B2B lead generation is complex — the sales cycles are long, customers fewer, and it involves more decision-makers. This makes it far more complicated than B2C lead generation, where customers are many, and sales cycles are shorter.
That’s why any B2B business needs to give special attention to their lead generation efforts. If you don’t do it well, you may as well end up wasting a lot of your marketing budget, and here’s what would happen to your campaign:
This is perhaps the reason why marketers gave preference to lead generation in 2020 as well. So, to ensure you have a steady stream of leads and customers, we’ve put together this B2B lead generation cheatsheet.
So, let’s dive right into it.
Cheatsheet for B2B Lead Generation in 2021
From email marketing to content marketing, there are loads of approaches that you can take to generate leads for your B2B business. Here are the best B2B lead generation hacks to help you out.
1. Email Marketing
Email marketing is an excellent way of going about B2B lead generation. It’s also highly effective, with an ROI of over $40 for every single dollar invested in it. The best part about it is that you can use it to acquire leads and nurture them and move them further down your sales funnel.
Here’s how you can leverage email marketing for B2B lead generation:
- First, build a list of potential prospects.
- Collect their email addresses.
- Draft a cold email and send it over.
- Send reminders after a few days, if they don’t reply.
While this may seem simple enough, there can be many challenges along the way. Simply compiling a list of prospects and sending out cold emails won’t help your cause. As the Black Panther would say:
The key here is to segment and micro-segment your email list to craft targeted cold email campaigns for B2B lead generation.
You can segment your audience based on their interests, demographics, or locations. This can allow you to target particular buyer personas and thus personalize your offerings further. As a result, they’ll be more likely to find the email relevant.
With micro-segmentation, you can take this targeting one step further. You can dive deep into your audience and create granular clusters among them. This allows you to personalize further your cold email messaging.
2. Email Automation
Sending out cold emails can be a great way to approach B2B lead generation. However, when you’ve to scale up your cold email outreach, it can get challenging. That’s where email automation comes into the picture.
Using it, you can set up autoresponder sequences that will work without intervening manually. Then, all you’ve got to do is leverage an email marketing tool like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign and add your email list.
You can then segment your audience and create an email template to send to each segment. Next, you can set up autoresponder sequences activated based on how the recipients respond to them.
For instance, if the recipients don’t reply to your email, the autoresponder sequence will send a second email after a few days.
3. Email Deliverability
When you’re doing cold email outreach for B2B lead generation, it’s also essential to look at your email deliverability. You might have an enormous email list, but if the emails don’t get delivered, you’ll end up waste your time and budget.
To improve your email deliverability, here’s what you can do:
- Get your domain verified to ensure your emails don’t go to spam folders.
- Filter your list regularly to avoid those emails that bounce.
- Be consistent with your email volume.
- Don’t send spammy emails to avoid getting marked as spam.
- Instead, encrypt emails to build trust among the receivers.
4. Marketing Research/Data Analytics
To generate leads, you must target your marketing efforts well. For this to happen, you need to do in-depth market research.
The idea is to understand precisely who your audience is, as this will help you customize your messaging, which, in turn, can influence your B2B lead generation.
If you’ve already got a website or customers, you can dive into their data and try to understand who shows interest in your brand and buys from you.
While numerous tools can do the job for you, it helps to have a combination of professionals and tools. We at SSC combine both to deliver the most detailed and accurate database to help you target your marketing campaigns. From demographic to technographic data, we cover it all.
5. Content Marketing
Yet another way through which you can do B2B lead generation is content marketing. Nearly 70% of marketers leverage it for this purpose. Content marketing involves creating and distributing high-quality content through blog posts, images, videos, etc
The idea behind it is to become a helpful resource for your audience. Doing so can help improve your brand trust and may encourage your audience to become your leads.
Here’s how you can go about content marketing:
- First, find out the pain points of your audience.
- Then, create content around how you can solve them and weave your products or services into it.
- Finally, add internal links to landing pages or registration pages.
- Leverage search engine optimization (SEO), social media, email marketing, etc. to distribute your content and grow its reach.
Final Thoughts
Lead generation has a critical role to play in driving your business growth. Without it, you can’t expect to generate sales and drive revenues.
To generate leads, it’s essential to leverage email marketing. You must segment and micro-segment your email lists and personalize your emails for the best results. When dealing with email outreach on a large scale, it helps to use email automation to engage with your prospects without any manual interference.
Additionally, you should pay attention to email deliverability as it can make or break your campaign. It’s also equally important to conduct market research and analyze the data collected as well to understand your audience. Without doing so, even the best of campaigns can fail.
All of this can seem challenging to implement, but we can help. Get in touch with us and we’ll help you grow your business.
