B2B lead generation or business to business lead-gen is the lifeblood of many companies and digital marketing agencies, including SEO agencies.
How You Can Get Quality SEO Leads in the New Normal
Generating more SEO leads is a priority this end of the year if you want to begin scaling in early 2022. It’s a wise investment to buy SEO leads if you are having trouble collecting and qualifying them. You can create a huge advantage for your SEO agency or SEO freelancing business this way – at reasonable costs.
What Exactly Is a Lead?
A lead is essentially Any person who expresses interest in a company’s product or service in any form. For example, if someone is interested in pursuing a revamp of his site, he becomes a web design lead when he finds and responds to a landing page for that service. Similarly, someone who needs help with social media management will become a social media marketing lead the moment he contact a social media management company.
After beginning communication, leads usually hear from a company or organization… rather than receiving a cold call.
Let’s pretend you’re taking an online survey to learn more about car maintenance. You get an email from the auto firm that created the study about how they can help in car repair and maintenance. This procedure would be a lot less intrusive than if they phoned you out of the blue without knowing if you care about car maintenance or not, right? This is how it feels to be in charge.
From a commercial standpoint, the information the auto company gathers about you from your survey replies allows them to customize that first message to address your current issues — rather than wasting time phoning prospects who aren’t interested in-vehicle services.
What Is the Definition of Lead Generation?
The process of bringing prospects to your organization and maintaining their interest to turn them into a customer is known as lead generation. Job applications, blog articles, coupons, live events, and online material are all good strategies to generate leads.
What Is the Purpose of Lead Generation?
Moving from outsider to the customer is considerably easier when a stranger establishes a connection with you by expressing a genuine interest in the business.
The second stage is lead creation. It happens after you’ve drawn in a crowd and are ready to turn them into sales leads for your sales staff (namely sales-qualified leads).
Marketing Qualified Leads
These are folks expressed interest in your marketing efforts but aren’t that ready for sales calls. An MQL is a contact who fills out a landing page form to receive an offer.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
Sales-qualified leads are individuals who have demonstrated an interest in becoming a paying customer by their actions. A SQL is a someone who fills out a form to inquire about your product or service. If you offer additional services like reputation management online, a person who seems interested becomes a reputation management lead.
Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
PQLs are people who have tested your product and performed actions that indicate a willingness to become a paying customer. Businesses that offer a free or limited version of their product with upgrade options frequently employ PQLs which is where your sales force comes in. A consumer who utilizes your free version yet engages with or inquires about features that are only available with purchase is an example of a PQL. A PPC management lead is a PQL if he’s tried a free SaaS offer for additional analytics and inquires to go up another service tier for more features.
Qualified Service Lead (QSL)
This is a service that provides qualified leads to customers. Qualified leads are contacts or customers who have expressed an interest in becoming paying customers to your service staff. For example, a customer who notifies their agent that they’d like to pay for an upgrade is an example of a service qualified lead; at this point, the customer service rep will up-level this consumer to the right sales team or team member. A company who contacts an app development team to create a new Android app for gaming and branding for example, is a qualified app development lead.
The Process of Creating Leads
Let’s go over the steps now that we understand how lead generation fits into the inbound marketing strategy.
One of your marketing channels, such as your website, blog, or social media page, is where a visitor first learns about your organization.
The visitor then clicks the CTA, which is a message, button or image on your site that encourages visitors to act. Your visitor will be directed to a landing page; a web page meant to collect lead information in exchange for an offer.
The information or something of value that is “offered” on the landing page, such as an ebook, a course, or a template, is known as an offer. The offer must be of sufficient perceived value to entice visitors to volunteer personal information in exchange for access.)
Your visitor fills out a form on the landing page in exchange for the offer. (Although forms can potentially be embedded anywhere on your site, they are commonly housed on landing pages.) Voila! You’ve got a new lead. That is, as long as you follow best practices for lead capture forms.
Isn’t it amazing how well everything fits together?
To summarize: When visitors click on a CTA, they are taken to a landing page where they complete a form to receive an offer and become a lead.
Lead-Gen Marketing
After you’ve put all these pieces together, you can start driving traffic to your landing page and producing leads using your various advertising channels. But how should you spread the word about your landing page? First, let’s talk about lead generation marketing, which is the front end of the process.
Content
Content is crucial for landing pages. Typically, you create content to provide users with free, useful information. CTAs can be used inline, at the bottom of the page, in the hero, and even on the side panel of your content. The more relevant your content, the more likely a visitor will click your call-to-action and visit your landing page.
This is a terrific way to reach out to those already familiar with your brand, product, or service. Because they’ve already subscribed to your list, it’s much easier to ask them to do something. Because emails are often cluttered, employ CTAs with intriguing language and a striking design to draw your subscribers’ attention.
Retargeting and Ads
An advertisement’s main objective is to persuade people to take action. So why spend the money if you don’t have to? If you want visitors to convert, make ensure that your offern and landing page match exactly what the ad states.
Blogs Everywhere
The advantage of using your blog entries to promote an offer is that you may completely personalize the piece to meet your objectives.
Free Product and Service Trials
Offering free samples or trials can help you overcome many of the hurdles to a sale. For example, after a prospect has used your product for a while, you might urge them to buy with more offers or resources. Another effective strategy is to integrate your branding in your free versions to attract the attention of other potential buyers.
Marketing Through Referrals
Differently, referral marketing, also known as word-of-mouth marketing, is beneficial for lead generation. That is, it raises your chances of producing more leads by putting your brand in front of more individuals.
Whatever channel you want to use for lead-gen, you’ll want to direct users to your landing page. As long as you’ve created a landing page that converts, the rest will take care of itself.
Lead-Gen in the New Normal: What are the Odds?
Any credible technology sector leader in B2B sales spent upwards of 80% of their working hours with clients in 2020. They’d be on the lookout for fresh prospects and qualified leads in person, taking possible clients to places like sporting events and rubbing elbows at conferences and trade shows. Surprisingly, considering the sector, pipeline development and shutdown was not based on much research or technology.
Because of COVID-19, the same seller now travels significantly less or not at all, leaving them with a lot freer time but the same, or even higher, quotas to meet in the next quarter. While the salesperson may be looking forward to an improved travel schedule as the world adjusts to a new normal, it’s unclear whether clients want them back as frequently as they did before or whether businesses will allow vendor trips as much as previously due to legal concerns. In addition, remote human interactions or digital self-service are preferred by more than 70% of B2B decision-makers.
This new environment poses a challenge: how can a B2B seller attract new customers whose problems they can answer when customers don’t want to return to the old business method?
What Clients Are Looking for Right Now
Organizations must better facilitate sales lead gen operations in the new environment rather than telling their B2B salespeople to make individual modifications. Salespeople are being pushed to spend more time prospecting, speaking with clients on platforms like Zoom and Teams, and presenting online events right now. While these activities may be beneficial, they are insufficient to help the seller overcome a significant gap in their pipeline, particularly for those without the benefit of established customer accounts or continuous renewal business.
To generate more leads, B2B salespeople must go where their prospects are: online, particularly on LinkedIn and Twitter. Your salesforce must become known thought leaders in their professions and contribute to digital debates in new and provocative ways as part of this effort – a role previously reserved for people in its product, customer success, or professional service arms. They must also employ client-specific solution selling in a digital world, which is more important than ever.
Most salespeople are unable to accomplish this idea on their own. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the organization to give the necessary assistance. Finally, B2B salesforce leaders, particularly those in forward-thinking businesses like tech, must generate content that salespeople can use to create the aura of thought leaders, such as white papers, standard pitch materials, one to three-year transformation blueprints, or roadmaps, etc.
The New Business-to-Business Sales Playbook
Assemble the best go-to-market team possible. To compete in this new environment, businesses must assemble a cross-functional team to develop standard global repeatable procedures that will be utilized to create comprehensive go-to-market content. The processes must be streamlined to produce no more than three industry-specific standardized marketing assets for the sector. It’s critical to involve regional stakeholders in the content generation process and comments from global field sales and marketing teams. Many people were involved in the content development process at the global technology company. However, it began with regional sales and marketing teams.
Create material that is simple to understand and articulates the firm’s industry offerings. The content your team creates must be “outcome-based,” in the sense that it focuses on the difficulties customers have rather than the items the field sells. The team should put up the architecture for this information to be placed on internal landing pages and a portion of it to be offered externally through marketing teams on social and digital platforms. For example, the company we looked at previously had hundreds of sales literature dispersed over multiple sites. The cross-functional team concentrated on developing sales collateral for a small number of industries, and each piece of collateral defined client value rather than product specs.
Make the content available to the public. Here, awareness is crucial. Leaders must make the go-to-market content and program well known throughout the organization. Leaders must ensure that the content is freely accessible to salespeople after the conversation. After the content has been deployed in the field, salespeople must be able to push it to market, employing platforms for distribution and maybe sales productivity tools for tracking KPIs.
Sales teams receive relevant leads from demand creation teams. In addition, sales will generate leads immediately from their actions, such as sending the information to prospects through email and publishing it on other digital media channels.
Evaluate outcomes on a variety of levels. Reps on the field need to track their content’s overall performance, including views and influence on deals. Meanwhile, the company can expand on successful sales content and eliminate collateral that fails to gain traction rapidly. Internal performance metrics must be present to maximize quality content and leads. This final stage ensures that the content library only contains sales motions that are beneficial to both clients and field personnel.
