B2B Lead Generation Strategies in 2021

If you’re marketing your product or service to other businesses, you already know that B2B lead generation is not easy. When talking about selling to business-to-business customers, usually this means dealing with a whole company or a team. Furthermore, business purchasing decisions often go through several phases and need the approval of different decision-makers and stakeholders. It’s a more complex and longer sales process with many unknowns along the way.

Creating the perfect buyer personas can also be challenging as your goal is to offer a solution to a specific business need by targeting the right person in the organization. Sounds tricky?

And it’s not enough to get just any leads. A top priority for B2B marketers is to win high-quality ones. With a good digital marketing strategy in place, you can capture the right people with the highest potential of converting them into your clients.

In this article, we will walk you through some B2B lead generation strategies you can use in the upcoming 2021 to stay ahead of the competition.

1. Improve the UX & Interactivity on Your Website

Nobody wants to land on a boring website with static content that is hard to navigate, right? Optimizing your website and landing pages is crucial for engaging new visitors who find your business organically via search or a referral. Your goal is to capture the user’s attention and his data, so make sure there are no distractions on your pages and the browsing experience is smooth.

You can improve the UX and increase the engagement by creating interactive pages that spark the user’s actions. Include different lead magnets with call to action buttons, so you provide visitors with varied options to opt-in.

Properly placed lead generation forms on different places across your website increase the chances of capturing leads. Make sure your forms are responsive and functioning properly on all devices.

You can use different types of content such as:

• Infographics
• Quizzes
• Interactive eBooks
• Calculators
• Surveys or polls
• Case studies
• Virtual reality

By answering questions, filling out forms, exploring content in an interactive way, your leads will become engaged in activities that will spark interest in your brand. Test different formats and see which one works best for your business.

2. Tailor Your Email Marketing Campaigns

No one can deny the power of email marketing in the B2B world. Let’s look at the numbers:

• 59% of B2B marketers prefer email for lead generation.
• Email is 40% better at converting leads in comparison with some social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
• 40% of B2B marketers claim that email newsletters are the most important tactic in their marketing strategy.

If you are an established business that targets other businesses, you probably already have email marketing campaigns in place. But are you making the most of them?

The great thing about email marketing is that you get to decide when you interact with your leads. Moreover, once a subscriber joins your list, you can monitor their behaviour and activity like open rate, link clicks or else. This can provide you with additional data to create segments and develop custom campaigns and approaches for each of them based on certain criteria.

Nowadays marketers use different software tools like customer relationship management (CRM) platforms that allow them to collect detailed information. They also assist in managing relations with clients and prospects. Combined with the power of email marketing, these tools provide you with options to make your email campaigns more personalized and build custom templates. You can send unique messages tailored to customers’ needs or based on their behaviour on your website.

In other words, you have more information to use in email marketing campaigns and experiment with. You can also run A/B tests with different templates to see which variant performs better and ensure you’re using the right approach.

3. Attract Leads with Useful Resources

Before you capture and convert those leads, you need to educate them. Business prospects love learning new things and expanding their knowledge. You can take advantage of this and create eBooks, whitepapers or other educational resources on topics that are important to your industry.

On one hand, you will position yourself as an expert in your niche and increase your authority. On the other, you will add fresh leads to your list. Usually, such learning resources are free, but in order to download or access them, users are required to provide personal data like a name and an email. Once they agree to submit their information, you can use it for your marketing campaigns.

Some examples of useful resources you can create are:

• eBooks and how-to guides provide in-depth expert content on a particular topic that targets people based on a stage of the buying funnel. You can create your ebook around a certain keyword that you want to target or a pain point that your persona is experiencing.
• Market reports and statistics that are important for your niche. Do your own research or hire an agency to do it for you. Use the obtained data and insight to create an interesting report with data visualizations and put it together in a pdf or other format that is easy to read.
• Free webinars are always a great way to attract new leads or engage with current. These online events are perfect if you want to share your expertise and educate your audience on a particular topic that is trending or important in your niche.

It’s an interactive format that allows users to ask questions in real time and get answers. It’s also great to capture new leads, because signing up for access requires customer data. Webinars are typically hosted by company representatives and putting a face to the brand builds trust and credibility.

Make sure you market these educational resources with a special campaign and beautifully designed landing pages with lead magnets.

4. Create Pillar Articles in Your Blog

Turning your company blog into a learning section is an old, but good practice that always works when getting leads. You can create pillar articles on certain topics that would be useful for your customers. This means compiling a collection of website content on a particular topic that you’ve covered in several articles.

These are usually built around a certain long-tail keyword that prospects may use in their searches. If done properly, pillar articles can help you improve your rankings and thus increase the potential to generate more leads organically.

Such large pieces are great for embedding short lead generation forms and CTA buttons. Make sure your design is simplistic and fits in naturally within the content. Also, don’t forget to position the form in hot locations – you must have it at least at the top, middle, and bottom of the page.

This gives your visitors a chance to opt-in if they like your content, without being intrusive. It will also ensure that these leads are more qualified, meaning more likely to convert, so you can approach them in a special way.

5. Increase Your Video Marketing Budget

According to the psychologist of consumer behaviour Nathalie Nahai the video is “the closest approximation people have to real life”. This makes it an effective way to communicate with your future customers and drive attention to your brand. It also boasts marketing potential.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that by 2022 experts predict video will account for 82% of total internet traffic according to Cisco Annual Internet Report (2018–2023). The online video tool Wyzowl surveyed 656 unique respondents and shared the following video marketing insights:

• Online video marketing is used by 81% of respondents, a 21% increase from 2016.
• Nearly all businesses that are using video will continue using it in 2021 and 85% plan to increase their video marketing budgets
• On average, prospects watch 1.5 hours of online video per day.

To impress your B2B leads you can incorporate videos into your homepage or campaign landing pages. Here you can choose between different types based on your business and available resources. You can create animated explainer short movies on a particular topic using motion graphics software and add an end screen with a call to action. If you want to improve your brand awareness and recognition, you can hire professionals to shoot a corporate video.

It’s another way to increase your company’s visibility and win over new prospects naturally by giving them the opportunity to explore your business from the inside.

Wrapping up

Having a strong lead generation strategy in place is essential for growing a successful business. Make sure you constantly improve and upgrade your strategy to make it more attractive and engaging, especially for new prospects.

Moreover, introducing video or interactive elements to your website will future-proof your digital marketing plan and allow you to stay ahead of your competitors.