Introduction
Just as you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, you can't have customers if your leads haven't progressed through your sales funnel.
Your ability to convert leads (your conversion rates), which are the lifeblood of any business, depends on your ability to attract them in the first place. As such, racking up the numbers of converted customers equally means keeping up with the numbers game that is lead generation.
However, for many entrepreneurs this is the most difficult step in customer acquisition. Investing massive amounts in budget or advertising campaigns is not ideal, and with the fierce competition in today's digital marketplace, you can still get leads naturally.
Digital marketing plays a huge role in this, as it helps you attract a good number of digital eyeballs and places your business in front of your target audience. Through promotional efforts, you can accumulate more interested leads that convert into buyers, which significantly increases your bottom line.
With these marketing techniques, you can significantly accelerate your lead generation engine ahead of the competition.
In this post, we examine 5 of them:
How to generate leads for the B2B sector.
Creating gated content and lead generation forms - Legal
A foolproof marketing technique to increase lead generation is to create and publish gated content. Today, search engines like Google are a constant variable in the customer acquisition funnel, with up to 81% of consumers searching for products and services they are interested in before purchasing them.
When firms perform these searches on Google, having your gated content (whether blog posts, webinars, videos, white papers or infographics) on the first page of search engine results (SERP) instantly puts you at the front of the race for leads.
Companies in the legal industry can find this particularly useful. For example, closed white papers on recent developments in contract law, given the realities produced by COVID-19, would put prospects interested in this topic straight to the top of your sales funnel.
By inserting your sign-up form, you can capture leads as your readers indicate their intent to subscribe to your professional service (think about scheduling a discovery/strategy call), thus qualifying them as new prospects. Your marketing team, or yourself, can take it from here and intervene to convert them into buyers at the bottom of your sales funnel.
Newsletter forms are also an easy way to acquire leads. Efficy Marketing allows you to create newsletter form templates to keep your website consistent and save you valuable time you would have otherwise wasted in the editor.
Social Media Engagement/Influencer Marketing - Insurance
Social media is undeniably a vital pillar of today's digital economy. Globally, we spend an average of up to two and a half hours on social media platforms. And this figure varies widely. In the more mature economies of Europe, potential customers spend a significant amount of time in front of the screen.
That's a lot of valuable hours in which your marketing efforts can generate quality leads! This can be especially valuable for companies in the insurance industry.
Not many people really understand how insurance works or what insurance options are available to them. Engaging them directly on social media to educate them is one way to generate leads. Since you are only interacting with people who have registered some interest in knowing how insurance works, they are likely to seek you out for your professional services.
There are a number of strategies you can choose to adopt or combine. You can drive organic engagement by using social media accounts on behalf of the company. This allows you to interact with your audience: directly introduce them to your product and receive honest feedback.
With a content marketing calendar like ours, you can introduce a time in your content strategy that coincides with when your target audience is most active. Are you too busy? You can also hire social media companies to promote your posts to a much wider audience than you have.
Another marketing technique is to pay influencers to generate buzz. Influencers have already built a certain level of popularity and credibility with your target audience. They can be anyone from real industry participants to commentators and critics.
By bringing them on board, you'll be leveraging their credibility and the existing trust of their audience to spread the word. Our technology stack of marketing solutions also includes social marketing tools designed to help you get the best results from your social media marketing efforts. You can learn more here.
Website optimization, persuasive calls to action - Logistics and transport sector
Your website is one of the first paths leading to your customer acquisition funnel; you can't afford not to optimize it. Every element of your website must be designed to guide visitors to conversion from the moment they land on your landing page.
You can talk about optimization until you're blue in the face, but if your website isn't responsive and mobile-friendly (especially at a time when, according to Statista, mobile devices generate 54.4% of global web traffic), you'll lose valuable leads. Your calls to action are also a vital part, whether it's subscribing to newsletters, downloading an e-book or something else.
Your calls to action should be as short, obvious and persuasive as possible, especially since attention spans are the lowest they've ever been. If your business focuses on the logistics industry, for example, you can't expect truck drivers to have the patience to read five-paragraph calls to action.
Potential customers are likely to find you through a search engine. Therefore, if your website is difficult to use or navigate, they will quickly go to a competitor's website.
Webinars - Health
Webinars are a great way to educate potential customers about your products or services and help them make an informed decision about whether or not to do business with you. They are also a great platform for building relationships with potential customers and establishing yourself as an industry expert.
To get started, you'll need to decide on a topic that is of interest to your target audience, and then create a presentation that is informative and engaging.
Then you can promote it to your target audience by sending out email invitations, posting on social media, and running ads. Be sure to include a link to the registration page in all your promotional materials and make the registration process simple and straightforward.
Before the event, you can send sequential emails to remind potential registrants. And on the day of the webinar, your presentation should be packed with valuable, useful and relevant content.
For after the webinar, Efficy Marketing's powerful email tool includes segmentation features that allow you to select a list of registrants who did not attend to send them emails about future webinars (or links to recorded content or slides from the webinar) and another separate list of people who attended to follow up with a thank you email (also include additional resources or information you promised to send during the webinar).
Healthcare professionals (pharmacies, healthcare organizations, insurers, medical equipment suppliers, etc.) will find this particularly useful, as webinars are often a good way to network and forge strategic partnerships with other non-competing companies in the value chain, generating leads in the process.
In addition, since members of these audiences are likely to already be involved in the industry, your chances of converting them into customers are significantly higher.
A/B Testing - Software Industry
A/B testing is one of the most powerful marketing techniques in any digital marketer's handbook. Why? Because different people in your audience will likely react differently to your calls to action and other elements of your marketing message and products.
A/B testing allows you to get hard data on which variations of your calls to action and other elements of your marketing work best with your audience. This is particularly important for companies in the software industry.
It also gives you real-time information about your customers' desires and preferences, allowing you to customize your messages, change your calls to action or modify other elements of your marketing campaign as needed. With this marketing technique, you will see an increase in lead generation (and conversion) rates.
Drive Lead Generation with Efficy Marketing
It should come as no surprise that some B2B companies have more success with certain marketing techniques than others. For example, lawyers can increase their lead acquisition with content marketing instead of social media marketing. Simply embrace key strengths as you evaluate your clients' behaviors.
Since these different marketing techniques require different sets of tools to implement correctly, the best option is to have a cross-functional marketing automation solution. This way, you'll avoid juggling (and paying for) multiple services. With Efficy Marketing, you have a highly customizable, flexible and easy-to-use platform with in-depth data to help you analyze and leverage customer behavior.
With over a decade of experience helping multiple clients meet and exceed their digital marketing goals, Efficy has everything you need to help you reach yours. Our stack includes a suite of tools and features that will change your marketing experience completely. Why not book a demo now?
Just as you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, you can't have customers if your leads haven't progressed through your sales funnel.
Your ability to convert leads (your conversion rates), which are the lifeblood of any business, depends on your ability to attract them in the first place. As such, racking up the numbers of converted customers equally means keeping up with the numbers game that is lead generation.
However, for many entrepreneurs this is the most difficult step in customer acquisition. Investing massive amounts in budget or advertising campaigns is not ideal, and with the fierce competition in today's digital marketplace, you can still get leads naturally.
Digital marketing plays a huge role in this, as it helps you attract a good number of digital eyeballs and places your business in front of your target audience. Through promotional efforts, you can accumulate more interested leads that convert into buyers, which significantly increases your bottom line.
With these marketing techniques, you can significantly accelerate your lead generation engine ahead of the competition.
In this post, we examine 5 of them:
How to generate leads for the B2B sector.
Creating gated content and lead generation forms - Legal
A foolproof marketing technique to increase lead generation is to create and publish gated content. Today, search engines like Google are a constant variable in the customer acquisition funnel, with up to 81% of consumers searching for products and services they are interested in before purchasing them.
When firms perform these searches on Google, having your gated content (whether blog posts, webinars, videos, white papers or infographics) on the first page of search engine results (SERP) instantly puts you at the front of the race for leads.
Companies in the legal industry can find this particularly useful. For example, closed white papers on recent developments in contract law, given the realities produced by COVID-19, would put prospects interested in this topic straight to the top of your sales funnel.
By inserting your sign-up form, you can capture leads as your readers indicate their intent to subscribe to your professional service (think about scheduling a discovery/strategy call), thus qualifying them as new prospects. Your marketing team, or yourself, can take it from here and intervene to convert them into buyers at the bottom of your sales funnel.
Newsletter forms are also an easy way to acquire leads. Efficy Marketing allows you to create newsletter form templates to keep your website consistent and save you valuable time you would have otherwise wasted in the editor.
Social Media Engagement/Influencer Marketing - Insurance
Social media is undeniably a vital pillar of today's digital economy. Globally, we spend an average of up to two and a half hours on social media platforms. And this figure varies widely. In the more mature economies of Europe, potential customers spend a significant amount of time in front of the screen.
That's a lot of valuable hours in which your marketing efforts can generate quality leads! This can be especially valuable for companies in the insurance industry.
Not many people really understand how insurance works or what insurance options are available to them. Engaging them directly on social media to educate them is one way to generate leads. Since you are only interacting with people who have registered some interest in knowing how insurance works, they are likely to seek you out for your professional services.
There are a number of strategies you can choose to adopt or combine. You can drive organic engagement by using social media accounts on behalf of the company. This allows you to interact with your audience: directly introduce them to your product and receive honest feedback.
With a content marketing calendar like ours, you can introduce a time in your content strategy that coincides with when your target audience is most active. Are you too busy? You can also hire social media companies to promote your posts to a much wider audience than you have.
Another marketing technique is to pay influencers to generate buzz. Influencers have already built a certain level of popularity and credibility with your target audience. They can be anyone from real industry participants to commentators and critics.
By bringing them on board, you'll be leveraging their credibility and the existing trust of their audience to spread the word. Our technology stack of marketing solutions also includes social marketing tools designed to help you get the best results from your social media marketing efforts. You can learn more here.
Website optimization, persuasive calls to action - Logistics and transport sector
Your website is one of the first paths leading to your customer acquisition funnel; you can't afford not to optimize it. Every element of your website must be designed to guide visitors to conversion from the moment they land on your landing page.
You can talk about optimization until you're blue in the face, but if your website isn't responsive and mobile-friendly (especially at a time when, according to Statista, mobile devices generate 54.4% of global web traffic), you'll lose valuable leads. Your calls to action are also a vital part, whether it's subscribing to newsletters, downloading an e-book or something else.
Your calls to action should be as short, obvious and persuasive as possible, especially since attention spans are the lowest they've ever been. If your business focuses on the logistics industry, for example, you can't expect truck drivers to have the patience to read five-paragraph calls to action.
Potential customers are likely to find you through a search engine. Therefore, if your website is difficult to use or navigate, they will quickly go to a competitor's website.
Webinars - Health
Webinars are a great way to educate potential customers about your products or services and help them make an informed decision about whether or not to do business with you. They are also a great platform for building relationships with potential customers and establishing yourself as an industry expert.
To get started, you'll need to decide on a topic that is of interest to your target audience, and then create a presentation that is informative and engaging.
Then you can promote it to your target audience by sending out email invitations, posting on social media, and running ads. Be sure to include a link to the registration page in all your promotional materials and make the registration process simple and straightforward.
Before the event, you can send sequential emails to remind potential registrants. And on the day of the webinar, your presentation should be packed with valuable, useful and relevant content.
For after the webinar, Efficy Marketing's powerful email tool includes segmentation features that allow you to select a list of registrants who did not attend to send them emails about future webinars (or links to recorded content or slides from the webinar) and another separate list of people who attended to follow up with a thank you email (also include additional resources or information you promised to send during the webinar).
Healthcare professionals (pharmacies, healthcare organizations, insurers, medical equipment suppliers, etc.) will find this particularly useful, as webinars are often a good way to network and forge strategic partnerships with other non-competing companies in the value chain, generating leads in the process.
In addition, since members of these audiences are likely to already be involved in the industry, your chances of converting them into customers are significantly higher.
A/B Testing - Software Industry
A/B testing is one of the most powerful marketing techniques in any digital marketer's handbook. Why? Because different people in your audience will likely react differently to your calls to action and other elements of your marketing message and products.
A/B testing allows you to get hard data on which variations of your calls to action and other elements of your marketing work best with your audience. This is particularly important for companies in the software industry.
It also gives you real-time information about your customers' desires and preferences, allowing you to customize your messages, change your calls to action or modify other elements of your marketing campaign as needed. With this marketing technique, you will see an increase in lead generation (and conversion) rates.
Drive Lead Generation with Efficy Marketing
It should come as no surprise that some B2B companies have more success with certain marketing techniques than others. For example, lawyers can increase their lead acquisition with content marketing instead of social media marketing. Simply embrace key strengths as you evaluate your clients' behaviors.
Since these different marketing techniques require different sets of tools to implement correctly, the best option is to have a cross-functional marketing automation solution. This way, you'll avoid juggling (and paying for) multiple services. With Efficy Marketing, you have a highly customizable, flexible and easy-to-use platform with in-depth data to help you analyze and leverage customer behavior.
With over a decade of experience helping multiple clients meet and exceed their digital marketing goals, Efficy has everything you need to help you reach yours. Our stack includes a suite of tools and features that will change your marketing experience completely. Why not book a demo now?