The lead generation process helps businesses turn strangers into prospects and prospects into customers.
Leads nurtured with targeted content produce an increase in sales opportunities of more than 20%.
Businesses can promote these assets in several ways:
- Content creation
- Targeted emails
- Surveys and Research
- Webinars
- Display Advertising
Content strategy
In the B2B world, it is well known that content strategy improves lead generation and qualification. Thought leadership is still an important part of the marketing process and It is incredibly rare that a prospect responds to a salesperson’s first outreach attempt. According to Salesforce. It takes 6 to 8 touches to generate a viable sales lead.
It is important that you are engaging with the right target group and providing them with relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey. This can support your business to move cold prospects that have engaged with marketing efforts to the point where they become a warm to hot lead for the sales team.
When creating a content strategy, start at the top of the funnel with rich content and move down with more product-driven content.
The awareness stage: The early stages of the marketing process. The user knows they have a problem, but they may not be aware of the services or products your business offers. Useful content for this stage includes blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts, eBooks, and white papers.
The consideration stage: During the consideration stage prospects should begin to look at your business as a thought leader. Content for this stage includes webinars, software downloads and case studies.
The decision stage: Only at this stage should you be reaching out to prospects offering free consultations, product demos, and free trials, as at this point they should be well acquainted with your brand and will be more inclined to make a purchase.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is more effective than it has ever been and, according to email marketing expert HubSpot, 80% of marketers reported an increase in email engagement last year.
Why is email marketing still so popular? The answer is segmentation.
Email marketing is an excellent way to reach a targeted audience that is familiar with your brand and product or service. Focusing on a very specific audience of limited size makes it much easier to deliver a message that resonates and gets them to act.
Segmenting data allows organisations to target contacts more effectively, ensuring that only those organisations or people most likely to be interested or responsive are contacted. Simply sending mass emails to every contact in a database, for example, is likely to be less effective than sending a specifically targeted message to the people who fulfil the criteria that mean they are most likely to be interested.
With email marketing, you also have the option to do A/B testing and you can do a resend if an email campaign is unopened (you can track this using a preferred email platform e.g., Mad Mimi, Mailchimp or Pardot).
Marketers also get a wealth of reporting metrics from email marketing campaigns, covering everything from open rate/click through rate to blog page visits and demo requests. Tracking the results of marketing activity is key if marketers are to show their actions are effective. To have true oversight of whether marketing activity is achieving the desired results, marketers need to be able to report accurately on every stage of their activity.
Data
Accurate data is important for your lead generation activity. Marketing is becoming ever more complex. With the potential for prospects to be targeted automatically through a combination of information on what content they have interacted with and their professional status and interests, ‘one-size-fits-all’ marketing content is no longer sufficient. Organisations need to ensure they are collating as much data as possible – and using it.
Combining various types of data can allow marketers to be far more specific and efficient in their communications. For example, by being aware of both the sector a prospect works in, and what content they have previously interacted with, you can ensure you are sending them content they are more likely to be interested in. This need not mean extra work for marketers – in fact, it can boost efficiency.
It is important that your business has a regular schedule for updating its CRM data. Without regularly making sure that the data you are using is as accurate as it can be, your organisation cannot guarantee that you are contacting the right people as the market continues to change shape.
With the right data, you can target audiences by sector, job function, company turnover and many other factors and promote your content to a wide but precisely targeted audience.
Surveys and Research
Industry experience and knowledge are crucial for a campaign to work. By creating online research surveys, you can get to know your target market in real depth.
This kind of research will help your team to learn all about the challenges being faced by professionals within a specific area of the public sector or within the sector as a whole and how your company can address them and in turn boost engagement.
By engaging with prospects like this, you stand to position yourself as an influencer and thought leader, instead of just another commercial supplier. Once you have developed a relationship with a buyer, there is even the possibility of shaping the procurement requirement.
Survey results can also form the basis of survey reports, which act as thought leadership content, as well as generating individual sales leads
Webinars
Webinars are an excellent way to engage with prospects and, at this stage of the nurture, you can be certain that the attendees are interested in the service you offer. If you create an industry-specific webinar, the content can be curated for the sector’s specific needs and desires.
Adding a question and answer section to a webinar can also boost lead generation as you can follow up with these attendees after the webinar – opening a less aggressive conversation. When sending first follow-up message, try to be as personalised as possible, and reach out within 24 hours after the live webinar concludes.
Questions during a webinar can help you reshape the webinar for its next session and can inspire your organisation to create fresh content arising either from the webinar or from participants’ questions.
Post webinar there is also an opportunity for your business to reuse this content. Creating an infographic or report with the content you have collated for the webinar could regain the attention of prospects that have signed up for the webinar and missed it.
Display Advertising
Do not forget about display advertising – it is an essential part of the marketing mix.
Many of the benefits of digital marketing are obvious; insight is one of them. Important digital marketing decisions should be determined by data. Without being able to demonstrate that the money spent on marketing generates revenue, marketing budgets are hard to justify.
Whether a campaign performed well or not – you must take the learnings from it. An example of a simple and effective way to test and learn is through A/B testing during digital display activity. A/B tests can support the improvement of conversion rates. This can really help you to discover the best online promotional and marketing strategies for your business.
Tracking results and compiling information on interactions is helpful, but marketers must also be able to analyse the results and react to what they are telling them. One way to do this is by combining CRM data with data on interactions to target prospects with content that will be best suited to them.
Be the B2B to beat
New to email marketing or just want to see better results? Using a B2B contact database is an excellent option for you.
A database that is updated in ‘real time’ means that you can be confident that the data you are using is up to date, accurate and relevant for your needs.
Cadence Marketing offers just that and can help your business to reach key decision-makers across the public, private and charity sector, which keeps you one step ahead of the competition, straightaway.
Not only are our databases hand-researched, by people who understand the structure of the multiple markets we cover, but they also cover the length and breadth of the United Kingdom, so you can be sure we’ve got your audience sorted and ready to go.
