the overall freedom of experimenting with different post styles at little to no cost.

You can establish a presence across social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.

But it’s about where your business fits in and has the greatest access to its ideal customer profile.

Since we are looking at B2B marketing which tends to have an alternative audience profile to consumer products, I would suggest you choose to build a visible brand on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the best platform for B2B businesses to generate leads since it is a platform designed for working professionals.

It allows you to search for specific job titles and businesses.

It is still worthwhile to experiment with other forms of social media out there.

There will be chunks of lead generation opportunities scattered across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

But you must qualify the results against the time and efforts which you are putting to make sure your work brings a positive ROI.

6. Strive for quality over quantity

It doesn’t matter if you have acquired an infinite number of leads if they lack quality. Because leads have no value without a genuine conversion potential.

You are only as good as the quality of your leads. And until you create a mentality whereby you realize that, you will be wasting a lot of time and effort into dead-end leads.

Quality leads are those who buy from you and stay with you for a lifetime. They even refer your products or services to others.

They fit the criteria of your ideal profile which you can discover through detailed research of your best paying or most frequent customers.

So for 2018, it is important to remember that having less volume of strong quality leads is a better situation to be in for your business than an excessive amount of non-qualified ones.

7. Collaborate marketing and sales departments

Sales and marketing are undoubtedly different from each other in terms of their roles.

When they are combined together it helps the organization to create better strategies according to the feedback and findings of both teams.

Bringing the departments together to share ideas regularly and overlap each other’s environments can have major psychological effects.

Similarly, picking each other’s brains and combining strategies like SEO, PPC, ABM, email, web, social and others can help maximize your lead generation possibilities.

8. Use website visitor tracking

As a B2B business, you are able to integrate website visitor tracking to reveal the actual business prospects who are coming to your site. 

Whereas consumers and individuals can’t be identified for personal data protection, businesses do not have the same rules applied.

You can use analytical insights matched with physical business data to generate strong lead opportunities, viewing the businesses who arrive on your site from your latest campaign and following up with them through various channels.

9. Cold calling is still relevant

It might be 2019 and there is access to all kinds of new lead generation technologies and techniques. Some are largely effective. Others are just creating vanity results and unwanted fluff.

To avoid this, sometimes it can be best to acquire data lists of relevant business targets and hit the phones.

Combined with the technology and software which is available to you, adopt a positive, respectful phone manner and create a logical pitch for the receiver which develops a genuine interest.

Cold calling is still the most direct and potentially rewarding approach for so many businesses – so don’t completely disregard it.

10. A/B test with your campaigns

A/B testing is an experiment that includes the comparison of two versions of a particular campaign to see which one performs better.

Its main objective is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of what you have created.

With A/B testing, you get to qualify the success rate of your ideas and collaborate the strongest elements to create the ultimate campaign for improved results.

So in 2019, stop gambling on your intentions and take the time to run two versions and calculate the best possible long term project.

Don’t forget to share these B2B lead generation ideas with your friends.

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