Generating any kind of B2B engagement is tough, but more so if you’re wading through the digital ocean for signs of life – does anyone need a good agency?
Where are your SEO leads? The echoes in the seemingly hollow space answer your calls. That is not a good sign. But luckily, we have a few strategies up our sleeves that just might help you engage your audience better – and it’s likely that your prospects of getting SEO leads will improve.
This is our rundown of the best tips for boosting engagement and getting awesome SEO leads for your business.
1. Build Excitement About Your Brand
Every business needs a roaring entry point into the digital ocean, so people will take notice.
Let’s say that you are rebranding, and with the rebranding comes a host of new services that you didn’t offer before. There’s new staff, and the company is going through a lot of awesome changes to deliver better SEO to clientele.
But you need help: no one is going to celebrate all this awesomeness with the internal changes and what not if people don’t know about it. The solution? Get everyone in the company excited about the changes, too.
They’re going to be the first group of people to talk about the changes, and by spreading the word through their network, you are already casting your net to reach a wider audience.
There has to be a soft launch for the changes, and a hard, grand launch that is all stars and fireworks. The reason for this is we don’t want to overpromise and just ignore launch day.
We are building excitement and energy for a purpose: we want your audience to be fully engaged, as that also helps them to stay interested in what you have to offer.
This applies most especially to SEO companies or agencies that focus a lot on small businesses – with small businesses, you have the opportunity to actually reach the decision makers more quickly with your B2B marketing campaigns.
2. Aim for Granular Personalization
We are in the age of user-centeredness and personalization. The more general your approach, the less likely that people will be responsive.
Why? Because they believe that the Web should be a largely personal experience, and there should be at least some effort to provide something that they can relate to immediately. So plan your marketing efforts properly, and aim for granular level, and not company or enterprise level.
Customize for the smaller portion of your audience that are likely to hire your company, but also retain a percentage of the more globalist approach to make sure that you are generating general interest in your brand.
65% of marketers also believe that their personalization efforts are only average or even below average, which is why it’s imperative that you start improving your own efforts. Underutilizing this aspect of B2B lead generation is a big mistake.
3. Don’t Play With Urgency
This is probably the biggest mistake that digital marketers make when trying to get people hyped up about a promotion or offer: they play with urgency. It may have worked ten or fifteen years ago, when Web 2.0 was just kicking off.
But if you are still sending ten to fifteen “last day” offers to your email list in 2019, you’re probably getting ignored more for saying that it’s the last day.
If it is the last day, then there’s no problem: build that excitement all week and promote whatever service you want until the final day. But if the opposite is true, and the package you are offering is actually available all year long, there’s going to be problems down the road.
Last chance offers are crucial because people who have been resisting for a long time will want something concrete as an incentive so there will be no buyer’s remorse after. We don’t want buyer’s remorse.
We want people to be happy spending their SEO budgets on our agencies, and hopefully for a long, long while. Messing with urgency will only backfire on your campaigns, for sure.
4. Work With Sales
If you have a separate sales team responsible for generating leads, you have to make sure that you are working as closely as possible with the sales staff so they know exactly what message/s you want to transmit to the people who are interested in getting SEO services.
There’s a general message that anyone can transmit, and then there’s the special message that can only come from someone who is knee-deep in the intricacies of search engine optimization.
The same applies to companies that offer Web development in this era of endless changes to the search engine landscape. Unless the sales team are also developers or established B2B experts, they need extra guidance in terms of knowing what messages are best suited for specific situations and events.
It’s also important for your sales team to realize that people don’t live in a vacuum, and they are looking at websites and social media channels of your competition. If you don’t take the competition as part of the equation for developing effective spiels, for instance, then your sales team is going to lag behind, because your competition who has done his homework is probably making a more masterful case of hiring them instead of you.
You can have all the fancy and expensive SEO tools ready for implementation, but people don’t know that and at the point of contact, all your customers have is your sales team.
Have them master the ins and outs of your business like you do, and make sure that they live, eat, and breathe SEO – like you, too. That way, you and your sales team will always be on the same page, and they’re going to make some serious headway in generating SEO leads for your company.