How to Use Online Campaigns for Successful B2B Lead Generation

Your marketing department wants more leads. Your sales department needs better leads. That’s not guesswork, quantity and quality of leads are cited as the highest priority in The State of Marketing and Sales Alignment 2022 Report.

Unfortunately, sales and marketing having slightly different priorities can create conflict. More does not equal better.

One option for bridging the gap and hitting the mark for both parties could be lead generation ads. Paying allows marketing to take a shortcut to getting their message in front of more people. Targeting gives sales more confidence that you're finding the leads that matter.

Even better, the platforms you're already working with understand both your priorities and those of your potential customers. Ad formats now offer a streamlined experience with forms that pre-populate with customer's details and that put them straight in touch with the right people.

Paid Lead Generation Strategies Complement Inbound Marketing

Often, companies silo online advertising as its own process but, as we've discussed previously, an integrated approach offers more benefits. Lead generation ads complement organic methods, including SEO focused content, lead capture landing pages, and lead magnets.

Inbound marketing should form a central pillar of your marketing strategy, but it is a long-term game. It takes time to build up your online presence and start appearing in search engine results. It takes consistent commitment to attract your audience, get them to engage, and nurture and qualify leads.

Lead generation ads offer the potential for a more immediate payoff. Targeting allows you to do some pre-qualifying. You can target people who are in-market, or who match the profile of your ideal buyer. You can specify your audiences based on lists of existing buyers.

The data you collect from your lead generation ads gives you a firmer foundation to work from at the beginning of the lead nurturing process. From here, you can assess the quality of each lead and build a relationship with them.

The result should be an increase in marketing qualified leads that turn into sales qualified leads, and a higher conversion rate. 

Tips for Successful Lead Generation Ads

We’ll cover some of the most popular platforms, but first here are some best practice tips that work across all platforms:

• Clearly Define Your Lead

• Audience Targeting

• Gather Lead Qualifying Information

• Create a Clear CTA

• Experiment

• Optimise for Mobile

• Integrate with Marketing Automation

Define a High-Quality Lead

The first step you need to take is to bridge the gap between sales and marketing. Get your sales and marketing teams to agree on the criteria that define a sales qualified lead.

This helps marketing to create campaigns and a lead scoring process that gathers information throughout the sales funnel and accurately assesses whether leads are ready to buy. When everyone knows what you're looking for, you can create systems that soft out and hand over only the best leads. 

Audience Targeting

Now you can agree on who you're looking for, you can define your target audience.

Ad platforms allow you to target ads on a wide range of variables. You can use information such as age, sex, income, location, and marital status. For B2B audiences, you can also target ads based on industry, job title, and criteria, such as company size.

Data from existing customers gives you additional information to help you find the people who will be interested in your products and services. As well as re-targeting to stay top of mind with existing contacts, you can expand your reach to 'lookalike' audiences.

Gather Lead Qualifying Information

Closer sales and marketing alignment also helps when you are developing your adverts' lead generation forms. When you know what criteria you need to measure your leads against, you know what information you need to gather.

Filling out long forms can frustrate your audience, especially if they are on a mobile. Many lead generation ad formats address drop-offs by pre-filling fields where they have the information. This makes it more likely that your lead will convert. 

Marketing can help by viewing ads as the beginning of a process. Use ads to gather the most vital information, then design lead nurturing sequences to gather any additional information your sales team needs down the line.

Create a Clear CTA

What action do you want your audience to take? And what's in it for them?

In short, what is your call to action? Do you want them to book a demo? Are they clicking to call a member of your team? Do you want them to sign up to your newsletter or complete an event registration? Make sure that your ad copy communicates the value in providing their information and then tell them how to take the next step.

Being clear on this point is the difference between pay per click ads that convert, and ones that don't.

You don’t have to get too fancy with it. Keep things simple and concentrate on making it easy for your user to say yes.

Experiment

Marketing is one part art, one part science. No matter how much data you gather, there will always be some element of experimentation to find the copy and content that spurs conversion.

Don’t be afraid to try different assets and content to help your brand to stand out. 

AI and machine learning now make creating and managing digital marketing campaigns easier, so take advantage of the opportunity to try new things.

You'll also want to analyse your performance so you can gauge how well different campaigns perform. After a while, you will hone in on what works well for your audience.

Optimise for Mobile

Many of your audience members will reach your ads on their mobile phones. This is a standard across all your digital marketing, but it’s important enough to need repeating.

Make sure that everything is optimised for the mobile user. Pay attention to safe areas for images and text overlays. Make sure your ads read well across all screen sizes.

Integrate with Marketing Automation

Lead gen ads make capturing prospects' information at scale easier, but it's what you do with that data that counts.

Time is of the essence when following up with leads. This makes marketing automation crucial.

Ad platforms offer solutions to integrate buyers' data with your CRM and marketing automation platform. This gives both sales and marketing full visibility of every prospect. 

You can follow up using workflows to deliver relevant content marketing in response to customer interactions and nurture leads through your funnel.

Automation is also vital for sales management, allowing you to trigger follow-up notifications so that members of your team can strike while the iron is hot.

Platforms Offering Lead Generation Ads

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the platform for companies in the B2B space, so this is an ideal space for B2B marketers to start with lead generation ads. Campaigns on LinkedIn benefit from being able to target using the platform's professional demographic data.

LinkedIn’s forms are easy to develop and launch, as well as for your audience to use. Pre-filled information from LinkedIn profiles reduce the barrier to completing and submitting information for your customer, and ensures that you get the most accurate information possible. This data is synced to your own CRM for your team to follow up.

Google Ads

Google offers some fantastic advice to walk you through using their lead generation solutions on Google Ads and YouTube. Their playbook, How to Generate High-Quality Leads with Digital Advertising, walks you through the process. In it, they outline the basic information you need, such as campaign placement and formatting. They also help you understand deciphering the analytics to make use of the data that you can collect through Google.

Meta

Meta offers lead generation ad formats on both Facebook and Instagram. Given the size of the user base on these two platforms, the opportunity is clearly worth examining. Like LinkedIn, Instant Forms for lead generation are pre-filled for ease of use. Delivery optimisation allows you to specify whether you want to prioritise for the volume or quality of leads delivered. You can also connect your CRM to synchronise data. 

TikTok

TikTok for Business offers lead generation objectives that are versatile to use and can be customised for your business. The data can be integrated directly into your CRM to eliminate the need to download or upload data sets. 

Ready to Explore a Paid Lead Generation Strategy?

Online advertising can help you generate high-quality leads at scale, satisfying the priorities of both your sales and marketing departments.

The ad platforms you already use have some great features that create seamless interactions with your buyers. Remove the frustration of having to fill out customer data to improve uptake, and get that data into your CRM! Then, follow up with high-value content and marketing automation to make lead nurturing and qualifying painless.

If you’re considering implementing a new lead generation strategy, or need help with your current process, reach out. We'd love to show you how we can help design effective campaigns, maximise your follow up, and increase your ROI.