What is a B2B lead?
A B2B lead is a person who can make a decision or influence the decision to buy a product or service (that he/she is interested in) for his or her company.
B2B leads usually hold executive positions or purchasing roles in their companies. Therefore, businesses should target the right people to achieve optimal performance for their lead generation campaigns.
B2B leads are different from B2C leads since B2C refers to business-to-customer leads which means B2C leads are the people who are interested in buying a product or service for their own use, not for a company or an organization.
What is B2B lead generation?
B2B lead generation is a process that focuses on targeting the right B2B prospects and turning them into B2B leads.
B2B lead generation is essential for any business to stay afloat or grow bigger since the task helps generate sales.
There are several ways to generate B2B leads effectively, some of the most popular methods are cold emailing, cold calling and paid ads.
Targeted B2B lead generation explained
B2B lead generation has never been easy, in fact, it is a very intimidating task for beginners, it requires a lot of effort to learn how to run effective campaigns.
When it comes to lead generation, you will have to fight with your competitors for every single qualified lead, and that is a big challenge to any business.
Targeted B2B lead generation means using your lead generation campaigns to target the right people to generate leads effectively. For example, running ads to target senior citizens for your social media app isn’t a wise choice.
Targeted B2B lead generation campaigns sometimes aim at very small and specific groups of people in order to achieve maximum results. For example, running ads to target those who previously visited your website only is a highly targeted lead gen strategy.
If your business isn’t doing targeted lead generation, you’re missing out on a lot of potentials to generate more leads and sales.
Targeted B2B lead generation strategies reviewed
Lead generation involves 2 stages. The first stage is generating excellent prospects and the second one is trying to turn the prospects into paying clients.
There are not many B2B lead gen tactics out there, however, we will likely need to spend a lifetime learning and getting better at using them.
B2B lead generation tactics don’t stand still, they evolve constantly to become more efficient, therefore, digital marketers will need to stay up-to-date with the best practices.
1. Using a reliable B2B lead database and cold emailing to generate B2B leads.
Generating excellent B2B prospects with a reliable B2B lead database
The fastest and most affordable way to generate excellent prospects is by using a reliable B2B lead database.
A great B2B lead database will provide its users with tools to generate very specific leads, down to where they live, contact information and a lot more information about their companies, social media profiles, etc.
An excellent data provider must also provide its users with a risk-free experience as well as ensure top-notch data quality.
However, it’s not that easy for businesses to find a trustworthy one. Most businesses end up losing a certain amount of money before they could find a reliable data provider.
Every database claims to be providing the best product and service, but there’s only one way to find out the truth that is actually using them.
However, you should never try a service without some caution to minimize the risk that you’re taking. Try a B2B lead database if they provide the following:
- Free trials
- No credit card is required
- Refund policies
- Excellent support
- Discounts for first-time clients
At Limeleads, we offer all the above-mentioned and more. We provide a $79 detailed cold emailing course free of charge. We also make sure, you will get help at any stage of your lead generation with our experts.
Simply sign up for an account and get your free trials with us, it only takes you a few minutes.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us at [email protected] or via on-site live chat support, we’re happy to help you with anything.
Targeting and turning prospects into leads with cold emailing.
Now that you have a list of good prospects, it’s time to reach out to them and turn them into leads.
Cold emailing is the process of sending a series of emails to your prospects who have not known about you to make them interested in your product or service.
While you can use cold calling, we find that cold emailing has a lot more advantages over cold calling when it comes to outreach.
Cold emailing is cheaper, it can reach many prospects in a short time and be automated.
Cold emailing isn’t a one-stop task, it needs to be maintained and optimized over a long period of time to generate leads effectively.
Because it’s a long battle, you must utilize cold emailing automation. Email marketing software such as Mailshake, Mailchimp or Mailerlite provides their users with features that help automate their cold emailing campaigns.
Some of the most useful features of email automation are:
- Automatically send welcome emails to new subscribers.
- Automatically send a sequence of emails based on how the prospects interacted with your first emails.
- Automatically target different groups of people based on their activities on your website or app.
- Present performance stats at all times for optimization.
When it comes to B2B lead generation, you should really give cold emailing a try, there’s no guarantee it will work for your business 100%, but it’s the most likely strategy that works for most businesses.
2. Use data scrapers to collect prospects & cold emailing to generate leads
Online marketing tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs and Hunter help people generate prospects with limited options. That means in some cases, they won’t help you collect the data that you need.
If you want total control of the types of data you want to collect, build a scraper. A scraper is basically software that will scrape information from web pages such as Google search result pages.
The follow-up steps will be cleaning the data that you have collected in preparation for cold emailing.
Using online marketing tools tends to be less expensive than building a data scraper, however, digital marketing tools must be used all together to generate prospects effectively, and that could be a challenge for beginners.
Once you’ve got a sizable list of prospects, it’s time to generate leads using cold emailing.
3. Use ads to generate targeted B2B leads
Using ads is one of the fastest ways to generate leads, the more money you put in, the faster you’ll get leads.
However, investing in ads isn’t always a good thing, especially in a long term and when your business is still small.
The cost per lead acquisition often drives small to medium-sized businesses away because it can be very expensive. There’s another disadvantage of using ads is that when you stop running ads, you’ll stop getting leads and sales.
However, ads can work really well for a business, many businesses around the world rely on ads to generate income. Ad platforms have become more sophisticated to improve advertisers’ ads performance.
There are a few types of ads that are specifically designed to generate leads such as Facebook lead ads or Linkedin lead generation forms.
These ads will make it easy for your prospects to leave their contact information so that they will be contacted later. They do this by delivering a form to the prospects’ news feeds and a few other places while they’re on their platforms, to entice them to take action.
We recommend trying ads to generate B2B leads but do so slowly and keep an eye on your ad’s performance to optimize them as you go.
4. SEO and lead magnets
SEO is hands down one of the most sustainable ways to generate leads and income. However, SEO is becoming more challenging for businesses to succeed since there are already so many big competitors in pretty much every niche.
If you plan to take on SEO in niches such as lead generation and email marketing, you may need to think twice. We strongly recommend consulting SEO experts or agencies and doing a lot of research before taking on SEO.
But when SEO is working, it’s usually the most reliable way to generate leads and income consistently for your business.
Pairing SEO with lead magnets is now considered a must-have because lead magnets can increase your chance of converting visitors into leads significantly.
A lead magnet can be a useful checklist, an eBook or a coupon for your visitors to get for free in order to obtain their contact information.
Moreover, lead magnets can be used to improve the performance of your lead gen ads as well.
Conclusion
Targeted lead generation is an absolute must for any business. Lead generation without proper targeting is a waste of time and investment.
The strategies above are the most popular strategies to generate B2B leads effectively. While there are a few other creative tactics to generate leads, mastering the most popular methods is a much safer bet for your business.
If you need any assistance with your B2B lead generation campaigns, you can contact us for expert advice at [email protected] or via our live chat support.
