At Media Giant Design, we are asked this question all the time. Its surprising how many business owners that sell to businesses simply don’t understand what B2B Lead Generation is. In it’s most simple form, B2B lead generation is the process of acquiring potential customers for your B2B business (businesses that sell to other businesses). For a b2b business to grow, they need to bring in more leads which when sold results in more revenue. More leads = More Customers.
There are lots of ways that b2b businesses can generate leads. After all, b2b lead generation is a funnel just like any other type of lead or sales process. There are lots of ways to generate interest at the top of your funnel (the Awareness phase) – and no single channel is better than another as we have found. Inbound Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, Social Media are great ways to create awareness and then bring people into your funnel – but it doesn’t end there.
Just because someone has expressed interest at the top of the funnel doesn’t necessarily mean that they result in a paid customer. Once interest is attained, your funnel moves into it next phase (Consideration). In this phase, positive out reach is necessary. This outreach can be calls from your sales people and remarketing ads – but the best way to accomplish this outreach is via email marketing.
The simple fact is that even today – most B2B customers still prefer to get their marketing messages by email. This means that not only do you have to attract them at the top of the funnel, but you have to have a process in place to keep your name in front of them and provide them with ongoing information about your products and services. This is often referred to as lead nurturing.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of creating content that people seek out and convert on after engaging with it. These types of messages are great because they effectively segment themselves. You know that they’ve engaged with a certain type of content, so it makes sense to feed them a similar content about that product or service until they’re ready to make a purchasing decision. However, between the keyword planning, content strategy, content creation, campaign design and email deployment, nurturing b2b lead generation campaigns can be quite time consuming – but when done properly results in more sales with less “selling”.
Don’t get us wrong – you still need sales people and to be speaking with your potential clients. But it typically takes more than that to win business these days.
Let’s face it – B2B is highly competitive in all vertical markets and the “cold” tactics of previous years simply don’t work anymore. To effectively generate B2B Leads today requires a team of people that not only can bring interest in, but can nurture leads into sales as well. If you need high quality leads for your B2B business call us today.
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