Top Smart Strategies To Improve Your B2B Leads

In today’s digital world, there is no shortage of tactics or channels for generating B2B leads. Most of the companies are spending more digital marketing dollars now than ever before and they have more data about their prospects than they can digest. Leads are out there, but the problem seems to be identifying high-value leads.

Generating high-quality leads that have the best chance of becoming an actual customer is a major challenge. A report from last year shows that 83% of B2B marketers said that they are focusing more on lead quality over lead quantity. Other problems include long sales cycles and the ability to precisely measure ROI but the main problem is still obtaining enough quality leads.

Let’s first define what a quality lead is. If we look at the overall picture, the main criteria is that an acceptable percentage of leads become sales opportunities and clients as they go through the sales funnel. Basically, quality lead is the one on which it makes sense to spend sales resources and continue to follow up.

Balancing Lead Volume and Quality

Every B2B lead generation campaign involves balancing these two things along with cost. Finding the sweet spot for each business is crucial and you need to always keep trying to improve these metrics.

There are companies with well-established lead programs and large and expert sales teams that focus mostly on lead volume. They are looking to get as many new leads as possible into their sales funnel so their team can start following up and closing them. They usually have large budgets and will continue to fund their lead gen campaigns as long as the cost of leads remains below an acceptable threshold.

Then you have B2B companies that are focusing more on lead quality over quantity. Their budgets are usually more modest and they have limited resources. Because of this, their focus is on improving lead quality while reducing lead cost.

No matter to which group you belong, improving lead quality should be one of your main marketing goals. Here are our best methods to improve the quality of your leads.

Mobile Optimise Your Landing Page

You should be focused on creating a landing page that looks perfect regardless of which device you view it. Your visitors shouldn’t have to zoom to read the text and they shouldn’t have to scroll to find your CTA.

You should carefully weigh every element and word that you use on your landing page because there is very limited space on a mobile device. Every word counts on mobile devices. While longer content can convert better on a desktop, that is not necessarily true for mobile. Did you know that the average session on a mobile phone is only 72 seconds?

You should know in which stage is your lead in the buying cycle and use that information to tailor your landing page. Include necessary info about your offering that will persuade the lead to take action but tries not to cross the line and show them irrelevant and filler content.

Use the “Squint Test”

Designing a landing page can sometimes turn into a complicated process and people end up burying the call to action. When there are too many elements, it’s easy to get lost in all the details on the page. There is a cool trick that will help you know if your page is clear enough and it is the squint test. You can perform it if you just take a step back from the screen and squint your eyes. What this does is it blurs the design and it’ll let you know what element stands out and where the primary focus is.

By doing this quick test, you will instantly notice if your CTA is overpowered by some other element or of something is too big. When you squint, it blurs everything into general shapes and it’s easy to see what is the most important. When performing the test, you should check if your CTA is hard to see or if anything else stands out more. If there is something that is in the way, it’ll just cause confusion for the user.

Add CTA’s to Your Best Content

Adding new content is a great way to get more eyeballs on your website. While you should always be posting new content, you shouldn’t forget to refresh your old existing content because you might be missing out on leads and you don’t even know it.

You should use Google Analytics (or whatever software you are using) and check your past content that is still bringing in traffic. Next, you should examine it and refresh it to keep it up to date. This also includes updating the call to action to a current relevant offer that you have.

You don’t want to keep receiving traffic to content that is outdated or that is linking to an offer that doesn’t exist anymore. Linking to a new current offer will start getting you new leads instantly. Don’t forget to keep the CTA above the fold or pin it to the screens so it scrolls with the viewer.

Does Your Persona Need a Refresh?

Using personas can be very useful, especially when marketers have access to a lot of data about their customers. Using personas will help you organise and humanise that data and provide you a better way of presenting your content. You might think that just because you spent a lot of time creating your persona and getting it right that you never need to update it or change it.

This is a mistake because you have to remember that people aren’t static so your personas shouldn’t be either. Since your personas were developed, some of your customers’ pains, goals, or interests might have changed as well. New technologies might emerge and change the way your customers prefer to interact with your content or some cultural shifts may influence their goals.

As you are interacting with your customers, be sure to gather more information about who they are – their preferred channels, their interests, types of content they like, and why and how they buy. Updating your personas is a great way to ensure that you use this information to your advantage and stay up to date.

So, if you developed a persona but you aren’t seeing the necessary ROI from your marketing, it may be the time to revise it for accuracy. As your business evolves, you’ll reap the benefits of refreshing and revising your personas.

Diversify Your Content Creation

A B2B content strategy is crucial for lead generation. The goal of content is to attract and acquire a defined audience and then drive customer action. When you are creating your B2B content, you should always make sure that your content speaks to the interests of a specific stakeholder in other organisation. You can’t create the same type of content for ones who don’t make the final decision and for CEO’s.

The first thing you should do is to get detailed about the audience that will see your content. A buyer persona will exactly define your ideal user. Take a look at what their engagement cycle looks like as well. You can start tailoring a message and content marketing strategy when you finally understand your customer.

You should also examine your goals as content marketing can serve several purposes. It’ll depend on the actions you want your leads to take and what is your overall goal and it can be prospecting, marketing, PR, sales, etc.

Make Webinars Part of Your B2B Strategy

Webinars are still one of the best ways to generate leads for B2B marketers. Research has shown that up to 40% of webinar attendees usually turn into qualified leads. B2B buyers are highly engaged with webinar content and 44% of respondents in a survey said they spend 30 or more minutes watching a webinar. You can use quizzes and audience polling to help hold attendee’s interest.

Webinars have historically been used at the top of the funnel, but more marketers are also using them throughout the buyer’s journey. They can also be used in a mid- and late-stage of sales conversations.

Webinars can provide relevant and educational information and also address the problems and concerns that your prospects are facing. Not only that, they can also be used to establish your expertise and build your reputation. Webinars have a deeper level of engagement and those leads tend to be warmer.

Analyse and Optimise Your Conversion Rate

Increased traffic won’t help you much unless it converts into actual leads and customers. What’s driving your lead generation campaign is having your visitors perform the desired action when they visit your landing page. Any digital marketer knows that conversions are the lifeblood of lead generation and other marketing campaigns. You run campaigns to get people to opt-in or sign up for your services so improving your conversion rate should be the main goal because you’ll get more bang for your buck.

Don’t get caught in measuring all the metrics like traffic and rankings, but instead, try to actively analyse and improve your conversion rate as that is what drives lead gen and sales. Your sales process, from generating interest to eventually closing the sales is known as your sales funnel. You should focus on identifying weak spots in your funnel and fix them through continuous A/B testing of every element.

SlideShare Is Ideal for B2B Marketing

SlideShare is the largest presentation sharing website on the internet. It has over 60 million visitors a month and most of them are professionals and business owners so it is a perfect platform for B2B content marketing.

When you properly prepare your presentation before you upload it to SlideShare, you should pay close attention to relevant keywords. This will make your presentation show up in related search results very quickly. You can quickly repurpose your old presentation or webinar and start sharing it on SlideShare.

You can use PowerPoint to create slides that look very decent, even if you’re not a graphics expert. Take time to prepare your presentation and make it look good because it’ll stand out. You can also host PDF’s like infographic and white papers so make good use of those. Through SlideShare presentations, you can demonstrate your leadership and authority on the subject. SlideShare decks are very easy to share via social media and you can also embed it on a website, so it is a perfect platform to deliver visual content to your potential leads. 

Identify Marketing and Sales Leads

Lastly, you can make a system for identifying marketing and sales leads to improve the results of your lead generation campaigns. Marketing leads need to be cultivated over time and you need to persuade them. They are usually very qualified leads but they are still in the early stages of the buying cycle and need additional information and selling.

Sales leads are the prospect who will go further in the buying funnel and they are close to making a purchase decision. A sales executive can directly interact with them because they are pre-qualified and have the budget that is needed.

Categorizing the leads in this way will make it way efficient and easier when interacting with them. This way your sales people can dedicate their limited time and resources to only right prospects. 

CONCLUSION

The B2B industry is swimming with competition and a B2B company with a thought out plan will have a huge advantage. You should try to really understand your target buyers so you can develop a brand message to match them.

The best lead generation results will come from an endless willingness to experiment with different methods and to combine them across multiple channels. Only by running experiments, can you truly know what works for you and what doesn’t, and when you finally know this, you can use your budget and time more efficiently to get better returns on your investment and better lead generation results as well.