Successful lead generation is the lifeblood of your company's financial wellbeing. Without a solid strategy in place to attract and nurture quality leads for your sales team to develop into new business, you cannot grow your business.

Professional service businesses relying on traditional lead generation methods such as cold calling and networking are struggling because the nature of the B2B buying journey has changed. Purchasing decisions are increasingly made by teams within organisations, with the evaluation stage dominated by a self-led exploration of the issues and options. This demands a digital-first approach, using marketing automation technology to detect buying signals, simplify the buying process across multiple channels and enables B2B buyers to complete the tasks they need to do in order to make a purchase decision. Because buying decisions are teams-based, it makes sense to adopt Account-Based Marketing best practices.

In addition, you might be struggling to make sense of what seems to be conflicting information about digital marketing. Use keywords, but don't keyword stuff. Don't be salesy but demonstrate your value. Use paid ads but try to grow organically. With all of these contradictions, how can you make decisions that will benefit your business? Let’s start at the beginning.

Search optimised content is the foundation of a digital- first lead generation strategy 

Your ideal customer is searching online for answers to their questions every day. Whether your services are in advertising, branding, HR, management consultancy or accountancy; every single query entered on search engines and social media is an opportunity to connect with your target audience. 

In order to be found and have the chance to make that connection, your firm needs to be creating search optimised content that provides authoritative, comprehensive answers to those questions. And as visitors read the content you provide on your website and social media profiles; they can decide whether your company is a good fit for their needs.

Firms whose businesses are based on the value of their expertise and advice often focus their content marketing strategy on highlighting the benefits their customers enjoy. Case studies and portfolio pieces illustrating outcomes are common, but when people are making a decision on which supplier to hire, your experience and knowledge is only one side of the equation. 

You might be an multi award-winning agency, but if you don’t focus on helping your potential customer understand their problem and why you are part of the solution, you’re likely to struggle to attract and engage quality leads. Your content needs to communicate not only what your expertise is, but why your expertise is different and how it is relevant to the specific problems they are facing.

Content includes a wide range of formats. It’s the social media posts and videos you put up on a daily basis. It’s also blog posts or thought leadership articles that help communicate information to a party searching for information. It also plays a vital role in getting people to sign up to receive further content marketing material.

Think of it as the method by which you build trust, demonstrate value and create a relationship with people. The process starts with search optimised content. It intensifies through social media and email marketing, and the data you gather as the relationship develops is what solidifies the opportunity and prompts one-on-one outreach.

However, while having effective content is vital for generating leads for your business to grow, it’s not lead generation in and of itself.

Content creation alone is not lead generation

It’s possible that an amazing piece of thought-leadership can create immediate opportunities. More often that kind of content is more top-of-funnel. People tend to go a bit deeper into your offer and explore more before making contact. Professional services firms therefore need to create content for each stage of a client journey, matching the client’s intent at each stage. For lead generation to occur, specific attention needs to be given to how you can use content to get people to opt-in to receive more information from you.

When you’re building on a solid foundation of valuable content designed to build connection and trust, it's much easier to get people to opt in. This is the crux of permission-based marketing. 

Having primed your audience to expect quality content from your channels, the next step is lead capture. Whether you entice interested prospects to a landing page designed for their specific interests and that provides a compelling reason and call to action, or use specific lead gen ad formats on social media, the aim is for them to give you their contact details.

In either case, that point of exchange - when a visitor fills out your lead capture form because they want your lead magnet (access to a webinar or another virtual event, a white paper or piece of original research) – is when lead generation occurs.

From there you have the opportunity to continue nurture the relationship, with the aim of getting quality leads to make an appointment and, ultimately, convert to a sale. Tactics such as personalised drip email campaigns and retargeting ads to promote relevant content helps you to do this at scale.

This is what provides the customer intelligence to help to home in on their precise requirements. It is also a key source of lead scoring data that tells you if they’re a lead worth pursuing, as well as when they’re ready for one-to-one outreach.

Use social media to build quality relationships

When a customer makes a decision to purchase, it's often based on an interaction they've had on your social media profiles and pages. They'll look at how you've responded to other customer's concerns. They'll check reviews to see how you've performed for other customers and similar information. It's only after that point that they make the decision to purchase from your company.

If you're not using social media effectively, it can have a detrimental effect on your company's ability to generate leads, so make sure you're touching base with your social media audience on a regular and consistent basis.

LinkedIn

Just as important as having content available and a consistent presence is focusing on which platforms you’re using. You can have a great Twitter or Facebook account and never generate any leads. Why? Because you're reaching the wrong audience.

These social media platforms can be great for B2C marketing, and even some B2B firms. However, for a more reliable outcome for your professional services business, look to business-based social media platforms such as LinkedIn or Quora.

LinkedIn can help you gain ground quickly when you include it as a major part of your lead generation and content marketing strategy. Concentrating your resources here allows you to target a tightly focused business audience, rather than everyone in the world. 

You can use LinkedIn for both organic growth as well as paid advertising opportunities. LinkedIn's Lead Generation Forms provide you with tools to encourage viewers to provide you with their information. It also includes analytics, customisation and similar features to help you grow your business with quality leads. LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities also helps you reach exactly the right people and control the quality of the leads you generate through the platform.

You can also use the B2B social media platform to build relationships, prospect for leads and follow-up opportunities. 

While there are an incredible number of tools promoted online that allow you to create and run automated workflows for prospecting, outreach and connection, most of them go against LinkedIn’s terms of service which forbids automated messaging. If you’re caught using them you’re likely to face sanctions, such as a ban, and damage your standing. 

However, the actions those pieces of software enable are the right way to go about building relationships on the platform at scale. And there are ways of using LinkedIn for more targeted mass communication that can keep the conversation and lead to a more personal relationship, without breaking the T&Cs and running the risk of a ban. For example, you can use InMail to send promoted messages and retarget specific groups of people who have visited your website with ads to promote organic content that keeps you top of mind.

Being able to automate parts of the process means you can focus on high-value prospects. You can use the leads you've gained to go from a one-to-many to a one-to-one approach. This allows you to form a personal connection with the prospect, which increases conversion rate.

Because sometimes there really is no substitute for the personal touch. You might want to reach out when you know someone is actively researching your company or close to making a purchasing decision. They might be from one of your high-value target accounts or an industry influencer. Having that information at your fingertips allows you to be smart about how you use LinkedIn for social selling. 

Marketing automation that tracks the interactions your leads have with your company online gives you the information you need to be smart about how you allocate resources on LinkedIn. Automated lead scoring can tell you when your marketing qualified leads are ready for additional outreach. For example: 

• Engaging with their content by visiting their profile and liking or commenting on their posts. 

• Sending a contact request, if appropriate.

• 1-to-1 messenger outreach to make an introduction once you’re more familiar to them.

• Using LinkedIn messenger to send messages to people’s in-box. If they’re interested and they respond, you’re in a position to start to build a personal relationship. 

• Using messaging to share relevant info 1-to-1, such as inviting them to visit a landing page or book an appointment based on their browsing history.

From One to Many, to One to One

Understanding the process from start to finish makes it easier to understand how you can apply a content driven lead generation strategy to develop your professional services business. It helps your marketing team balance its lead generation campaigns and focus resources. The aim is to provide your customers with high-quality, relationship building content, while at the same time providing sales with qualified, high-value leads. 

If you'd like to find out how creative content, marketing automation and savvy social media can combine to generate a steady stream of leads for your business, we'd love to show you what's possible with the right tools. Book a demo to discover what we can do for you.