As companies respond to the changing demands of their customers, one thing has become clear. The B2B buying experience is now digital. 

Your lead generation strategies must adapt if you want to keep pace, and fast. Whatever framework you use to conceptualise your customer journey - be it sales funnel or self-sustaining flywheel -  you need a deep understanding of how customers are interacting with your company. You also need effective, repeatable mechanisms for turning general interest into solid leads. Because without leads, there are no sales.

So, how do you generate leads in a digital first world? What questions do you need to address to create a successful B2B lead generation strategy?

1. How do you attract the right leads?

To answer this first question, you need to go back to marketing 101. You need to know your audience and who your ideal client is so you can target your strategies to meet them where they are.

Lead generation is a numbers game, at least in part. You need a large enough pool of leads to generate the sales you need. However, you can’t just work backwards from the numbers of sales you need based on your existing conversion rate. That might tell you how many leads you need to generate, but it won’t do anything for the efficiency of your marketing operation.

For your sales team to be able to close deals, you need high-quality leads. Bringing in a huge number of low-quality leads for them to sift through is demoralising, a waste of resources, and an administrative nightmare.

In that regard, the fact that buyers prefer to delay their first interaction with your sales team and educate themselves on your offer without their guiding influence is actually great news. 

By refining your customer journey, you create interactions for lead capture, lead nurturing, and lead scoring. As a result, by the time your sales team gets involved, they are focusing their resources on closing deals with qualified leads and ready educated, enthusiastic buyers.

The digital customer journey also creates a wealth of additional data points, helping you to further optimise your marketing efforts and conversion rates.

Look at your existing customers and their route into your business to improve your understanding of your buyers. Create robust, data-led buyer personas, driven by your existing customer intelligence. Use market research to fill in the gaps on your target audience. 

Where can you find them online? What are they reading and talking about? What sort of language do they use in their online interactions? What questions are they searching for answers to on search engines and social media?

Focus your efforts on the platforms they use, rather than attempting a scattergun approach across every platform. Then create awareness and start the conversation through search optimised content and both paid and organic social media.

Quality leads respond to highly targeted messaging that clearly demonstrates you are their kind of company, and can solve the problem they have. The more you know about them, the more chance you have of successfully targeting them.

Your keyword research needs to target what you want to be found for. However, one of your aims should be to find the high intent keywords active buyers are using to research solutions online. If you can target these keywords, you can build campaigns to drive high-quality traffic back to your site. 

Of course, traffic doesn't equal leads unless you capture their contact information. Create lead magnets that answer questions you know they’re asking from your tracking data and analysis, and target calls to action to entice them to sign up. 

Optimise your lead capture landing pages to create a consistent customer experience. From the post, ad or email your lead clicked through from to the design of the lead magnet they receive, everything needs to speak with one voice. 

Use marketing automation solutions to create web pages, landing pages, and email marketing that talks to the concerns of specific segments. Dynamic content will serve lead generation copy and creative that positions your offer to match the needs of each potential customer and improve your conversion rates.

2. What are your lead nurturing and qualification processes?

Generating leads won’t help you to generate sales without knowing two things. 

First, you need to know the markers of high-value clients so you can identify your most promising prospects in the crowd.

Second, you need to have a clear process for nurturing and qualifying leads so you can move them through your sales process and prioritise your most profitable opportunities.

The data you collect as you get to know your potential customers at the awareness and lead capture stages provide a foundation for segmentation. However, this isn’t a one-and-done task. 

As your buyer progresses through the customer journey, you need to continually gather information. Get to know your prospects, and evaluate them throughout. Always keep learning and moving forward. This allows you to segment your potential customers based on what they respond to in terms of services or products and benefits. From here, you can target content and messaging to their preferences.

Imagine meeting a prospect at an in-person event and having a conversation. During that conversation, you're asking questions, seeking to understand their needs and whether your offering is a good fit. Digital marketing gives you the opportunity to do that remotely using content and automation.

Plan what information gaps you need to fill, and what interactions and experiences you can create to achieve that aim. Where do you want them to go on your website? Do you want them to sign up for your newsletter, read case studies, download a report, or participate in an online event? What is the most logical next step on the journey, for them and for you?

The more you know, the more relevant an experience you can give your leads. And the more likely they are to continue to move through your sales funnel and to buy.

Show them content related to what questions they’re asking. Use list segmentation to send them relevant email marketing with offers that suit what they want. It’s about building genuine relationships and connections. Think about ways to delight potential leads and prove to them that you have the solution they need.

As they progress, you track their engagements and conversions across marketing channels. In an integrated marketing automation platform, you can keep track of calls and messages as well as clicks, building a picture of the prospect across the lifetime of the lead.

This information is the basis of your lead scoring system. It is what enables you to identify sales-ready, marketing-qualified leads among a sea of people who are not yet ready to purchase. Agreeing robust lead scoring criteria is what allows your sales team to prioritise their resources and develop relationships with the people most likely to buy.

3. What is the right balance between automation and human activities?

Automation is a boon for marketers, saving time and reducing repetitive tasks, but too much automation can feel fake and put potential customers off. People like to feel like they’re interacting with real human beings, not a piece of software. If they’re a dream client, you can’t afford to get this wrong. You need to get the balance right between automation and human intervention.

There are some things you can automate. Blog posts and social media posting can be scheduled. Email welcome sequences can be triggered by the recipient’s interactions with the content. Event reminders can be sent automatically. 

But your ‘best foot forward’ moments deserve your full attention and the human touch. Your first contact for high-value prospects is a case in point. As are your interactions with an organisation when you’re close to closing the deal.

With LinkedIn, it is possible to automate your outreach although it is against LinkedIn’s terms and conditions and may result in account suspension. But if a business sends identical copy and paste messages on LinkedIn that aren’t targeted or personalised, it does look like spam, because it is!

Instead, you need to focus on doing outreach in a way that creates the foundations for lasting and valuable business relationships. LinkedIn allows you to easily find and target the right contacts in different businesses. While you could automate connection requests and more, it’s here that you need to think if you should.

It is far better to follow companies and the high-value people you want to target. Start to like and comment on their posts and build a relationship. You can then send them an InMail at the right time and introduce yourself to see if there’s any interest in further conversation.

Marketing automation is an excellent tool when used correctly, but it can’t replace proper human contact, and with highly valued leads, it really shouldn’t.

4. How can inbound marketing support outbound?

Inbound and outbound marketing techniques are two sides of the same coin, not things that should be kept entirely separate from each other.

Any form of digital marketing comes with a wealth of data that can be used to refine and target your other strategies. Whether it’s PPC, social media, or content, this data helps to lay the groundwork for outbound marketing, so don’t leave it siloed. 

Content creation, for example, can attract good prospects. You can also use optimised content as part of outbound campaigns. Your inbound team has ready-tested and optimised copy and images. They understand which segments respond to what messaging. Milk that hard-won data for all it is worth.

Content can also be an asset to support the sales team when they’re speaking to and building relationships with customers. You can create content specifically for the sales team, including marketing scripts, lists of benefits, ways to overcome objections, and answers to frequently asked questions.

Being able to track what content people have been looking at throughout the life of each lead also helps your sales teams to prepare for outreach, cold calling, and pitching. 

Marketing automation gathers the data so have insights into what is interesting about your offer to your general audience and segments within it. It also lets you know what is specifically of interest to specific contacts.

Likewise, lead scoring focuses their attention on the best leads. When your sales team do reach out, they can be confident they’re speaking to people who know about your business, the level of knowledge they already have, and that they understand their readiness to buy.

5. What is the process of lead generation, and do our internal workflows support our external efforts?

Businesses now expect that their potential and current suppliers will be available to them as and when they require information and want to communicate during the buying journey. The non-linear path to purchase sees customers moving back and forth between the traditional sales/marketing divisions and marketing’s role extending beyond the point of purchase.

This shift means that organisations now have to scrutinise and rethink their previous ways of doing things. Including fostering greater integration and collaboration between the sales and marketing departments. 

With talent from both disciplines working to create a holistic view of lead generation tactics and lead management, you can create stand out customer experiences. 

We’ve already talked about how marketing can create content that supports and enables the sales team. On the flipside, insights from the sales team can help to shape and inform the marketing team’s content marketing strategy. For example, sales are in a good position to notice content gaps and make suggestions that can help to educate customer. 

With integrated pipeline management, you have the ability to track opportunities, accounts, and individual leads. Pipeline reporting allows sales to see where opportunities are getting stuck along the journey. This gives your teams the ability to put their heads together and reduce friction.

It might mean looking at the sales workflow and implementing automated notifications to prompt engagement and improve follow up times. It might mean improving the customer experience and fixing gaps in the flow of information from marketing.

It needs to be a two-way street, with each team open to suggestions for improvement. Without the internal mechanisms to make sure these two departments can communicate and co-operate, your company will miss out on opportunities.

Formalise the conditions for shared learning. Encourage regular sync meetings and get sales and marketing working together for your customer’s benefit.

Conclusion

It's not about the quantity of leads you get. Ok... it is partly about the quantity of leads you get. But your sales department will thank you a lot more if you focus on quality instead.

Making connections with quality leads and helping them take the next steps through the customer journey is what creates an excellent and easeful customer experience, purchases, and brand advocates. And while things may have changed with the buying journey, ultimately, people still buy from people. They may want to do more online now, but it’s still about making connections and building relationships.

If you’d like to find out more about how digital marketing and automation can make your customer’s experience more human, get in touch.