Old school marketing and B2B lead generation both come from the same tree, so there definitely shouldn’t be a lot of upward resistance when you are learning B2B lead generation for the first time.

Of course, statistics show that B2B lead generation specialists can help generate reliable and warm leads for other businesses more quickly and more economically than businesses trying to do it on their lonesome. How do the more conventional marketing principles meld with new approaches? Let’s find out.

1. Get social, on the right networks

 For B2B lead generation, the top-performing social network is still LinkedIn, and we know why: the platform is designed for businesses and professionals and has none of the fluff and the extra distracting content that’s common on Twitter and Facebook.

We’re not saying that you can’t get leads from the previously mentioned networks, what we are saying is if you want a network that is already optimized for the function of lead generation, you have LinkedIn.

And yes, people have actually nurtured leads worth millions of dollars on the platform, all for a measly monthly premium rate that anyone can afford.

But there are more people on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram! That’s right, there are more people here. And people are increasingly using their Facebook apps to search for businesses on the social network.

Sometimes it works, if the businesses have made it a point to create geo-specific pages that people can find easily.

Other times, it’s not so easy because a business’s social media presence is poorly planned.

There are many factors that affect the effectiveness of social media marketing, and the foundations/basics can have a huge effect on the final results, in the end.

How does effective social media engagement compare with how companies promoted themselves fifty years ago? Fifty years ago, it was all about glitz and glamour. It was all about appealing to the good life, luxury, etc.

Some of these techniques still work today, but people can smell if something is too self-promotional the moment they lay eyes on something poorly written on social media. This reminder extends to all businesses, not just the big companies.

The main reason why businesses are on social media in the first place is we want to nurture the online community/communities that support our branding.

Social media gives people a chance to directly address issues with products and services and also to provide feedback – whether the feedback is good or bad to begin with. This ability to speak to consumers is a precious gift as it can be recorded and then later measured.

As for the lead generation aspect, leads can be collected and warmed up to be sales-ready right within the Facebook network for example.

2. Get people to sign up

 Forget about people asking for a card and hoping that in less than a year, that card is going to bring in big bucks.

The name of the game now is adding people to a marketing funnel as quickly as possible, and keeping them there by providing stuff they need (to a degree) and presenting them with solutions (which is where your products and services come in).

Getting people to sign up essentially builds a flexible membership base for your website, and you can send well thought out emails and valuable content to your email subscribers to get them warmer than ever.

Internal promotions, or promotions available only for those who have already signed up for your website, gives people more reason to want to become part of your email list.

As long as you are providing something of value, and people love it, you are on the right track. Happy customers always mean that the business is doing something right.

3. Test exhaustively.

 Some businesses become too preoccupied with the MC (main content) of the home page because this is what Google really looks at when ranking websites – but what about the other parts of your website?

Google now wants websites to provide genuine content in the range of 1,800-2,000 words per piece of content/posting. That means short pieces or text descriptions no longer fit the bill.

You either go in with the intention of informing people and giving them useful articles with genuine value, or suffer from the fact that Google is probably never going to put your website up top in search results.

And then there’s A/B testing. A/B testing or split testing is setting up at least two different layouts for the home page MC, and other parts of your website such as product landing pages, and measuring the effectiveness of each layout over a period of time.

The only way that you would be able to optimize your website is to measure factors like bounce rate and dwell time. Software can help you analyze this, and the website can easily switch between testing pages so you can understand further how your customers’ psychology works.

4. Automate things you can automate.

 Automation is key to your success as a digital marketer, or as any business owner doing business on the Internet. A/B testing, emails, sign ups, all these things can easily be handled by plugins and software.

Do your research and find ways to make things easier by automating them. Time is a precious resource and if you want to build your business, you have to have time to work on the actual business rather than just spending a lot of time on just the website.

Because we all know that beyond the website, there are still other things we have to take care of, and those things require time, too!

5. Email sequences rule

 Let us assume that you already have a way to connect with customers through social media. Sure, posts can go a long way in announcing new product offers.

But everyone knows that public posts are for the public, and they can be read and then freely forgotten. How do you protect your business from this phenomenon?

You go in from all sides, including email. Email sequences have traditionally brought good results, and the sequences themselves, they can be tailored to what you have in mind for the folks in your marketing funnel.

Each section of your marketing funnel gets warmer and warmer as it goes down and narrows, right? And the point of having a funnel is to lead most of your people downward, to the areas where sales and repeat sales are possible.

You can create blasts of emails for specific sections of the funnel that you designed. You don’t have to email as if you are addressing everyone who are already ‘warm’ because they are further down the funnel already.

For people on the top of the funnel, these are called “cold prospects” because these potential customers might not even know that they need something from your business – yet.

The goal is to make them realize that your business provides a solution to an existing problem that they may not have spotted before, or may not have been paying much attention to in the past.

6. Think “community”

 Brands that have long treated their customers as ‘family,’ or brand communities have also long determined the surefire path to success. When a commercial brand descends from the market down to the level of the personal and sticks, because people begin to care for the brand as their own, that’s when you can say that all your efforts in reaching out to people have succeeded wildly.

The first step is to connect. Always connect with people. Create events online and offline. Any kind of event where people can learn something from you, or you can give something of value to them can send ripples for years.

Again, think of brands like Coca-Cola, who seem to have exhausted all kinds of connection opportunities with people globally. From sports to community-level projects in Third World countries, Coca Cola’s expansive ambition of being a fixed part of people’s lives continues to pay dividends up to this day.

It is precisely this dedication to ingraining the brand into communities that protects the soda maker from the effects of recession in almost any decade. Sales might drop during recession, but Coca Cola is always able to bounce back.

7. Establish your authority

 Being an authority figure online usually means your website has a lot of useful and compelling content, and you have experts on board doing guest posts and other neat stuff for you.

Or you can do it like how other mavericks do it: establish yourself as the authority. If you have the passion and the knowledge, the Web offers a seat that you can call your own, and all you need is to convince people that you are worth listening to.

Thing is, the old concept of authority has eroded. People no longer look up to people with multiple degrees or stuff like that online. What they want are people who can get things done.

You can definitely showcase your knowledge by hosting webinars and similar events online. Invite people to attend your webinar and even charge a fee for the sign up. Other options include books, digital reports, white paper, and the like.