How can you bring in new business? It’s a question businesses have to constantly ask themselves. You want to reach new customers, but how are you even supposed to identify prospects, let alone reach them?
This is where digital marketing excels.
A digital marketing strategy can help identify and generate appropriate leads. By attracting potential customers online, you encourage them to come to you. Once a prospect has indicated their interest in your product or service in some way, they become a lead. Exactly what qualifies as a lead depends on your own lead scoring model. This is a process where you assign a score to your leads, this can be done by scoring characteristics such as industry, location and job title. The score of your lead then tells you your leads' probabilistic buying intention - the higher the score the more likely they are to buy.
The beauty of lead generation is that you already know that this prospect is interested in your product or service. You can then focus on nurturing that lead, personalising your communication with them. You can send them relevant content that will hopefully guide them down the sales funnel until they make a purchase.
Below we have outlined some channels you can use in your digital marketing to generate leads.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a great way to attract appropriate prospects and guide them into becoming leads. To generate leads through content marketing, you need to craft relevant and engaging content, make it available online for free, and ideally push it out on different channels where it can reach potential customers.
Obviously, your content should be as relevant and useful as possible to the people seeking your products or services. Think about what concerns your customers have, and how you can assuage them. Providing this content has the added benefit of demonstrating your business’s expertise and adding to your credibility, which in turn will have a positive effect on your online visibility and ranking in search.
CONTENT THAT IS GOOD FOR LEAD GENERATION:
- Well-researched, informative blogs and infographics with CTAs
- Gated long-form content such as guides, reports, ebooks, or whitepapers
You should include a CTA on your content to guide your lead through the marketing funnel, CTA's allow viewers to interact with your business further by inviting readers to contact you or provide extra information at this point. Or the CTA could drive to a relevant landing page where you can encourage website visitors to provide contact details for your mailing list.
With longer-form content, you can ask users to provide an email address directly in order to download the content. People will generally be happier to provide personal information knowing they are getting extensive, free, quality content in return.
TIPS FOR OPTIMISING CONTENT FOR LEAD GENERATION:
- Consider what your customers are searching in high volumes, and ensure your blogs and articles fulfil the intent of search queries.
- Write articles targeting the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the sales funnel.
- Build a resource library.
- Ensure your content is mobile friendly.
- Optimise your content for search engines by doing thorough keyword research and link building, working on your metadata, and improving website’s speed.
- Push out your content strategically and across multiple channels.
Paid advertising
Paid advertising is another great way to generate leads. You pay to put an ad online targeted to your customer profiles, to attract their attention, and when a user clicks on your advertisement, you know they are interested in what you are selling. You now have a lead you can nurture, warming them up to your business, and hopefully guiding them down the sales funnel.
Advertising on Google or social media makes use of enormous data sets, so it is highly targeted. This means you’re only paying for your ads to appear in front of demographics that are interested in your products or services. Digital advertising is also very trackable, so you can gain a wealth of data on when and how users engage with your ads and qualify as leads.
WAYS OF USING PAID ADVERTISING TO GENERATE LEADS:
- Create ads on social media promoting a sales offer or an event organised by your brand.
- Build a re-marketing ad highlighting a special limited offer for targeting marketing qualified customer lists.
- Target sales-qualified leads with hyper-targeted Google ads.
TIPS FOR OPTIMISING ADS FOR LEAD GENERATION:
- Do your keyword research.
- Create unique, quality landing pages that deliver on search queries.
- Use customer profiles to target prospective customers carefully.
- Utilise good tracking methods so you have data on your leads.
- Follow up with a re-marketing campaign.
Social media
Social media is another brilliant, and often underutilised, B2B marketing channel for generating leads. You can attract potential customers online with engaging content and demonstrated expertise with both organic social media content and engagement, and paid advertising. Their social nature also makes social platforms ideal for leveraging client recommendations.
GOOD WAYS OF USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO GENERATE LEADS:
- Regularly share branded content to familiarise yourself to prospective customers.
- Demonstrate expertise with blogs with CTAs that address customer pain points.
- Share gated content.
Social media advertising allows for very careful industry targeting for B2B marketers. On LinkedIn, for instance you can specify the job title, industry and experience of users to whom your ads appear in great detail. This ensures your content gets in front of the people it should. Quality social content, careful targeting, and clear CTAs are an excellent recipe for generating high quality, engaged leads.
GOOD WAYS OF USING SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING TO GENERATE LEADS:
- Make use of lead generation forms.
- Sponsor your high quality gated content.
- Create targeted ads with special offers.
- Set up retargeting ads.
Social media can be a brilliant channel for generating new leads, as well as offering support to existing customers. But, on the flip side, poorly-managed, forgotten and abandoned social media accounts can damage your brand image. If prospective new customers see inconsistent content, or interact with you without a response, they might get frustrated. This means it is important that you actively manage your social media so that the first impression you make on prospective leads is a good one.
TIPS FOR OPTIMISING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA FOR LEAD GENERATION:
- Make sure your social profiles have consistent and up-to-date information about your business, and working links to your website.
- Make sure your social profiles have a consistent visual style and tone.
- Ensure your social content offers solutions to your customers’ pain points.
- Post relevant and timely content to enhance brand awareness and boost website traffic.
- Always engage with your audience through comments or messages.
To learn more about social media strategies read our article ‘How to get started with your B2B social media strategy.
Email marketing
There’s no doubt that email is the dominant form of communication in the business world. That’s why the email newsletter, routinely bringing in the highest ROIs, is one of the most important weapons in the B2B marketer’s arsenal, and why good old email marketing is still the best way to nurture qualified leads.
Individual contact details, even within organisations, fall under GDPR. This means that you must process perspectives’ data according to GDPR regulations and you should only send emails to leads where there is legitimate interest, or who have opted in to communications.
When it comes to generating leads, you can use email to care for your existing client relationships and encourage your existing customers to promote your brand. This way, loyal customers can generate leads for you. Email is the best channel for this. You can include referral discounts, benefits or coupons in your email for further encouragement, or develop more sophisticated referral or ambassador programs if it suits your business.
Once you have qualified leads, email marketing is an ideal way to follow up with very targeted, personalised content. You should carefully consider the journey of your lead, and only present them with content that is tailored to their interests and stage in the sales funnel. This is particularly important in B2B marketing, where you see much longer sales cycles. Business customers usually need to be nurtured through a lengthier journey of research and decision-making.
GOOD WAYS YOU CAN USE EMAIL MARKETING IN YOUR LEAD NURTURING PROCESS:
- Send offers, updates, and content to your prospecting audience.
- Build a strong customer relationship with marketing qualified leads by offering valuable content.
- Offer value-driven bottom of the funnel content to sales qualified leads.
TIPS FOR OPTIMISING YOUR EMAIL MARKETING FOR LEAD GENERATION:
- Keep mailing lists up to date and always ensure you are GDPR compliant.
- Tailor email journeys carefully to your lead’s demonstrated interests.
- Design different content for each stage of the sales funnel.
- Automate your email marketing campaigns.
Start generating leads today
The most successful digital marketing strategies are the ones that include an array of different channels and methods for generating leads. This way, you can put your business in front of the most prospective customers you can.
If you are interested in finding out more about how digital marketing can generate leads for you, contact us or email us at hello@codemilk.co.uk
