28 B2B Lead Generation Tips & Strategies That Work In 2020
Category: Industry News, PPC, SEO, Social Media, Websites
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28 B2B Lead Generation Tips

BoostOnline

Written by BoostOnline

Posted on 17th April 2020

28 B2B Lead Generation Tips

Here are 28 B2B lead generation tips & strategies that work in 2020

Every year Google receives over 500,000 searches from: business owners, digital marketers and entrepreneurs like yourself searching for: lead generation agencies, lead gen tips and business growth guides. If you need advice on Lead generation for B2B businesses then we have tried and tested 28 B2B lead generation strategies you can try too. We have included a variety of tips and tricks to generate more B2B leads no matter the industry or your companies size. These digital marketing strategies can work for everyone from ‘heavy machinery businesses’ to ‘B2B magazine publishers’. We really encourage you to cherry pick the strategies right for your business and your potential customers. 

It’s now 2020 and BoostOnline have deployed 1000’s of lead generation campaigns to help SMEs and enterprise level businesses reach the right customers at the right time. Below are some of our most effective strategies for B2B lead generation. With these marketing strategies you can solve the biggest challenge to business growth – leads. All revenue begins with a lead, and acquiring high quality leads can prove difficult which is why we’ve decided to share our: SEO lead generation strategies, PPC B2B lead acquisition tips and email marketing guides for B2B lead campaigns.

Throughout this guide we’ll share 28 golden marketing nuggets to take your business to the next level, but we strongly encourage you to implement more than one of these strategies to find the combination that works best for your company and industry. Customers will interact with your brand across multiple channels and touch points so ensuring you have a strong presence across: SEO, PPC and social is essential

B2B PPC Lead Generation Strategies

1. Google Ads Remarketing

The fastest and most effective way to generate new leads for your business is to engage with the users you already have visiting the website. These users have visited your site and left a trail of valuable data signals, and snippets of information for you to use. The variety of audiences you can build using the Google Ads remarketing tag are based on the pages a user visited on your site.

You can build audiences and serve them relevant ads across the Google Display Network (GDN) based on the content (URL) they have consumed. Users that have viewed your ‘Industrial Curtains’ pages should be retargeted with ‘Industrial Curtain’ display ads or users that have visited the ‘SMB accounting software’ pages should be targeted with the correct display ads for the services relevant to them. Push these potential customers over the line and towards your ‘Contact Form’ before you begin prospecting for new users. An excellent explanation of Google Ads remarketing and how you can use it to generate new leads is available from WordStream here.

2. Google Analytics Remarketing

Data is king, and Google Analytics allows you to dive deeper into the data signals from your website visitors. With the behavioural data available in Google Analytics you can take your remarketing a step further and really focus on your most engaged users to drive them to become leads. We’ll even share 4 super charged audience ideas below that we’ve used to increase the number of B2B leads generated from site visitors:

  1. Highly Engaged Users – Page Depth >5
    1. Users who have visited more than 5 of your pages in one session. These users have visited multiple pages and consumed a variety of content.
  2. Moderately Engaged Users – Time On Site >5 minutes
    1. These users have spent more than 5 minutes on your site engaging with your brand and consuming content.
  3. Average Engaged Users – Scroll Depth 75% on service pages
    1. These users have scrolled through 75% of the content on your service page. After 75% your USPs and value proposition should have been received.
  4. Low Engaged Users – Visited ‘Lead Capture’ page but did not complete more leads.

3. YouTube Remarketing

If you’ve been creating and sharing videos on YouTube then not only can you retarget users who visited your B2B site, but you can also retarget users that have viewed these videos. Your video viewers should be familiar with your: brand, product and the value you provide. Use remarketing across the GDN and YouTube to bring these visitors back to your site and convert them into leads. The audiences available are:

  1. Viewed any video from a channel
  2. Viewed certain videos
  3. Viewed any video (as an ad) from a channel
  4. Viewed certain videos (as ads)
  5. Subscribed to a channel
  6. Visited a channel page
  7. Liked any video from a channel
  8. Added any video from a channel to a playlist
  9. Shared any video from a channel

After engaging with your videos these users will have some brand affinity and therefore will be more engaged and more likely to convert than a new user. A more detailed set of instructions are available from Google Support here.

4. YouTube Organic Lead Prospecting

If you do not have YouTube content…. Why not? YouTube offers a great platform to engage with current and potential customers about the services you offer. It can really help to position you as the expert in the industry and if you’re running low on ideas we have 5 examples below you can start with to generate more B2B leads:

  1. Meet The Team Series
  2. Customer Testimonials
  3. Product Reviews
  4. About The Company
  5. How To Videos

5 YouTube PPC Lead Prospecting

Once you’ve created engaging video content that you’re proud to share, you’ll want to promote it to the right people. Paid promotions with your video content can help to increase traction and stimulates organic shares and reach. As with all PPC marketing, targeting users is the easy part, targeting the right users is the real challenge. Below we have a number of audiences we would recommend targeting your YouTube ads towards. These examples should be contextually relevant to the users most valuable to your business.

  1. Competitor channels (YouTube)
  2. Similar to convertors (Google Ads Audience)
  3. Previous Website Visitors (Google Ads Audience)
  4. Lapsed Customers (Customer Match)
  5. Product Review Videos (YouTube)

YouTube can be a powerful lead generation tool for B2B and B2C customers and Google has developed the platform extensively over the last few years. The massive reach partnered with laser like targeting and your own engaging content can really help to scale your company more leads.

6. PPC Competitor Campaigns

Google Ads offers huge opportunities for B2B lead gen and one of the lowest hanging fruits are competitor campaigns. This lead generation technique can be used to jump in at the last minute to capture a prospective client’s details before they arrive at a competitors website.

Adding your industry competitors into the keyword portfolio allows you to target users interested in a similar service or company. Beware! You  need to be extremely careful to not misrepresent your company or to over spend budget. Without visibility of a competitors branding activity you could receive unexpected spikes in clicks and spend as a result of large branding campaigns i.e. TV or Radio. Below we have an example of ‘SkyBet’ bidding on the keywords for ‘William Hill’.

7. Generic B2B PPC Campaigns

Google receives over 40,000 searches every second! Many of these searches are for businesses like yours. Running Google Ads SEM campaigns allows you to generate the leads you need whether they are: managed service provider leads, commercial electrician calls, CCTV installation calls or print and copier leasing enquiries. Google Ads PPC campaigns targeting the specific services you offer  should be set up by all businesses.

8. Protect Your Brand With Google Ads & Microsoft Ads PPC

Google tries to be as fair as possible and if they’re going to let you bid on your competitors keywords, then your competitors can do it right back! Bidding on brand terms may seem counter intuitive, especially if you already have position 1 organically. However there are a number of benefits we would like to point out:

  1. More control over the ad copy and extensions
  2. Very low CPCs
  3. Maintain position 1 against competitors
  4. More data captured
  5. Increase your ‘Click Share’
  6. Generate more leads!

Here at BoostOnline our PPC team are all Microsoft Ads accredited professionals and as an agency we are certified Google Premier Partners! If you have any questions at all please do contact us.

B2B Email Lead Generation Tips

Alongside the opportunities available to generate leads through PPC, we advise the business we partner with to generate as much revenue as possible from your current mailing list. Cold leads, old leads, warm leads and lapsed customers can all be engaged with through email marketing to provide additional revenue to your business.

A lot of these tactics are commonly used by e-commerce companies that have really mastered how to squeeze every drop of a revenue out of a user. These same email marketing strategies can be used effectively for B2B lead generation.

Ideally you would like the email strategies below to be set up within an email automation platform like DotDigital or SendInBlue  but these can all be leveraged with manual sends if you have the time to do so.

9. Progressive Profile Building

It’s no secret that personalisation works in lead generation campaigns. It helps to build rapport with prospects and improves the  likelihood of converting a lead to a paying client. Email is an excellent channel to help develop blank and nameless email addresses into high quality leads. Regularly engaging with users via email can help you to develop a potential customer profile for all of your contacts. We use different emails to collect additional information about users to determine:

  1. Client budgets
  2. Company size
  3. Project timelines
  4. Pain points
  5. Decision makers

With each snippet of data collected, you can then leverage this to inform the next touchpoint your business has with a potential customer. Progressive profile building can help you to tailor bespoke user journeys to develop email contacts into quality leads and eventually revenue!

10. Regular Newsletters & Business Updates

Unlike ‘Progressive Profiling’ this email tactic is not a data gathering exercise. Your business should be sending regular updates to your mailing list because every interaction is either an opportunity to sell your service or to inform a user about the services you offer. These emails should be informative and provide clear value to the reader. If they are going to give your email their attention, you need to be providing valuable content in exchange. Regular exposure and a strong brand presence can really help to generate more leads and providing customer testimonials in your email newsletters can work well.

11. Email Capture Forms

What to do if you don’t have a mailing list? This may sound obvious but make sure that you have an email lead capture form on your site. It can also help to provide an incentive for users to provide you with their contact details through this form. These incentives can include:

  1. Newsletter sign ups
  2. Discount codes
  3. Free audits
  4. Free quotations
  5. Introductory calls
  6. Product demos
  7. Brochure requests

These forms and incentives are great for growing your mailing list and lead count. It also allows you to develop a clear idea of the services your leads are looking for.

12. Email Crawling Tools

Getting the ball rolling can be difficult but once you begin capturing contact details your lead generation campaigns can really begin to snow ball. There are tools available online which can help to crawl websites for contact details you can use. Hunter.io is an extremely powerful email tool for users looking for new contacts. You can then send a short introductory email to start the conversation.

13. Abandoned Funnel Follow Ups

For companies with multi page funnels or multi step lead capture forms it is easy for users to abandon this process for a number of reasons. Users that have not completed the entire form should be followed up with an email similar to e-commerce sites ‘abandoned basket’ emails. These users can then be fed into the ‘Progressive Profiling’ user journey to build a more detailed picture of your potential customers. Funnelytics.io offer an excellent tool to automate this process.

B2B Lead Generation Conversion Rate Optimisation Tips

 

14. Conversion Rate Testing (CVR)

Your website needs to be viewed for what it is – a store window. Before investing in paid digital marketing strategies you should implement these tips below to increase the conversion rate of your site. It is essential to capture as many leads as possible from users arriving at your site. These conversion rate (CVR) tactics can all be reviewed and optimised using A/B testing. There is a range of products and tools to help you test confidently – Google Optimise & Unbounce are 2 products we use at BoostOnline to generate more leads from clients websites.

As more users enter your site and participate in your website tests the smoother the path becomes for visitors to become leads and then revenue generating customers. With additional data and insights you can begin to understand your market better and tailor the website to provide more value to generate you more enquiries.

15. Mobile First!

One of the most common errors we encounter with our Free Website Audits are unresponsive mobile pages. Not only does your website need to perform well on desktop computers and laptops but also mobiles. 62% of users access the internet through mobile devices which means that 62% of your leads could be from mobile users.

The simplest way to improve this is to go through every page of your website on a mobile and address any issues you encounter. Common errors include:

  • CTAs are too small
  • Images not rendering correctly
  • Layout conflicts
  • Broken lead capture forms

16. Site Speed

Site speed has long been an important metric for digital marketers because of the impact it can have on lead generation campaigns and a business’s bottom line. Google have shared some very interesting insights to show the impact a slow page load time can have on a users experience.

If 90% of your users are bouncing because of a poor page load time then it only leaves 10% of your users to even begin the journey to becoming a lead! At BoostOnline we prioritise site speed during our website development projects, we can also help you to address some of the common load issues on your current site:

  • Non-optimised images
  • Server resources
  • Code bloating
  • Inefficient scripts 
  • Excessive theme functionality

17. Test Enticing CTAs

The small details really matter. Just a 1% improvement to the CVR on Amazon can generate an additional $6,000,000 per day!

A CTA is the last barrier to a lead submitting their details and you should always be looking to improve the performance of this element. Tests could include: wording, colour, size, length and fonts.

18. Leverage Your Google Analytics Data

Google Analytics is a powerful tool and allows you to move past your own bias about what works and what doesn’t on your site. Make data driven decisions on how to expand your website and on what content to create. Your potential customers are voting every day on your site for the elements they value with clicks and attention. Use the following metrics as KPIs to score pages and prioritise content creation.

  • Page Depth
  • Scroll Depth
  • Time On Site
  • Sessions Per User
  • Goal Completions
  • Reverse Goal Path
  • Bounce Rate

19. Get A Second Opinion

Most business owners we work with are regularly checking their sites but we often find broken links, page errors and mistakes when we audit their sites. A fresh pair of eyes or in this case algorithmic site crawling tools can help to highlight any issues you may have missed. These tools become more valuable as your website grows and manual checks become unrealistic and time consuming. We use a number of tools to increase the number of leads generated by a site including:

Once any issues flagged by these tools have been fixed you should begin to see an improvement in CVR. Broken pages and a poor user experience not only portray your business in a negative light but also make it extremely difficult for leads to provide their details!

20. Live Chat Functionality

A great way to drive more leads for your business is to engage with site visitors in real-time. With a  vast range of live chat products available for your website you can now engage with visitors in real-time cost effectively. The ability to: answer questions, address concerns and even upsell will make a positive difference to the CVR of your site. This is a great way to drive additional leads and it also allows you to engage with your current customers and provide additional value.

21. B2B Call Tracking Software

Call tracking technology companies like ResponseTap or Infinity allow businesses like yours to associate specific: keywords, emails or blog posts to leads. These tools provide you with the data to determine which marketing campaigns are working. As well as providing reliable data and insights into your marketing activity, you use call tracking to:

  • Review sales calls
  • Train members of your sales team
  • Record important information
  • Record conversions
  • Track the effectiveness of offline media – print and banners etc

22. Build An Online Tool To Generate Leads

Creating an online tool for your website can provide additional value to potential customers and also develop into a lead generating machine for your business! Try to develop a tool that addresses some of the most common questions asked by your customers, access to the tool can then be gained in exchange for contact details or an email address. We’ve created a variety of tools including:

  • Grab lorry load calculator
  • Property valuation tools
  • Carpet cost estimator
  • Free quotation tools
  • Website audit tools.

How To Use SEO For B2B Lead Generation

Search Engine Optimisation, also known as SEO is the process of increasing a website’s visibility on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) on Search Engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. This is achieved through a number of factors including optimisation of the website, typically SEO is broken down into three areas, on-page, off-page and technical SEO.

Organic traffic (this is what SEO aims to increase) is non-paid, it can drive very targeted traffic, as well as driving large volumes of traffic depending on the keywords being used. This is why it is so important to generate organic traffic and SEO is what you need to utilise in or to achieve this.

23. Keyword Research

One of the first and most important steps in any SEO strategy is deciding what keywords you will target. Keywords refer to the query that a user types into a search engine in order to find a specific result. Ensuring that you are targeting the correct search queries allows you to focus on searches that drive the most valuable users to your website.

When deciding which keywords to target, there are some factors you need to consider:

  • Search Volume – How many people are actually searching for this keyword each month? You don’t want to waste your time ranking in position 1 for a keyword that receives 3 searches each month, use the Google Keyword Planner, it’s a great tool for forecasting search volumes.
  • Competition – How much competition is there? A highly competitive keyword will be much harder to rank in position 1, you will have to carry out much more work to achieve the top spot, but the amount of traffic is usually abundant for competitive keywords, so it could be worth the extra effort.
  • Relevance – Is the keyword relevant to your business or service? You want to be able to convert your traffic, so do not waste your time sending the wrong traffic to your website.

24. Produce Great, Unique Lead Generating Content

‘Content is king’ is a well known phrase within the SEO industry, and for good reason. Content is one of the best ways to improve your websites search engine positions.

It takes effort, and because of this Google rewards you.

It’s not a case of just uploading content, there are guidelines you should follow to ensure that you get the most out of it, as well as avoiding any potential penalties

  • Content should be unique and not copied from anywhere else unless referenced correctly.
  • It should be relevant to the topic/keywords you are targeting.
  • Include the right densities of keywords so that it doesn’t look like you are ‘keyword stuffing’.
  • Include internal and external links.
  • Tag your headings and images correctly for SEO.

Generating high quality, relevant content takes effort, and because of this Google rewards you.

25. Update Your Old Lead Generating Content

Refresh old content, update the text, add new images, check that your links are still working. If the content is outdated or no longer relevant, especially when compared to the content your competitors are publishing, Google will notice, and as a result, they won’t prioritise your web pages to new users.

Quick tip – If you have several old content pieces, why not combine a few of them to create a new, larger piece of content. This is a great way to not only refresh content but also build upon it, we have seen great results with our clients using this method to increase b2b leads.

26. Include shareable Ideas & Data in Your Content

Well written, highly optimised content is excellent, but you need to get it in front of people. Including shareable elements, data and infographics are great ways to encourage readers to share your content on social media platforms, within newsletters and other aggregating websites. When the ideas and data provide real value to a reader they are more likely to share that with others, so be sure to keep this in mind when creating your next content piece.

Infographics are another great shareable resource, they may take a bit more effort to design but don’t overlook the power of these beautiful things. Piktochart provides a user-friendly service for creating infographics in all manner of shapes and sizes, it’s free to use as well!

 

27. Guest Blogging

This allows you to push your content in front of a much larger audience. There are many blogs out there which have a huge following receiving millions of visitors each day, imagine being able to put your business or service in front of those people! All you need to do is create an engaging, relevant piece of content. That’s exactly what guest blogging helps you achieve, some blogs will allow you to submit content to them, if they like it they’ll publish it and usually with a backlink to your website. You don’t have to worry about marketing the content or building an audience, which is why this is a very practical and effective strategy for b2b lead generation.

Here are things to keep in mind when guest blogging.

  1. You need to find blogs relevant to your industry, with whom you share a similar audience.
  2. The blog should allow guest posts, most blogs will have a page mentioning their submission policy if they allow them.
  3. If there are loads of blogs to choose from, prioritise the ones with the largest audience, checking the websites Alexa rank provides a good gauge on how each blog compares in regards to traffic.
  4. Ensure your content is right the first time, check it, then check it again… and then you should probably check it again. Ensure the content is properly optimised as you still want to have SEO in mind when producing it.

28. Local SEO

Targeting local search terms is a great way to increase b2b lead generation, depending on the competitiveness of your market, it can be easier and quicker to see results vs. traditional SEO. This is because local SEO helps you to connect with people within your area, and as a result, your efforts can be more refined and therefore deliver better results.

Google My Business (GMB) is a great resource by Google which allows you to list your business information, as well as drive traffic to your website and increase b2b leads. You can include your business name, opening hours, contact information such as a phone number and email address, photos, questions and answers for your business and even capture and respond to reviews. Beyond this, you can continue to optimise your GMB profile to ensure that it appears in the top positions for local searches for your product or service. Tasks such as responding to reviews, listing the areas you serve, adding fresh content, ensuring your business information is accurate and matches your website are just a few things we recommend to optimise your profile.

Citations are online references to businesses, online directories are typically used to list these citations and there are thousands of websites across hundreds of industries which you could choose to use, BrightLocal provides a great service which can find citation opportunities that are relevant to your industry for you. Building citations is a key component of any local SEO strategy, as a minimum you should include your Name, Address & Postcode (NAP), but the more information you can provide the better.

Please note that all NAP information must be consistent across all websites, this is to build up trust within the search engines and to let them know that the information is correct and up-to-date. If you have inconsistent NAP information it could severely impact your local SEO efforts.

 

For more information, or to request a free audit of your current activity please contact us today. If it’s to help improve your Google Ads PPC or SEO page positions, we can help your business to generate more leads.

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