Is your website doing a good job of driving B2B leads for you? If you answered “no” you’re not alone as only 1 out of 10 marketers feel that their lead generation campaigns are effective. And that’s a huge issue because from a marketing perspective, leads are what drive dollars, and how we are judged. So, what can you do to improve your B2B leads generation efforts? Read our list of 30 B2B lead generation tips is a good place to start.
In our list we are going to cover tips in four areas that a good lead generation program should include:
These four components are integral to any effective lead generation process. We’re going to share one tip from each. If you’d like to se the other 26 download our free full guide below.
*Content and offers
All visitors to your site are not in the same place when it comes to making a purchase decision. Some are just starting to research and happened to find your site because you wrote a blog post that caught their attention. Another visitor may be at your site to evaluate your product or service offerings. A third might be there with the intent to purchase. The same content will not be relevant to every visitor. After all, someone who is ready to purchase probably isn’t interested in reading a post geared to helping them diagnose their issue. They’ve done that and are ready to take the final step.
To maximize your ability to drive leads you need a content marketing strategy that delivers the right content to the right person at the right time. You do this by understanding the different stages of the buyers cycle and by knowing the types of content buyers in each stage are looking for.
Here are the three stages of the customer buying cycle
Awareness: This buyer is aware that they have a problem and the are doing research to better understand and clarify the issue. Here is where you start educating your prospects with informative and relative content such as blog posts, infographics, white papers, social media, videos, etc. You’re simply being helpful and not salesy.
Consideration: Your prospect has diagnosed their problem and have a clear understanding of it. They are now moving to identify which companies products or services can best help them address the issue. This is the stage where lead generation takes place. In this stage they are comparing your solutions to other companies directly and through reading additional content including blog posts, case studies, reports, research studies, webinars, etc.
Decision: Your prospect has narrowed the list down to a few companies that can help them address their issue. Even though they are in the process of making the final decision they are still consuming content. Content that can help move them to make a positive decision for you includes demo’s, free trial downloads, data sheets, etc.
The content and offers you create doesn’t stop with a purchase. Now that you have a new client you should be creating content and offers geared to helping with satisfaction and retention, as well as taking advantage of some cross or up-sell opportunities. You can see how manufacturers are using content marketing in our “The Fight For Prospects” infographic.
*Calls-to-action
This seems pretty intuitive but you would be amazed at how hidden calls-to-action (CTA’s) can be on a page or website. Often its just a matter of poor placement usually resulting from not identifying page objectives. Your first goal for every page should be to set a primary object (if someone can only do one thing this is it), major objectives (these tend to be CTA’s that drive visitors into conversion paths) and finally minor objectives (these tend to be to information that builds credibility such as testimonial pages and blogs). Obviously your Primary objective CTA needs to be above the fold and stand out. Some of the ways to convey the importance of CTA’s is through location or placement, size, color, shape, etc.
We also find that people often hide CTA’s in plain site by not providing any contrast in the color of the CTA and other site elements. If your color scheme is predominately blue with grey highlights, then making your CTA buttons the same blue color isn’t going top help them stand out. Instead you want to contrast the predominant blue with a color like orange. Since we’ve started out as a conversion optimization company, we’re often asked what is the best color to make your CTA buttons and links. There is no best color. Contrast will do more to make your CTA’s stand out and increase conversions than any particular color.
*Landing Pages
This is another tip that seems intuitive but seems to get lost in between the thought that you should have more content offers and actually creating and building landing pages to support the offers. Even if you were a one product company you would need at least 3 offers and landing pages. One for each stage of the buyers cycle, plus maybe one for the client stage as well.
Now we can agree that simply having more pages isn’t enough to drive more leads. What increases leads is that instead of one page targeted to everyone for all products and services, we have highly focused landing pages based on the target (buyer persona), the stage of the buying cycle, and the products they are interested in.
*Forms
This is a misleading tip to some degree because there is no perfect length for a form. Its understood that as you add more fields to a form your conversion rates go down. At some point you have to think about if that extra piece of information is worth the decrease in submissions. Unless you plan on AB testing the form you’ll have to guess as to the appropriate length.
Here are two ways to think about when determining the length of your form:
To start you’ll need to make a best guess as to the appropriate number of fields. Then as time moves on you can adjust if needed.
The ability to generate online leads will transform your marketing. To get the most out of your efforts you will need to master content and offers, calls-to-action, landing pages and forms. Be sure to download the guide as it contains 26 more awesome B2B lead generation tips.
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