Without leads there is rarely any sales. These days especially in the online world there are literally hundreds of different options to try to improve lead generation, but here is a list of some of the most effective and easiest methods to be applied and tried out in your company.
Lead generation by phone – Is cold calling dead in 2022?
The traditional way to do outreach in Business-to-Business (B2) sales is to make cold calling i.e calling to people that usually don’t have any previous engagement with you or your company. To make phone calls is not an especially scalable or effective way to find new customers unless talking about outsourcing calling to a call center or using robocalls that are often fully automated and pre recorded phone messages. These options are usually used by companies that just want to push their product or service everywhere without any intention to create any value to the buyer.
How about good old one-to-one cold calling? For anyone working in B2B whether or not to do cold calling depends on a few important factors. It makes sense to do cold calls if you are working in a region where it is possible to legally acquire direct phone numbers of your potential customers and if your sales strategy is based around one-to-one sales and you know what kind of industries and companies benefit from your product or service. Then cold calling can definitely work. But even then you should always be aware of the competitive landscape of your companys’ and your customers’ industries. If your market is flooded with alternatives and competitors are using cold calling, most likely you will not have the most effective sales process with cold calling unless you have something truly unique and valuable to offer. Never forget developing your offering and positioning yourself!
Lead generation by email marketing – Add value for your customer
Companies that operate on the B2B market can do email marketing more freely than companies that operate on the B2C market. Where B2C markets are strictly ruled by GDPR compliance B2B companies’ representatives can be contacted through email based on their position in the company. Key in well working email marketing lead generation is to segment the audience. When speaking about marketing in 2022 basically any content in any marketing channel needs to be directed to a specific audience. Too common content that is addressed to company representatives in all kinds of positions or companies in different areas of business rarely work. Instead that kind of content is often taken as spam. To get email marketing to generate leads, email should be personalized after the receiver’s needs and engage him so that you are able to carry him on in your sales funnel. Marketing technology (martech) industry is developing fast and there are new solutions coming out all the time to help in creating and distributing personalised emails fast and effectively.
Lead generation with the help of paid online advertising
One of the most important and cost-effective ways to achieve leads for your business no matter being present on B2B or B2C markets, is to do paid advertising online i.e., pay per click (PPC). While talking about pay per click it’s important to understand that it is cost per action (CPA) which is the most important metrics to follow. Lead generation channels that work with pay per click principle make it possible to count the price for one lead since these channels are possible to track. Google Ads, Bing, Facebook and Instagram paid ads, as well as paid advertisement in LinkedIn, Xing, or other similar platforms are all ways to generate leads with the help of paid advertising.
Affiliate marketing in Lead generation
A less known way to do result based lead generation might be affiliate marketing. This is usually very cost effective and a good way to create leads when it comes to B2B businesses. With affiliate marketing you can take advantage of someone else’s potential site visitors or prospect lists and pay the amount that is affordable for your business to pay for each lead.
Using Social media platforms in Lead generation
Being active in social media platforms is a potential way to increase lead volumes. To be successful in this you should find out what platforms your potential customers are using (and in which language!) and concentrate on addressing and reaching your target audience with relevant and useful content instead of reposting someone else’s content.
Content creation as a key to show expertise and increase customer interest towards your services or products
To improve your companys’ ranking in organic search results i.e the non-paid results a user sees when they use search engines such as Google or Bing, one of the most important things is to create enough and relevant content to your audience. If you are able to improve your website ranking to be in the 1st page of search results then you will get more traffic to your website and more enquiries (= inbound leads) from potential customers. Note that there is a difference between writing a good and grammatically correct article and creating a search engine optimised article or other content to get your page ranking improved. To find out more about this, be in touch with our Marketing Operations lead Iina Lehtonen, her contact information is at the end of this article.
Create attractive online events to attract potential customers
One of the most cost effective and scalable ways to generate leads is the use of online events such as webinars to make your potential customers aware and interested in your offering. If your company is selling software then this approach is definitely one of the best ones! In software business online events can easily be targeted to both budget responsible people as well as potential end users.
Use chatbot or online chat service on your website and in your software
The more traffic your website has the more important it is to be available to engage with website visitors when they are on your website. This applies also to software companies that want to make customer service a competitive advantage in their industry. One of the easiest ways to do this is to apply the use of chatbots to answer most common questions 24/7. For more complex questions it’s good to have a trained online customer service team that can help potential customers and software users live via online chat and have them available at least on those times when there are most visitors or users online.
Aktive Revenue Operations – Growth as a service
Aktive provides Marketing, Sales and Product Led Growth Operations as a Service to B2B software companies. Marketing and Sales Operations focuses on top of funnel and opportunity creation. Product Led Growth focuses on improving try to buy conversions, churn prevention and user retention development.
With us your company gets resources, processes, tools and know-how in one package. We help you to plan and execute successful Revenue Growth models that improve your growth metrics!
Want to know more about lead generation and how it could be improved in your case?
Contact me and let’s talk more!
Marketing Operations Lead at Aktive Revenue Operations.