It’s a new year and undoubtedly some of your major goals for 2018 are to build your sales pipeline and increase ROI. In this article, we’re going to talk about the most effective lead generation strategies for B2B businesses and answer the ever elusive question that keeps every Marketing Director up at night –
How do I get more leads?

If you want to create a sustainable lead generation strategy, one of the first decisions you face is choosing the right set of techniques or methods and knowing how much time and money to invest in each. At this stage, it is important to remember that lead generation is not a simple one-step process – It is a series of concentrated efforts. Often, most businesses make the mistake of choosing one single approach and investing everything they’ve got into that.

Lead generation requires a holistic approach that incorporates different activities and requires different teams to work together to achieve the ultimate goal – more leads!

To help you get the ball rolling, we’ve put together a list of lead generation strategies guaranteed to help to work together to help you build a stronger sales pipeline:

1. Email Marketing Automation

Email Marketing has been around for decades and it is still one of the most popular forms of lead generation for most B2B businesses. Over the years, what has made email marketing so popular is the introduction of marketing automation. Marketing automation tools help you to create drip campaigns that send out a series of messages over time. They allow you to set triggers such that emails are delivered to a specific type of buyer, or a distinct area of interest. The important thing to remember when building an email campaign is to focus on creating a valuable experience for the audience. This means carefully constructed subject lines, engaging content, a valuable offer and impactful call to actions.

What makes email marketing so effective is that it allows marketers the flexibility to send a sequence of messages designed to increase a customer’s interest in a product or service, then adjust the emails automatically based on their behaviour. For instance, the first email in your sequence may include information to educate readers on a certain product or service, or simply to introduce them to the service. The second email may be aimed at sharing a case study or an ebook, while the third one addresses specific pain points and corresponding solutions.

2. PPC Advertising

Online lead generation through Google PPC is quickly becoming one of the most popular techniques for marketing professionals. The popularity of PPC stems from the fact that it allows businesses to appear on the first page of a Google search result, instantly appearing in front of people who are searching for a solution to their problem. Usually, a PPC campaign is paired with a website landing page that is specifically designed to get users to sign up and fill a form with their details. By targeting the right set of keywords and writing excellent ad copy, marketers are seeing increased success when implementing this lead generation method.

According to
Hubspot, the first step is segmenting your campaigns and then identifying the most focused and relevant keywords within each campaign. While there are several keyword tools that do the job, the most widely used one is the Google Keyword Planner.

Although PPC is a promising method to generate leads, there are still chances that users won’t fill a form on the landing page. However, the key thing to remember is that those who do have an interest in your service will click on the link and land on your website. Once a user lands on your website, the opportunity to engage with them still exists via a Live Chat pop-up – where an agent or chat operator interacts with the user and talks them through your service or product, as explained below.

3. Live Chat

Do you often worry that you’re spending tons of money on generating traffic and pushing users to your website, but not seeing any real results? The truth is lead generation is not just about driving visitors to your website – you need to be able to qualify those leads by engaging with them and capturing necessary data. This is where Live Chat comes into play. It provides the opportunity to have conversations with interested buyers in real time and not only understand their requirements, but explain your product to them in a one on one chat session.

Live Chat helps modern-day marketers and sales teams overcome the age-old issue of having to go out and find & contact prospects. Live Chat brings the customers to you.

What makes
CommVersion’s Live Chat offering so unique is that we only charge for the qualified leads we deliver and customer support is offered absolutely free of charge. There are no setup fees or hidden costs and we don’t tie you into a long-term commitment either. You literally get what you came for – more leads!

Our trained agents will qualify your leads, capture key contact information, and send leads along with the chat transcript to your team immediately, while they are still hot.

4. LinkedIn Advertising

With 550 Million professionals on LinkedIn, it’s no surprise that this marketing platform is amongst the most enthusiastically used by marketers around the globe. What differentiates LinkedIn from other online platforms is the unique opportunity to engage with the decision makers themselves. On LinkedIn, marketers are more likely to target audience members who are not only looking for a solution but have the power to decide whether or not to implement a chosen solution.

LinkedIn provides marketers with more than one way to run Ads, and these include sponsored Native Ads which allow you to display your LinkedIn updates to targeted audiences and track the number of leads you’re getting via
conversion tracking. The other two options are Sponsored Inmails – targeted & personalised messages and Text Ads i.e. simple PPC or CPM desktop Ads.

In 2017, LinkedIn announced Lead gen Forms, which made it even easier to collect leads from the 500 million + users on the platform. When users click on an ad, their LinkedIn profile information automatically populates an in-app form that they can submit instantly – without having to manually type in the info. After form submission, an in-app “thank you” page is displayed that immediately connects users with your content or sends them to your site to learn more, providing your business with an additional opportunity to engage with prospects on the website, directly via
Live Chat.

If you’d like more information on how to improve your existing lead generation strategy or how to implement
Live Chat to fit into your current marketing strategy, speak to one of our experts today.