Now more than ever, there are so many different channels that you can use to acquire customers. Despite this, not many people, businesses, or marketing/sales teams have a coherent and clear strategy to do so which is why this blog post will help you dramatically increase your B2B lead generation. The First thing you have to consider is being aware of your funnel and how to maximize your business growth through digital marketing.
Download our case study on how we drove $71,050 in additional revenue here.
Full disclosure, a lot of the steps I will outline are not magic bullets. Most marketing processes require thought and execution but the high-level concepts can be applied to most businesses including yours to increase your B2B lead generation and ultimately increase your sales.
In the first stage of the funnel is
acquisition – this is what drives all the later stages. When we talk about
acquisition, we are referring to the process of how a business acquires leads.
The top 3 stages of the funnel are often
the most neglected so the points outlined below will focus on what your
business needs to do to increase revenue and drive referrals. When we write, we
assume that your business or product is something that you can deliver on, so
with this in mind once you have sold the customer getting them to refer you
more customers is a matter of what pain point your software has solved for them and how effectively it has performed.
Website
The first, and maybe most obvious factor in increasing your B2B lead generation efforts is checking if Is the website itself set up to collect
leads?
This is an example of how Salesforce has set up a page on their website to capture inbound leads.
Lead capture: Just another fancy way to say "forms on your site that customers enter their information in."
If your website can actually capture the customer information is there an easy way for those
prospective clients, or customers to contact the sales people and go ahead with the sale? What we mean by this is if you sign up for a potential offer do you have an email responder letting the customers know they can book a call with sales or reach out to them directly to see if they have any questions before they dive into your product/service.
This is important because it allows for you to establish rapport with your customers who have signed up but not paid yet. Ghostit does this because our part of our onboarding process involves creating a content marketing strategy where we have to talk to our customers initially so we can ensure our content solves their customer's problems.
One
of the things that differ between B2B vs. B2C is that B2B deals involve more stages, e.g. it is a longer sales cycle and the deal size is a lot higher. For example,
if a company is looking into a license for software that costs around $8000 per month, they're not going to pay for that up front as soon as they land
on the webpage.
Most likely, that company will want to see
if this specific product or service will solve their specific need. In the case of a traditional marketing agency, the company will ask to see a proposal at the minimum. You want to make sure that your website is
set up to answer the specific problems that a customer is searching for.
Set up your pages to have an immediate tool
for lead capture. Whether that’s directly below a blog headline or right on
your landing page it doesn’t matter as long as your visitors don't have to actively search for a way to sign up for your business. Ultimately your website exists to be a frictionless way to increase B2B lead generation and if it is not doing its job the tips above should help you capture some of the lost traffic.
Pro tip: If your bounce rate is high, it means you’re not doing a good job!
The second question you need to ask
yourself when you are trying to increase your inbound leads and after you have added lead capture to your website is how do you get traffic to your website?
Are you producing content that your customers care about and does that content include the right
keywords?
From my point of view, you want to find
keywords that your potential customers or clients are actually going to search
for. Not only that, keywords should have a relatively high search volume with
a level of competition where it will be realistic for you to rank for.
Taking a look at the keyword ranking list above, B2B lead generation, B2B website, marketing process, B2B leads, are all low keyword difficulty (so Ghostit can rank for these terms fairly easily) and relevant to our potential customers. We primary sell to companies who are B2B because they need a better inbound marketing funnel.
The best bang for your buck is not going to
be spending a year trying to rank for a keyword that has a difficulty of 70 out
of 100. It would be much better to rank for a lower volume but lower difficulty
keyword that actually has search intent behind it.
Figure out the types of organic content
that you need on your site to best attract people. The obvious place to start
would be blog posts and email marketing while making sure that your social
channels are covered.
Making sure that you have lead capture and solid content that your customer actually wants to read and that solves their problems will become the organic backbone of your
inbound strategy, and then you can get into building out e-books and other
downloadables later.
Distribution
Once you have your base established (People find you, and sign up on your website easily), what channels make sense for your content
to exist on? Facebook versus LinkedIn is a perfect example. If your business is
primarily B2B, Facebook might not be the right place for you unless you know
specifically the type of business that you want to sell too. Even then, this is
hard for B2B companies because being too specific in not conducive to sales.
Another reason I favor LinkedIn for B2B
businesses is that if you are a company that sells software to customers
(B2C), your customers will be actively online during random work hours if they
are slacking off, but primarily online after work hours. Facebook may make more
sense as your customers are more likely to look at Facebook than LinkedIn when
they choose to slack off at work. You can turn a blog post into an ad and run
it at a specific time that your audience is most likely to see it.
Businesses that are looking to build out
their inventory, connect with other businesses or buy a product made for
businesses are more likely to be searching through LinkedIn, and during their
work hours because the research will be built into their work. Similarly, you
can create the same ad from your blog post to capture leads on LinkedIn.
Organic vs. Paid
Organic reach refers to content that is
posted and pushed to different channels. You can also distribute content using
a paid method like Google AdWords, and Facebook ads. Quora recently announced
that it was trying to launch some paid mediums as well. If you’re going down
the paid ad route, my opinion is that Google AdWords or Quora are better
distribution channels for B2B over Facebook Ads for the reasons mentioned
above.
It's expensive, but over the long term,
it's going to be a lot cheaper than just dumping money into ads. However, the
quickest way to gain results is to do a combination of both organic and paid.
Have an organic backbone (e.g. actual content) so that your audience has items
to consume when they land on your page through your inbound strategy, but then
also put a little bit of money behind your content to make sure that it's
getting eyeballs right away. By doing both, you can tighten up the funnel more
quickly than you would if you were just creating organic content, or just
running on paid ads.
Engagement
A lot of people think that once they've
converted their potential lead into a sales call they're done, but that's not
at all true. Once the top of the funnel is in place you want to optimize for the bottom of the funnel –
referrals. The best way to do this is through solid engagement of your product
or service. For example, as mentioned above when Ghostit intakes new customers, we immediately ask
our new customers to fill out a questionnaire that outlines their initial
content marketing strategy. We ask them questions about their business, their
customers, their competitors and really strive to provide them with the feeling
that we care about their needs – because we do.
We do our absolute best to make sure that
the software and the actual content lives up to the customer’s expectations so that they are fully engaged from the beginning of the on-boarding process all the way through execution. This
creates trust and positive affiliations with our business, making these
customers more likely to share this positive feeling with other people later
on.
This is the most important part because
this is what keeps everything going. If your service and product are good enough
you will generate word-of-mouth referrals. What you want is something like:
The Ghostit team was so amazing. When I first signed up, they reached out right away and sent me some competitive analysis on how I can outrank my competitors all before I even paid!
Not a real testimonial but if you want a competitive analysis done, email us at hello@ghostit.co.
Referrals, next to retention, is by far the
cheapest and most effective way to grow revenue. Many of Ghostit's biggest
customers have come through on warm referrals because we've done a good job of
taking care of our existing customers.
All this talk of funnels does not have to be complex, it may sound daunting but you can hire someone to take care of it for you (shameless plug for Ghostit) or start small by producing content filling the top of the funnel, getting it in front of people online, and making sure that you are optimized to capture those leads online. Once they have done that you just need to walk your customers through engagement and turn them into customers.
As always, If you enjoyed this episode of Content and
Coffee, make sure to look out for our next one! Let us know if you have any
questions or comments about b2b digital marketing and we will be happy to
answer at hello@ghostit.co.
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