Does your B2B company find it increasingly difficult to generate high quality leads? This is a challenge marketeers are facing in 2024 for several reasons including increased privacy concerns, a rise in content created by AI platforms leading to over-saturation of the market, and continuous platform changes. Coupled with an uncertain economic climate, marketing departments are also faced with reduced budgets and deals closing at a slower pace, as potential opportunities have become more risk averse. This means we must rethink how we generate leads.
Without a steady flow of quality leads, your pipeline will dry out which will have a negative impact on the number of sales opportunities, closed deals, and revenue for your business. Looking at new ways to get leads to stay ahead of the competition should be a top priority for every business looking for long term profitability and revenue. As a digital marketing agency working with B2B companies on a daily basis, we craft lead gen strategies for many industries and have had to evolve them to solve these challenges.
Read on to discover 5 tactics you can try this year to generate qualified leads for your business...
Maximise Attendance at Events
Attendance at in-person events has bounced back since covid, with recent stats suggesting that spring in-person event attendance in 2023 was 23% higher than pre-pandemic levels. It’s no surprise as while the use of AI increases, people are seeking out human interaction more than ever before. We’ve seen it with the clients we work with too – more of our client base is exhibiting and talking at relevant events and conferences, and we’ve been working with them to maximise their presence at events through digital.
In-person events present a number of valuable opportunities to generate quality leads. One such way is by speaking at a relevant event that you know your audience will be attending. By delivering a compelling, useful talk with actionable insights, you can then encourage attendees to provide their contact details by using a QR code that links to more information or a downloadable asset. And, once you have their contact details, you have the opportunity to continuously engage with them through automated nurture flows. Leads from events should be warmer as your company will have had a face-to-face interaction with them, and they will already know who you are and what you do.
Run Longer Term LinkedIn Campaigns
According to research conducted by Professor John Dawes, it’s said that only 5% of your buyers are ever in the market to buy right now. This means 95% of the market you’re trying to reach won’t be in the market for months or even years. What does this mean for marketeers in 2024 though?
It’s more difficult to persuade an audience to be in the market and have a need for your product at the time you need sales. Buyers will be ready when they have a need for your solution. In B2B markets, this is especially important, as sales cycles are longer and more complex, with more people involved in the buying decision.
This is where we’re encouraging clients to run longer term campaigns – you may not see any or little results after just running campaigns for 2 weeks or even 1 month. Running campaigns on a platform such as LinkedIn is a good way to reach a highly targeted B2B audience, but depending on where your market is, there will be other platforms and channels to consider too.
Having long term campaigns with repeatable, consistent messaging and engaging creatives and content, will ensure you are front of mind when the buyer is ready to be in market.
If the content you’re promoting resonates with your target audience, you have the opportunity on LinkedIn to use lead gen ads to collect a contact’s details and nurture them until they are in the market to buy. Once you’ve got their details, you can remarket to that audience using different content formats which provides a further opportunity to enrich a prospect’s data record through the use of progressive fields. Think about using your tech stack in a smarter way and as an enabler to support your marketing efforts.
By combining the power of LinkedIn's targeting capabilities with a multi-format, consistent campaign approach, businesses can build trust with their audience for a long-lasting relationship that will eventually lead to a closed deal – when the time is right.
Run Webinars to Generate Leads
An often-overlooked lead generation tactic is webinars. Businesses often see them as difficult and time consuming to run but they are hugely effective in generating leads. While in-person interactions cannot be replaced, if your audience is based across the world, webinars give businesses the opportunity to connect with prospects in a more human way.
To get started with webinars, you need to decide on the topic. Helpful, educational webinars will perform better, particularly if you’re targeting an audience earlier in their journey and who may not know you as a brand. You can identify the webinar topic through looking at current trends or challenges in your industry or speaking to your customers and prospects directly. Alternatively, review your content bank and see if any of your existing content could be repurposed as a webinar.
The Importance of Highly Engaging Webinars and Follow Up Nurture
It’s important that webinars are highly engaging as this will improve post-webinar engagement, as your brand will be remembered for the right reasons. You can make a webinar more engaging through Q and A sessions, polls, chats, guest speakers and more. This also provides you with the chance to gain details about attendees and pre-qualify whether they could be a customer. Prior to the webinar, you could also ask attendees and customers their burning questions to ensure the webinar is tailored to their current challenges.
Your follow-up nurture should also be engaging and personalised. Using email is the best way to do it – those who attended the webinar vs non-attendees can receive different communications, while ensuring content that follows is relevant to the topic of the webinar they attended.
Additional Webinar Tips
- Invest in a good quality webcam + microphone to improve the image/sound quality of your webinar.
- People are so used to conference calls that they won’t be shocked if you’re filming the webinar from home, just ensure your background is professional (or use a fake one) and you have a quiet space with a good internet connection.
- Pre-record your webinar and launch it directly as gated content or run a live session where the audience watches the recording with a live Q&A at the end.
- Use tools that will require little to no editing of the video such as Streamlabs so you can focus on the content, saving time and resources.
Be Authentic to Build Trust
Being authentic as a lead gen business is more important now than ever. With AI becoming more prevalent in the marketing world, building trust and authenticity for your business will be crucial to building B2B relationships, encouraging collaboration and long-term partnerships. In an environment where sales cycles can often be longer, decision making can be complex and risks are significant, being transparent and authentic as a business about your products, services and company values will build trust and therefore give you more opportunities to guide your prospects through the complexities of their buying decisions. We encourage our clients to remain true to their brand and company values in any campaign they run as this will maintain consistency. Building trust will not only strengthen existing relationships but can open new opportunities and growth in the ever-evolving landscape of B2B marketing.
However, as artificial intelligence tools become smarter at mimicking human interactions in the digital space, it can make it harder for B2B marketeers to build true authenticity with their audiences. So how can this be done?
Here are a few ways we encourage our clients to be authentic and build trust:
- Produce content that is fresh, genuine, informative, and educational – there is a lot of clutter out there, educate your audience by providing valuable tips, guides, tutorials that will demonstrate your expertise to make you stand out from the noise.
- Collaborate with influencers, experts or partners in the industry who can shout about your business, vouch for your credibility and help you to reach new audiences.
- Engage with your audiences – B2B prospects are not just consumers of content, they are people too so don’t forget to engage with your audience by interacting with them on social platforms, asking for feedback, offering personalised Q&A or live chat opportunities to give your audience the chance to get to know your brand on a deeper level. Don’t forget to personalise these interactions where you can, this will demonstrate that you understand their challenges and can provide a solution.
- Be consistent and transparent – a B2B lead among other things looks for reliability, consistency and the assurance you’ll deliver on your promises, so why should your website or the content you share be any different? Once you have defined your brand guidelines, try to stay consistent and transparent about your successes and challenges through the content you share, and you’ll demonstrate authenticity and begin to build trust with your audience.
Authenticity isn’t just important for generating leads, it breeds loyalty, and helps to strengthen brand reputation within a competitive market. Therefore, in B2B marketing, authenticity isn’t just a nice to have, it’s a strategic imperative that will be the key to success and long-term growth.
Get Back to Basics
It can be easy to fall into the trap of complex marketing strategies, but more often than not, B2B businesses can benefit from taking it back to basics with their digital marketing approach. This means focusing on the people who make up the audiences you target. Understanding your audience is crucial to any marketing strategy but by focusing on the fundamental principles such as understanding your target personas, identifying their specific pain points and challenges, defining the channels they use, and the types of content they engage with, can give you a strong idea of how you can tailor your messaging based on their industries and specific needs.
You can start by reviewing your website copy – does the message resonate with your target audience and is it using their language? Or is it using jargon that could potentially be lowering your conversion rate and having an impact on your lead volume and quality?
Leverage Data to Inform Decisions
Another important part of getting back to basics is using the data you have available to you. Don’t just assume you know how they engage with content or what they’re interested in, but instead start leveraging the data you have. For example, look at their previous investment in services, survey feedback, buyers’ behaviour, how they engage with your website, to help inform your decisions on how you can improve the way you market to them. A lot of our clients have seen positive results over the last year from taking it back to basics rather than overcomplicating their strategy and trying to market across too many channels. We’ve been working with them to help understand their audiences, define their personas, and craft strategies that maximise ROI.
As we’ve already mentioned, it’s important to build trust and master authenticity to differentiate your brand from the digital noise and competitors. By simplifying your marketing strategy to focus on the foundational elements and personalising your approach to suit your audience, you will open-up more opportunities for prospects to recognise and connect with your company values which will in turn, help to generate high-quality leads and build long-term relationships.
(Bonus) Don’t Forget to Nurture your Leads!
Although it’s critical to feed your pipeline consistently with new leads, don’t just let them sit there! The next step is to maintain your relationship with these new leads by crafting an effective nurture strategy to ensure they will turn into opportunities and revenue for the business.
Using a multi-channel approach (email, retargeting, etc) combined with clever automation and personalisation will help you move these leads down the funnel to maximise revenue and shorten buying cycles.
Generate Leads with Innovation Visual
While marketeers are faced with numerous challenges in 2024, there are still many effective ways of generating leads, however it may just require you to rethink your strategy to ensure it aligns with market conditions and consumer needs.
Innovation Visual has over a decade of experience helping B2B companies generate high quality leads that convert to customers and revenue, reaping a return on investment. If your business wants more quality leads, we can work in partnership with you to develop a successful lead generation strategy that supports your marketing goals. Get in touch to find out how we can help.
