Generating quality and relevant leads online is a vital proposition, one that requires a constant feel of the landscape, as well as how developing technologies are affecting Internet usage and usability.
B2b leads are even trickier sometimes because when you are dealing with businesses, you are dealing with a completely different plethora of needs.
If a regular customer needs just one or two things from you, a business that needs Web design or search engine optimization leads will require a hundred different things. The clients are fickle, weary of bad offers, and can disappear in a heartbeat if your business comes across as shady or amateur.
What are the vital and urgent changes you need to focus on in 2018 and beyond to generate more business leads?
In addition to working with a qualified B2b lead generation expert, there are other efforts that you can start using to begin generating quality leads.
1. Lead Generation Forms Have To Be Improved
To regular Web users, lead generation forms are just that – forms that you can fill up so the agency or company behind the website can receive an inquiry.
However, lead generation forms can either save you money or triple your costs of generating leads in the long term. Why? Because your lead generation forms are the final frontier while the user is on the website, and it simply has to work not just in generating leads but also reducing the costs of the process.
Here is an example. Let us say that the cost of bringing in 1,000 visits to your website is $3,500. If your landing page has a conversion rate of 1%, you get 10 qualified leads for every 1,000 visits.
That is equivalent to $350 per lead. However, what if you can increase the effectiveness of your landing page to 3%? A 3% conversion will produce 30 qualified leads, for every 1,000 visits, bringing down the cost of lead generation to just $117. $350 versus $117. This is the kind of money you are looking at when generating qualified leads online. And this should definitely serve as a wake-up call if you are spending far more.
2. Online Marketing Methods Have To Be Integrated and Strengthened
Over the years there have been so many variations of online marketing that if we can convert all the digital gunk that has accumulated over the decades, we would probably be able to build a small planet (of digital gunk).
But one thing we do know is that there are strategies that have stood the test of time and are still delivering good results for B2B lead generation efforts.
These strategies are:
– Organic content marketing
– Social marketing
– Search marketing
– Email marketing
Let us talk about these marketing approaches.
Organic content marketing is generating valuable and useful content for a broad audience, as well as specific kinds of people who could use the help of your business.
So if your business is helping people with Web design, you would want to generate content that helps people figure out how to improve their websites. The impetus is to magnetize people who have genuine needs, to encourage them to go to you to provide solutions to their problems/needs.
Organic content marketing is hugely popular and is a sound backbone of any long-term marketing effort because the Web exists primarily to provide information to people.
And content is never limited to just write-ups: you can provide a whole range of content types from white papers, digital reports, infographics, videos, and the like.
It really depends on the market you have, what they need, and what types of information they are drawn to in the first place.
Social marketing is all about human behavior. It is the integration of social behavior with the promotion of products and services. Brands like Coca Cola have been using social marketing for decades.
Coca Cola is there to promote “strong family ties” in one country, and professional athleticism in another.
The suggested behavior has to be universally accepted as positive, the message does not even have to be complex, but the marketing works. The recall is instant, long-lasting and nearly permanent because actual human behaviors are associated with the brand of soda.
Search marketing is focused on generating traffic to your website through different search engines.
Google is of course the biggest of them all, but 1/5 of all online searches come from other search engines like Yahoo and Bing. Let’s not forget these other search engines, because who knows? Your customers may be using these search engines, too.
“Free” traffic comes from organic clicks when people find your website when looking for a certain type of information online. Paid traffic comes from PPC ads, Google ads, and the like.
“Free” traffic is not actually free in the absolute sense of the word, since you will need to develop content, and even if you generate the content yourself, there will be associated costs.
YouTube is probably the best place to examine the costs of creating quality content.
Those videos with consistently high views (in the millions) are often created by content developers who have invested in sound and video recording equipment and hundreds of hours of work. Quality content costs more, but the prospect of a higher ROI is usually better.
And then we have email marketing.
Email marketing is probably viewed as one of the riskiest types of communication strategies online because Google slaps SPAM tags to emails faster than you can say “oh no!”
However, this is definitely the most direct way of speaking to decision-makers in businesses, and B2B lead generation specialists like RankLeads have perfected the formula for sending out emails to generate leads.
It takes years and years to perfect the formula, but if you think you can do it, you are free to try it out yourself. We all have to start from somewhere, that is what we always say.
3. Going Small Can Mean Striking It Rich
One of the more interesting aspects of online marketing is the smallest gestures (and websites) can generate powerful sales results, and people wouldn’t even recognize that the on-going effort by the company is purely marketing in nature.
A great example of “going big by going small” would be Xerox.
Xerox has been around for a long time and everyone knows that it has had its fair share of hard times. But it’s still around, and apparently, it has been catching up to the digital marketing revolution.
What Xerox did was beyond clever. The company created a micro-site that provided specialized, expert tips.
These tips were geared toward business owners. Of course, in return for the expert information, Xerox asked for contact details and allowed people to schedule appointments. The results of sending out golden content were revenue amounting to $1.3 billion.
Yes, that is more than a billion dollars in revenue, and that is just from one micro-site.
To help you digest what just happened, we’re going to share two important truths about the Internet with you:
Truth # 1: People spend money on the Internet.
Truth # 2: People spend money after being on the Internet.
Connecting to people and getting them to carry out Truth # 1 or Truth # 2 is our short term and long-term goal.
4. Social Media Engagement Is Pivotal
When Facebook first appeared on the scene, it was lauded as one of the sneakiest ways to keep millions of people on a content platform that did not actually produce any content.
Content development was largely relegated to the people who were on the platform, and people liked it. Now, Facebook is now an indispensible part of so many people’s lives, and it has become built into the technological DNA of people.
With this being the case, businesses need to start maximizing this platform’s potential in generating business leads.
One way that other businesses have been doing it is by employing Facebook chat bots. Facebook chat bots are simple AI packages that interact with people online and provide relevant information based on specific queries.
And while Facebook chat bots may not completely replace a human answering on the other side of the line, they can generate leads by getting to know your customers more, instead of having to lead them to a separate website.
There is a ton of things that you can do with a well-developed Facebook chat bot, including:
- Having people sign up for services.
- Asking people what they need
- Asking people for their feedback about specific goods or services
- Recording complaints and suggestions
The response to automated chat bots is overwhelmingly positive nowadays because technology has definitely improved and people are getting used to speaking with machines more and more.
Chat bots are also used in websites (those 24/7 chat bots are awesome) and having someone to talk to when you need something from a website is really a game-changer.
