You scratch your head, pull your hair, rake your brains and still fail to come up with any fresh B2B lead generation ideas that could help you generate quality leads in a heap.
The pressure is mounting as the sales pipeline is drying up and profits are falling steeply; you need a magic wand to survive the cut-throat global competition, you need effective B2B lead generation ideas to stay afloat. The problem with most organizations is that they have no clue where to start and how to proceed.
Generating quality leads is of course just as tough as drilling a hole through a rocky mountain; you need to zero-in on to leads that are most likely to become well paid customers and then convince super-busy decision makers that you possess effective solutions to their most nagging problems. Certainly not a walk in the park, but if you have the right strategy and some potent tools, a lucrative deal is waiting for you right there.
B2B Lead Generation Ideas
A changed scenario:
Generating leads is one of the toughest jobs in the world and it becomes even more challenging in the B2B space as the business scenario has changed dramatically over the past few decades. You no longer lead a prospect by making them aware of their problems and giving them the solution you possess.
The decision makers are very well informed today, they do a thorough research before taking a decision; you need to stay ahead by being better informed and giving them some fresh food for thought. You need fresh B2B lead generation ideas actually to be more helpful, more approachable to the customer.
Your role is no longer just to give solutions to the prospect, you must help them at every stage of decision making by providing the required information and know-how. You generate leads when the customers find you helpful, when they can approach you easily. Following are some of the most effective ways of generating quality leads and ensuring that your sales pipeline remains full.
- Adopt a rifle approach:
Outbound marketing has its advantages but it adopts a machine gun approach targeting a lot of people. Cold calling as a tool is still somewhat effective and most organizations persist with this age-old method for approaching prospective customers. However, outbound marketing is very expensive and you collect a lot of junk leads along with some good ones, thus wasting time, resources and money unnecessarily.
Inbound marketing with a rifle approach ensures much better results as you target only those leads that promise a good return. The key lies here in developing content that will appeal to the prospects and present you as a solution provider, not a sales person. Generating leads is all about building credibility and you can do it more efficiently if you know your target audience.
- Develop a customer friendly website:
It is important to find out whether your main target group works online or offline. In all probability, your customer would be a tech savvy modern day executive that remains with the internet at least twelve hours a day. You need to maintain a website that is easy to access and easier to navigate.
Develop a customer friendly content that has everything they frequently look for and don’t forget to make the website interesting and attractive. You can generate a lot of quality leads by providing assistance to the prospects for their major and minor decisions. Provide content like pricing and feature comparison and discuss various problems and challenges faced by the people in your target group. Providing signup links and some lucrative offers could boost your appeal and attract loads of quality leads.
- Publish regular blogs:
This is an extension of the previous idea, develop a good accessible website and encourage prospects to connect with you more. Few people understand the full power of blogging, however, it can generate leads by presenting your image as an industry leader and building your credibility among the prospects. The times have changed and the customer today wants to deal with a professional organization that acts as a problem solver rather than concentrating only on selling a product or service.
You can discuss the common problems and challenges faced by most customers and offer solutions and opinions in your blogs. The best thing about a blog is that you can also make it interactive and answer the queries of the readers in the future posts. You can also use the feature to establish thought leadership and introduce new ideas and express opinion on important issues. Search engine optimization can help you attract traffic to your blogs and convert them into leads by providing signup links or subscriptions at the end of the text.
- Use social media strategically:
Even though most studies show that social media is most hyped, least effective in generating leads, yet it’s role in the context cannot be undermined especially with the new tools offered by Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn.
You just need to use your presence on the social media more strategically and make the most of the opportunities the platform offers. Use advertisement tools now offered and join the specific groups that have people likely to be your leads.
Generating leads is like crossing the river of fire, you need to adopt fresh B2B lead generation ideas, ideas that are sure to work. Using the above mentioned ideas in tandem will ensure good results and boost your business by filling up the sales pipeline with quality leads.
