Are you building a new enterprise or online store and are worried about how to build business leads?
If yes, you are at the right place!
The marketing process of building a consumer base through lead generation strategies is an indispensable aspect of new customer acquisition. Moreover, online content and search engines work together to become a significant part of attracting prospects.
So, with the right steps such as relevant content marketing, a solid sales team, and a lead generation campaign, you will be generating leads like never before.
Read on to know all about lead generation tools, B2B and B2C lead generation by the sales team, retail lead generation techniques to attract potential customers, and the major role of content marketing here.
Lead generation falls under the broad discipline of sales. Most simply, lead generation is the process of increasing the consumer interest in your business product or service with the target of lead scoring. These new potential leads help in converting a sale by the sales teams.
Thereafter, the process of lead qualification and lead scoring takes place. Through the step, the generated leads based on lead information are determined to be qualified or not. Here a sales qualified lead is a potential customer that is bound to make an actual purchase of the company’s products. Eventually, these high-quality leads become paying customers.
Now, let’s dive into the sub-types of lead generation adopted by most companies.
Every business needs to have a lead generation strategy to generate sales online. However, the difference between B2C and B2B lead generation companies alters their processes. By understanding the differences between the two kinds of lead generation, you can improve the results of your efforts and generate new leads.
The most obvious difference is that B2C companies generally have a shorter sales cycle than B2B lead generation companies. B2B companies must, hence, be more strategic, since they do not have the luxury of quick results. The sales cycle also derives the buying cycle for the company’s product.
Conversely, B2C has a shorter, more transactional cycle that means less money, but lower revenue sources. On the other hand, B2B businesses can spend more money on acquiring a customer because they can still get a positive ROI. B2C marketers however have to be more conscientious since the returns are not as great.
The content marketing practices for both B2B and B2C lead generation differ. B2B content uses case studies, blog posts, white papers, and other long-form content to provide the knowledge necessary to help customers make an educated decision on the services they provide.
B2C content, on the other hand, includes a few words and uses more promotions, unique offers, and personal messages. They are used to incite people to purchase your services, mostly through a mobile device.
B2B and B2C lead generation differences usually come down to the type of market you want to sell. To do this you need to understand your audience and where they hang out.
For example, if you are a B2C company you want to use social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to find the right prospects. On the other hand, LinkedIn is a great option for B2B companies, because the decision-makers utilise the network.
B2C has smaller transactions and faster lead scoring processes, so the goal online is for prospects to purchase your goods while on your site or a third-party platform.
Alternatively, the larger nature of B2B services and products makes it unlikely that you will close sales directly on the internet.
Additionally, B2B lead generation starts on the web and usually moves to an offline process. While this is not always the case, customers need to talk with the company to get their questions answered.
This is because B2B lead generation requires more relationship building. To stand out in most B2B fields, you need to build up personal relationships. Otherwise, prospects cannot know, like, and trust your services.
Twenty years ago most B2C businesses were generated from interruption marketing. While it still plays a prominent role in marketing, unsolicited calls at dinner time and other invasive marketing strategies have become a thing of the past.
Here are some of the top strategies to both find new consumers through lead generation and keep your existing customers interested. These tips work both for B2B companies and retail businesses- B2C or B2B.
About 89% of B2B customers do research before buying. On average, a B2B customer will perform 12 searches before they engage with a business. This is why it is vital that you use quality search engine marketing.
To elaborate, the process of search engine optimization involves the process of improving the web page traffic by ensuring that your website URL appears in the top relevant results produced by the search queries.
Web crawlers operated by major search engines understand these rules and proper keyword research can go a long way to ensure your site is on the top of the search results. For example, accelerated mobile pages will always rank higher.
When you create your content for marketing channels, you need to ensure you have the right keywords, headers, titles, meta tags, and search attributes to improve your search rankings. Also, you should not go for multiple URLs since they confuse customers.
To that account, you can connect with SEO experts to make sure your page is ranked above other pages and the best search engine optimization tricks are in function.
Then, when potential customers go to search engines and come to your web pages, you draw them in with the high-quality content you create.
If you want to improve your lead generation efforts, you have to create great content on the important pages that will keep your audience engaged with your sales process. Additionally, search engines discover content better than rich media- audio or video, so you essentially need to amp up your content marketing to rank above other websites.
The challenge in today’s market is that content is hyper-saturated. That is because most marketers know that the way to get search traffic, thought leadership, and leads are through content marketing.
The good news is that many of these content marketers still need to improve their game with leads. So, developing your content marketing strategy and emphasizing the SEO work now can help you get ahead of your competitors in your B2B lead generation strategy.
One way to do this is to remember to ask for more prospects and subscribers. That is why every content piece should have at least 1-2 different calls to action in the content. With content marketing, you can get prospects to say a lot of little “yes” until they are ready to purchase your services. We will talk more about this in the coming paragraphs.
Businesses do not have emotion. People do. People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. They want to feel something, wish to be included, and want to understand.
Most B2B lead generation strategies fail to generate potential leads because they do not add a personal touch to their marketing automation.
However, if you want to truly benefit from inbound marketing strategies, you need to ignore the B2B and remember the Human 2 human to succeed. That is because behind every company are people who will respond to your marketing.
The marketing team should use social media and other platforms to stay connected with your customers over the long term and generate leads. This way, you can build that human-to-human relationship that makes consumers want to come back to your store over time.
Some of these repeat customers even become your biggest raving fans. However, it all starts by building a relationship with them. So, you must always look for new ways to help your customers weave through your products, free information, or add-on services.
A quality lead generation funnel helps you build that relationship over time with customers, so they look to your services when they need help. In the meantime, provide them with relationship-building content and support on their journey.
Sometimes, it is not enough to use search engines optimization. Instead, you would have to supplement your search results ranking with paid search strategies like paid advertising.
A great way to do that is to use Google Shopping Ads to help sell your products through an e-commerce store Also, if you want to drive local traffic, you can use Google Ads with different extensions such as maps and call extensions that help increase conversions in your lead generation flow.
Along with that, you can make use of the Google search console to monitor your site’s presence in the google search results.
At the heart of any effective lead generation, the campaign is list-building by the sales team. Your website should provide several opportunities for people to sign up on your email list.
If you do have a local store, you might consider building a text message list as well. Many times, people are more responsive to text messages than they are to emails these days.
So, use different software like MailChimp and Twilio to build your lists and root directory. You can send regular messages to your list on an ongoing basis notifying people of various discounts and specials.
Set up an autoresponder, so you have regular emails going out to the customers that draw prospects to become customers and choose you over other sites.
Measuring and listening to what your audience wants is the most essential strategy. The process starts with social media listening tools to help you understand what your audience and target market say about your company.
Supplement this information with surveys that provide direct customer feedback. Then test the feedback received with a split test to see what your audience wants from you.
You can then set up a lead scoring system based on which actions prospects take the lead to the most significant gains for your business. The more you listen and learn, the more structured data you can use to build your lead generation funnel.
As we talked about previously, your page’s content plays a strong role in generating a paying customer and reaching the target audience. But, the same content or content marketing tactic cannot work for every company website and be used by all website owners.
So, if you want to improve lead quality and gain prominence over any other site, start working on your content marketing skills and keyword research today.
The first thing you need is the right tools for your content marketing. While the number of marketing tools has grown exponentially over the last few years, many of them do not fit your needs.
So, you must review the marketing tools you use right now, before continuing with this process. Some marketers get so married to content marketing and other tools that they do not set up the correct processes.
The greatest tool that cannot interact with the other aspects of your marketing is counterproductive. For example, what happens if your email marketing software does not work with your WordPress site? How can you track the leads back and forth between the two different platforms? More importantly, how can you then accurately source that lead to your CRM system?
To answer the same, if you create a blog post on WordPress and share it with your email list, it then becomes impossible to understand the path of your customer and the reasons why they purchase your products. When everything works together, the rest of these strategies work even better.
Next, it is vital to know how to create the best content for your blog, videos, and other content forms. Here are some of the most significant content marketing practices:
Generating leads means you need to ask for the sale. That is why companies that have 40 or more lead pages generate 12 times the results over companies with 5 or fewer product landing pages.
With so many lead pages, they find additional ways to incorporate those landing pages more often into their content strategy. This in turn adds more subscribers and prospects.
Furthermore, every blog post should have at least 1-2 call-to-actions in different spots in your blog asking readers to move forward with your brand. This will help entice visitors to say yes to your services when the time is right.
For some reason, many content creators think that creating content is the end of the process. However, if you do not promote the content you create then you cannot get the most out of your content.
Hence, it is vital for you to promote your content to the places where your network hangs out online. So, share your content on social media, discussion boards, email newsletters, and targeted groups. If your network is there, then this information can answer their questions.
Finally, no content and lead generation campaign is complete without measuring the results. Your company needs to review everything from website views to email open rates to call-to-action click rates.
As the saying goes, the more you measure the more you know. You need to know as much as possible to improve your results. This is where the unified marketing tools we discussed help you become effective at lead generation.
Content is truly the king in today’s day and age, especially when it comes to online businesses. If you aim to build a successful enterprise or store on the internet, you must focus on lead generation through powerful content marketing.
A strong suggestion would be to take some cues from this article to generate leads and elevate website discoverability.
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