And you’re in luck, because I’m going to share a few of them with you today. Not only do we think these are nifty lead gen tactics, we think we can pretty much guarantee that these will get you results. Sounds good doesn’t it?
Just to clarify, what I’m talking about generating here is marketing leads, or “marketing qualified leads”. These are not leads that are ready to buy – these are super engaged prospects that are ready to be passed on to your sales team for their qualification.
Anyway, without further ado, here are 3 proven marketing leads gen strategies for B2B, direct from our B2B marketing experts into your eyeballs.
Targeted case study campaigns
We frequently bang on about this until we’re blue in the face – case studies are BIG in B2B. In a world where there’s no aggregated product reviews like there are in B2C, and especially if you’re a services business, prospects are very interested in learning about who you’ve worked with before, and the results you got for them. Sharing relevant case studies with carefully selected segments of your prospect list can spark quite a bit of interest. The first step here is making sure you’ve got case studies in a format you can share – whether that’s a nice PDF or a page on your website. The second step is deciding who to target. This will most likely depend on the nature of your business, variety of products or services, and the case studies and data you have. That being said, some common ways to approach this are to segment and target by:
- Location
- Industry
- Job title
- Business size
Once you’ve segmented your list, you should decide how you’re going to share these case studies with this list. The most likely candidate here is a nicely laid out email with some powerful messaging. If you’re struggling with email data, you could also consider running a paid social campaign – using your segments to select the demographics you want to target, and driving them to engage with the case study on your website.
Webinars
We’re no stranger on this blog to making the case for the awesome power of the webinar. And for good reason – they’re great way to get in front of a number of engaged leads at the same time, and talk them through your service, or your product, or anything else you want them to know. You can even automate the whole process – pre-recording your content and making it available as a “like-live” webinar on your website. Registration can still be required, so you still capture the lead’s details. It’s a good idea to treat a webinar like you would most consideration or decision content – it’s very much a middle or bottom of the funnel play. Share with and promote to your most engaged prospects for the best results. As for the content – that’s up to you. If you can get a customer on to talk about their successes with your product or service, that’s even more powerful than a written case study. For the right audience, so is going through your proposition and how it can help them in detail.
Addressing a specific challenge
Ok, this might seem like an obvious one – isn’t that what you’re doing with your business generally, addressing customer challenges? Well, yes, but you’d be surprised how often some B2B businesses miss this trick when approaching their marketing. And when I talk about addressing a specific challenge with a campaign, I mean specific. This could be time-specific, or industry-specific, or job title-specific. See, those segments have cropped up again haven’t they? If you can make your proposition as relevant to that prospect as possible, the more engaged they’re going to be. If I seem to be a) stating the obvious and b) not really getting to the point, here’s an example to illustrate what I’m waffling about.
Two-thirds of the Inflowing team spent more of their lives than they would like to think about preparing for, attending and executing the BETT show as a marketing team. If you’re not familiar, BETT is the world’s largest education technology showcase. For anyone who wants to make a serious play around tech in the education, it’s a must. We know from experience the challenges that surround preparing for that event – ensuring you get the most visitors, engagement and ultimately return possible. Knowing all this, and having the knowledge and experience we felt necessary to help people with marketing the show, we launched a campaign around key BETT planning time in September, making exhibitors aware of how we could help them plan their BETT marketing and ensure the best possible return. Because this campaign addressed a very specific, time-sensitive challenge, we had a lot of great conversations around this.
Making your marketing about a challenge which is very specific to your audience is almost a sure-fire way to get a bit of engagement and start having meaningful conversations. This could be an event, new legislation you know to be coming in (remember GDPR?), or maybe in response to a bit of industry insight from a national report or otherwise. The possibilities, as they say, are endless.
Hopefully this has inspired you in some way and opened your eyes to possibilities when it comes to generating marketing leads for B2B. If you’re sitting there thinking “sounds great, but how am I going to get the time to do all this?” – check out Leads. For a single, low-cost monthly payment, we will guarantee upwards of 20 marketing qualified leads per month, delivered straight into your sales team, using some of the great tactics mentioned above, and more.
