With the right strat­e­gy, it’s pos­si­ble to sub­stan­tial­ly increase your company’s rev­enue. When I think of busi­ness-to-busi­ness (B2B) lead gen­er­a­tion strate­gies that give the biggest bang for their buck, I have to focus on two words: cap­ture and con­vert. One is just as impor­tant as the other.

The first part of the cap­ture-and-con­vert equa­tion refers to get­ting lots of leads and keep­ing your sales fun­nel full. The sec­ond part of the equa­tion refers to iden­ti­fy­ing the best strate­gies for con­vert­ing leads into sales. The more leads you cap­ture, the more leads you have to convert.

Separating Browsers From Buyers 

A great-look­ing land­ing page may be enough to get you a fair num­ber of vis­i­tors. While your vis­i­tors are “just brows­ing,” what you’ll real­ly need to do is har­ness your poten­tial buy­ers, which are your leads. The focus isn’t real­ly your land­ing page; rather, it’s your forms.

Beyond that, there are sev­er­al dif­fer­ent chan­nels that you can nav­i­gate to as B2B lead gen­er­a­tion strategies:

• Email marketing.

• Con­tent marketing.

• Search marketing.

• Social media marketing.

Just a word to the wise: It’s more impor­tant how you use your lead gen­er­a­tion chan­nels than which lead gen­er­a­tion strat­e­gy you choose.

Email Marketing

One of the first lead gen­er­a­tion strate­gies of the dig­i­tal age was email mar­ket­ing. Decades lat­er, it’s still one of the best. With­in the cat­e­go­ry of email mar­ket­ing, let’s take a look at how the fol­low­ing three fac­tors can boost your leads: using mar­ket­ing automa­tion, sweet­en­ing your pitch and cold emailing.

To under­stand mar­ket­ing automa­tion, think about how a cook­ie fac­to­ry works. The dough gets dropped in 24 per­fect pro­por­tions onto a bak­ing pan, and then the pan gets sent to the oven for the per­fect bak­ing time and tem­per­a­ture. Final­ly, the cook­ies get auto­mat­i­cal­ly pack­aged and labeled with the right branding.

Mar­ket­ing automa­tion works much the same way. You can eas­i­ly send batch­es of per­son­al­ized emails to your leads by join­ing forces between mar­ket­ing automa­tion and cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM) tools. Your leads get the right infor­ma­tion at the right time to set up for conversion.

If you’ve seen the “sign up for our newslet­ter” call to action (CTA) once, you’ve seen it a mil­lion times. If you real­ly want leads to sign up, you need to give them a good rea­son to, which is called sweet­en­ing the pitch. What makes your newslet­ter bet­ter than any­one else’s newslet­ter? What prob­lem are you help­ing them solve? When you can answer these ques­tions, you can sweet­en the pitch by chang­ing your ask to some­thing like this: “Our client increased their organ­ic search by 300%. Sign up to find out how you can do the same!”

What about cold leads? Don’t shy away from them because they’re a lit­tle hard­er to reach. I like to use a four-step approach to cold email marketing:

1. Make a good first impression.

2. Find a way to stand out.

3. Get to the point quickly.

4. Fol­low up.

I find humor that’s in good taste almost always makes a good first impres­sion. Ani­mat­ed GIFs and memes are cre­ative ways to stand out and keep leads from hit­ting the delete but­ton. Make your point ear­ly in the email. No one likes to read a long saga just to find out they have no inter­est in the main char­ac­ter. Final­ly, send two or three fol­low-up emails in case they had a bad or busy day the first cou­ple of rounds.

Email Marketing

Content Marketing

Con­tent mar­ket­ing is a huge umbrel­la over mar­ket­ing tac­tics. The ques­tion to ask your­self is, “Do I do what every­one else is doing and hope for bet­ter results, or do I step out­side the box?”

Social media, email newslet­ters, web­site arti­cles, blogs, pho­tos, videos and info­graph­ics are some of the more pop­u­lar con­tent mar­ket­ing tac­tics mar­keters use. Alter­na­tive­ly, you could opt for some of the less com­mon tac­tics like webi­na­rs, research reports and microsites.

Either way, you’ll be more like­ly to have good results by focus­ing on search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO), adding diver­si­ty in your strat­e­gy and track­ing your exper­i­ments to iden­ti­fy the best oppor­tu­ni­ties for busi­ness growth.

Search Marketing

Get­ting the top list­ing on Google is becom­ing a lofty goal because of stiff com­pe­ti­tion. Nev­er­the­less, organ­ic search is still a valu­able long-term strat­e­gy for gen­er­at­ing B2B leads. My approach to search mar­ket­ing is to do things well in all areas like design, con­ver­sion rate opti­miza­tion, social media mar­ket­ing and con­tent mar­ket­ing. I find that the sum of these parts can get you as close to the top as possible.

Social Media Marketing

Depend­ing on who you ask, social media mar­ket­ing is either one of the most effec­tive lead gen­er­a­tion strate­gies or it’s one of the least effec­tive strate­gies. In my expe­ri­ence, when it doesn’t work is when a client has a poor­ly struc­tured social media strat­e­gy. Take heed of these tips for estab­lish­ing a fruit­ful social media mar­ket­ing strategy:

• LinkedIn works well for many com­pa­nies as a lead generator.

• Social media lets you refine and tar­get your lead gen­er­a­tion process.

• Social media adver­tis­ing can be effec­tive because it’s high­ly tar­get­ed (watch your bud­get so it doesn’t get out of control).

• Social media chan­nels should lead to your web­site and oth­er content.

The excit­ing thing is that there are a host of oth­er lead gen­er­a­tion strate­gies that you can try. That means that you have an end­less array of exper­i­ments at your dis­pos­al. I’ve found that I learn a lit­tle some­thing with each new exper­i­ment that ulti­mate­ly helps gen­er­ate a high­er return on invest­ment, and you like­ly will too.

SOURCE: Forbes