Imagine you are coming back to your apartment after an exhausting day at work. You cannot wait to head inside and gorge on that pack of ice cream you bought the other day. Your door is locked, and you rummage through your collection of keys to identify the right one. After a series of unsuccessful attempts and frustration kicking in, you finally find the one that clicks and unlock the door. You enter inside looking considerably cranky from the wasted time.
What can we infer from this scenario?
If only you had just the one key at hand that you know is the right one, you could have entered your apartment much sooner and be enjoying that ice cream, right?
This imaginary situation is an example of how B2B lead generation works.
WHAT IS B2B LEAD GENERATION?
B2B Lead Generation is a marketing strategy that refers to the process of identifying potential customers who might have expressed interest in your product or service and initiating contact to attract them into investing in your business, thereby producing profitable revenue. In simple terms, it is a process that helps convert prospects, who are called leads, into clients, with the motive of generating revenue.
Considered a must-know for marketing professionals and B2B companies, lead generation is essentially the backbone of any B2B marketing campaign.
HOW IMPORTANT IS B2B LEAD GENERATION FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
It is no news that all businesses need a consistent group of clients to sustain themselves and eventually grow. Without a well-devised strategy, identifying the target audience and understanding their needs would be a tough nut for businesses to crack. Consequently, growing your business would go out of the equation. This concern is what generating quality leads aims to resolves.
Generating leads will help distinguish those customers who are a step away from buying your product from those simply browsing through and those with absolutely no interest. By pursuing those who fall under the latter two categories, your business faces a possibility of reaching a dead-end at the cost of losing valuable company resources, similar to an attempt at opening a lock with a key that does not fit.
However, the former category of people is the one you will hit the jackpot with, the key that fits the lock. These are prospects who require just a little nudge in the right direction, and they will be your customer in no time.
Generating and nurturing these leads falls under two primary areas of growth: marketing and sales.
MARKETING:
- Lead generation helps identify your ideal customer base and develop products or services that better fit their requirements and is valuable to them.
- It assists in building brand awareness by framing targeted and tailor-made solutions that fulfill market needs and generate visibility among a wider audience.
- It helps develop a dedicated marketing system to predict, measure and track all campaign activities and make adjustments wherever necessary.
SALES:
- Lead generation helps map out the total proportion of the market that would respond positively to your sales pitch.
- Its most distinguishing feature is ensuring that all the leads you will be contacting are up-to-date and are still interested in hearing your pitch.
- By providing data on those most likely to buy your products, lead generation enables salespeople to close deals faster and substantially increase the conversion rate.
MUST-HAVE LEAD GENERATION TOOLS:
For its many advantages, lead generation does require marketers to invest a lot of time, effort, and other resources into the process to pull it off. As if that was not enough, even the smartest of strategies might sometimes not yield desired results. At this juncture, one might wonder: Where am I going wrong? What am I not seeing?
Well, here’s the good news: some tools exist to make your work simpler and your business more profitable. These tools generate quality leads, monitor your marketing strategy, and are called lead generation tools.
Affording to lose resources is not a luxury a business can afford. But with lead generation tools, your strategies are automated, thereby providing you time to shift your focus towards campaign development.
A valuable lead generation tool ticks the following boxes:
- Simple to use and run campaigns
- Ability to integrate with existing marketing tools
- Value for money and cost-efficiency
- Beneficial in achieving the goals of your campaigns
Those tools that fulfill the criteria are further classified based on the lead generation type. These include:
- Inbound tools: to drive traffic to your website
- Outbound tools: to source for and contact leads via mediums of communication
- CRO tools: to increase the number of leads that qualify for sales
- Email marketing tools: to engage prospects via attention-grabbing email campaigns and catchy headlines
- Search marketing tools: to increase on-site traffic via paid and organic searches
HOW TO EFFECTIVELY USE LEAD GENERATION TOOLS:
There is a wide range of free lead generation tools out there waiting to be of service to boost your business. All you need to do is identify the ones most relevant to your business, learn how to use them, and start bringing in clients.
The following tools are categorized based on their field of usage for easier understanding:
TOOLS FOR FINDING PROSPECTS:
- FindThatLead: Just entering a company’s domain name will fetch you all the emails necessary to contact them.
- LinkedInSalesNavigator: The free Chrome extension provides insights into those with whom you have been communicating.
- Discoverly: Finds the Facebook profile and work details of your leads.
TOOLS FOR CAPTURING LEADS:
- Sumo: Effectively converts your site visitors into customers.
- HubSpot: Helps track how a lead came to your site and finds their social media profiles, job information, and more.
TOOLS FOR EMAIL AUTOMATION:
- Mailchimp: A popular and easy-to-use software to send newsletters.
- HubSpot: Setting an SMTP server is made easy with this tool.
- Boomerang: Sends regularly scheduled emails to your leads.
The tools mentioned above are only a drop in an ocean of automation software. However, no matter how many of these get developed, the success of your business lies in using them efficiently.
So, we will conclude by telling you this: lead generation is a savior in your quest towards growth, so savour it and gain that edge against your competitors!