Driving Sales With Effective Lead Generation Solutions

Lead generation is the most important initiative in the B2B marketer’s responsibilities. The opportunity to improve and refine the volume and quality of leads is a never ending battle. With fierce competition looming around, marketing teams are under tremendous pressure to come up with innovative and effective lead generation strategies  and solutions to keep a continual flow of qualified leads through the sales funnel.

Successful lead generation happens only when there is collaboration and harmony with between the sales and the marketing teams. Many Inside sales teams are constantly frustrated by dead end calls. Often lead generation solutions provide incomplete and outdated, contact information on leads with little or no context. It is therefore  important to integrate lead management, lead nurturing and lead optimization with the single goal of finding prospects for your business.

For companies to be successful, lead generation needs to be the focus of business. Effective planning and maintaining a consistent marketing effort are the two biggest challenges of any promotion, and by adopting the right lead generation plan with helpful tools, there can be a significant difference. If you do not have a workable lead generation system, then your attempts at lead generation can get difficult. It is therefore necessary to have a complete set of sales lead generation tools at your fingertips to reach your sales prospects.

A reputable lead generation solution utilizes sophisticated  tools and advanced methods to build impressive client bases. People have the tools and expertise required to find the qualified leads that companies need in order to grow, succeed, and expand their client rosters. With the right service provider you can capture qualified leads, rich with information. Such pre-qualified leads, have a significantly higher conversion rate than cold contacts. This helps sales achieve sales targets faster.

Partner with an efficient service provider to drive sales and get more power to control the processes and lower the risks. By engaging with the best partner, your business can accelerate marketing-through-sales cycles and achieve measurable and robust ROI.

With a complete set of sales lead generation tools at your fingertips, you can reach your sales prospects. With organizations looking for ways to build a strong return on investment, adopting the lead generation and lead management methods and techniques allows you to boost your business sales, and enable your company to earn lucrative profits ultimately.

Lead generation needs to be all about quality and not quantity, so reinforce your sales pipelines, and give your business an edge with the best lead generation solution.

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Relevance of Social Media in B2B Marketing

Today social media channels have established themselves as an important marketing platform for B2B companies, enabling B2B marketers to reach out to their niche target segments and gain their trust. The best part about social media is the flexibility it provides marketers to customize their marketing strategies and plans as per the needs of the communities being reached out to.

It is an efficient medium to promote company product and services in the B2B marketing scenario. And, due to the significant increase in the budgets being allocated by B2B companies for social media marketing in recent times, this medium is actively used as a useful B2B marketing channel.

Here are some important pointers for social media B2B marketing.

• Join social media sites and be an active participant by following groups and actively sharing useful content to read. Other ways of engaging target audience would include activities such as polling, voting, releasing research reports, etc.
• Developing quality content and sharing it with the target segment is the best way to show authenticity.  Sharing of content like best practises, guides, etc., can get people to talk and discuss about it. SEO optimize content so that it caters to readers who use search engines often.
• Since mobile technology enables users to connect to social media networks from anywhere, marketers need to provide content sharing options such as SMS and email, which will enable prospects to access their content anywhere, anytime.
• Social media marketing needs to be tracked on a regular basis to make sure that the active participants are nurtured at the right time. Metrics vary depending on the site chosen and the content shared in it. Some of the metrics include number of posts, number of responses, number of inbound links and conversion rates.

A social media campaign is incomplete if content is not shared on multimedia sites. People consume information they like in different formats, and social media allows marketers to present their information in the form of videos, podcasts etc. adding new ways of reaching out to a company’s target audience in a format that is popular with them.

Companies can share video content for multiple user viewerships through sites such as YouTube. These sites are user friendly and help to track views expressed on the video content. Also, video content can be embedded into corporate blogs, websites, shared on social networking sites to increase blog traffic and virality for the video.

Marketing automation can be used to automate the lead generation and lead nurturing process.
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Executing a Successful B2B Social Media Marketing Campaign

A MarketingProfs report states that “Across the various platforms, brands cited the following adoption levels: Facebook (87%), Twitter (83%), LinkedIn (76%), YouTube (66%), and blogs (57%).”

There are many new social media channels rolling in every day and marketers are continuously pressurized to engage prospects that are active on each of them.  In social media marketing, one solution does not apply to all channels, is a known fact. Example: a Facebook marketing strategy is completely different from a marketing strategy executed in LinkedIn or Pinterest.

However, there are some best practices that have to be followed when it comes to executing social media B2B marketing strategies. While marketing is only a part of the activity, it should always be remembered that marketers need to first build a community of prospects, partners and customers who will be evangelists for their company some day.

Step 1: Identify Target Audience

The first step for social media success is to identify your target audience. First, join social networks, where peers are already on board. Applying some smart brand building techniques combined with personalized nurturing of prospects, based on their interest levels, is the first best practice to adopt for social media campaigns to be effective.  

It is important to find out the top social applications used by your target segment. They, analyze forums for offers and promotions that have worked very well with your target audience to assess how they respond to them.

Step 2: Personalize Marketing Strategy

Every social networking site is different and hence marketing strategies must be planned and executed accordingly. Some important pointers for personalization of marketing strategy are:

• Find out who the key social media influencers are with the help of free search tools such as Technorati, Twitter Search or Google Blog search.
• Design and execute marketing campaigns to reach out to these purchasing influencers.
• Determine the key business objectives that are to be met with social media marketing, first.
• Allocate manpower to dedicatedly create, track and monitor social media campaigns.
• Use marketing automation tools to track website visitor intent and use that intelligence to create personalized campaigns.
• Devise a social media marketing strategy based on your revenue targets, product releases, upcoming events, etc.
• Prioritize your social media campaigns activities based on how fast your brand image gets established on the social site. Example: If your Twitter stream is going  great guns vs. your Facebook presence that is still lacklustre, it makes sense to spend more time and campaign money on Twitter than Facebook.

Leads procured through social media can be scored using lead scoring model and nurtured through smart drip marketing campaigns.


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Enhance Lead Generation Process with Lead Scoring

According to Gartner, “By converting segmentation criteria into business rules how leads are rated, or scored, providers see an immediate boost in lead volume and lead quality.”
Lead scoring is an essential part of the lead generation process. Lead scoring helps measure sales readiness aspects for potential prospects and assists sales and marketing automation teams across B2B enterprises in judging their prospects’ stage in the buying lifecycle.

Using robust marketing automation applications, leads can now be automatically scored and prioritized based on their activity, interest and intent. It helps marketing teams to differentiate between leads that are sales ready and those that are not. Accordingly they can pass on the sales ready leads to Sales and focus their efforts on lead nurturing for the others. Also, lead Scoring makes Sales more efficient by helping them focus on the hottest leads first and get to them with a relevant solution in real time.

Using robust marketing automation software, lead scoring process is easy and simple to execute.

• It allows Sales and Marketing teams to define the parameters for a 'good' lead in advance, based on which it then classifies all leads.
• It monitors every click and keystroke, to understand where the visitors are in their buying cycle and which of them are exhibiting key buying indicators.
• It determines their identity and quality. This data when accumulated over a period of time and when combined with a company level view, becomes a powerful tool in qualifying leads.
• Uses of lead scoring tools.
• B2B lead scoring tools are widely used by companies as they can now directly gauge the actual effectiveness of what is working with their potential clients and what fails to create an impact.
• With the help of real time updates, sales reaction time has become faster.
• Automated lead scoring techniques employed by enterprises these days come with the additional focus on enhanced analysis of prospects.
• Scoring analysis helps to nurture leads effectively.

Lead scoring model should use both implicit and explicit behavior of the leads. Explicit information throws light on the “fit” of a prospect to a product. Explicit scores are primarily based on the information about the prospect like company size, industry segment, job title or geographic location. Implicit scores are more realistic and are derived from monitoring the prospect’s online body language like the type of whitepaper downloads, email activities, number of website visits, webinars, blogs, article, virtual shows etc.

By implementing the right lead scoring model and using a robust marketing automation system B2B marketing companies can enhance the effectiveness of the lead generation process.

Also read on - lead management, lead nurturing

How to Leverage Marketing Automation Tools for Lead Generation

The surge in Internet usage and the overdose of digital information have brought about a huge transformation is the B2B selling process. It has been researched and found out that most buyers prefer to do their research about what they want to buy before reaching out to the company’s hotline.

It is important for sellers to also be informed about their prospect’s wishes. So, there is a need for sales teams to be aware of all the activities that the prospects are doing on the site.

Most company websites have online information filling forms. They know what to do when someone responds to an RFP, or fills up a Contact Us form. Companies are also potential prospects and are reaching out to marketers even if they are not choosing to identify themselves by filling out a form. Therefore, it is crucial to have a platform where both types of visitors are identified – those that choose to identify themselves and those that remain anonymous.

Most analytics tools (like Google Analytics) are more very useful to B2C audiences and hence the talk of summary metrics (number of visit to a page) and Goal completes (who is buying, where are they dropping out etc) which are not quite as relevant from a B2B standpoint. For a B2B environment the marketing automation software used has to be relevant to both Sales and Marketing teams.

When it comes to B2B selling, companies need lead data that is actionable and provides consistent information to all sales teams. This data should help to identify potential prospects, provide some background information to determine if they are qualified and in turn help in reaching out to them.

By using marketing automation solutions for lead generation, marketers can expect the following:

1. Trace Online Activity
Marketing automation tools help in tracking information such as visits made to important pages, downloading content, attending a Webinar, responding to an email sent out, copying content on the site, visiting site from a 3rd party review publisher site, etc. This can be very useful for B2B lead generation.

2. Identify Lead Background Information
Marketing automation solutions help B2B companies to identify the name of the company. Structured data like company size, location, industry can also be identified and be used to determine if the corporate visitor is in the target segment or not and help marketing teams to make a quick decision.

3. Choose Warm Leads Only
There is a lot of data that can be gathered from the interactions of the website visitors with the site. Users can set proactive alerts based on important criteria such as first time visitor from a company, a person from a named account visiting the pricing page, etc can be very useful to a B2B marketer.

4. Identify Target Segment Buyer
There are many people involved in the decision making process, information on their interaction should also be considered to track what the customers are doing. If the contacted person has delegated the responsibility then, it is important to be able to track both individuals and also the company behavior over time to gauge interest levels and qualify them.



Also read on - Lead management, Lead nurturing best practices

Top 5 Content Strategies for B2B Marketing

With rising number of ‘informed’ buyers and fierce online competition it is imperative for companies to come up with a content website engagement strategy that is smart and strategic at the same time. So, content needs to be used proactively and dynamically. By choosing to showcase relevant content, you can ensure that the visitor knows you are listening intently.

This means, every time a user hits your webpage, he/she should be able to choose from a variety of content. Personalized content may include videos, tutorials, e-books, newsletters, thought leadership content, case studies, success stories, offerings, landing pages, and so on.

Here are the top five content strategies you could use for B2B marketing.
1. Blogs
Did you know that 64% of B2B marketers regard blogging on company branded or managed logs as a highly effective tactic? The most important aspect of blogging is to post high quality blog posts often. It is imperative to have a well thought- out social optimization strategy for blogging.

2. Whitepaper
Did you know 65% rate whitepaper as being very influential over purchase decisions? Create whitepapers that contain multimedia elements. Have research teams to thoroughly scrutinize research data before drawing conclusions.

3. Infographic
Infographics are special because they are very engaging and relevant; thereby completely capturing the reader’s attention. They can be used as excellent link baits so it is important to ensure the information is accurate. Use attractive layouts, styles and visuals to build a persuasive info graphic.

4. E-Newsletter
E-newsletter has a very high impact quotient with readers. So, it is important to focus on providing high quality content to subscribers and present it in an interesting fashion.

5. Case Study/Testimonial
Considered as highly influential marketing collateral in purchasing decisions, case studies and testimonials must be a part of content strategy. Size and formats of case studies matter, it is essential to keep it less than five pages.

Lead generation is a common goal for marketing automation companies, especially content marketing strategies. In fact, 63% of companies in a Marketing Profs and Junta42 survey said lead generation was their third most important goal for content marketing.


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Useful Tips for Creating Effective Banner Ads

No one who spends time on the Internet could fail to notice the small rectangular ads that appear on almost all web pages. These are called banner ads, and they are one of the most popular forms of online advertising. What makes banner ads so effective is that any visitor who clicks on them is taken to the advertiser’s website. Banner ads are actually hypertext links or HTML codes inserted into a webpage. Almost all companies, irrespective of whether they are big or small, use banner ads because they are the easiest and the most affordable means of promoting a product or service. The following are some pointers on creating successful banner ads:

• Since banner ads have limited display area, it is always good to keep it short, simple and to the point. Cluttering it with details can do more harm than good. Advertisers have only a few seconds to attract the attention of visitors, and if the banner ad looks cluttered nobody will read it.
• Avoid wordiness, but the words used should be good enough to create a positive impact.
• Use large fonts and a small file size. Large fonts make it easy to read while a small file size helps banner ads load faster.
• Make changes to banner ads depending on the sites where they will be displayed. Because webpages will also have other banner ads, changing font size, color and, if possible, the message can help your banner ad stand out.
• Advertise banner ads on the right websites. Study the audiences of the websites to ensure that you are targeting the right audience.
• Make the banner ads attractive by using interesting images or animation, catchy phrases and bright colors to grab the attention of readers.
• Always include a strong ‘call to action’ in banner ads.
• Make sure there are no typos or grammatical errors.
• Ensure there is a powerful heading that grabs visitors’ attention.

Most people do not consider banner to be an effective lead management technique but rather a tool that helps enterprises and organizations in getting themselves or their products and services known to the people. That is, they are more of a promotional tool than a lead generation tool. But the fact of the matter is that, if implemented properly, they can be leveraged to generate quality leads. For instance, if by clicking visitors are directed to a query section where they can fill in details to get solutions to their problems, it means a lead is generated.

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Effective Lead Nurturing Best Practices – Raw Lead to Being Sales Ready

Lead Nurturing is a discipline that helps businesses maintain a healthy relationship with their customer, delivering content of relevant value to them so that they remain consistently engaged, thus helping convert prospective leads into sales ready customers. Almost 95% of the prospects visiting your website today are there for research, most of them may not buy at all, but as many as 70% of them will eventually buy maybe from you or your competitors. Lead nurturing helps you to track these leads and move them down your funnel, so that when they are ready to buy they purchase your solution.

Lead nurturing software allows leads to be tracked and content delivery to be automated through various marketing channels and helps convert prospective leads into sales-ready customers. It also addresses the challenge that marketing and sales teams face in establishing a strong bond with their customers. The biggest advantage of lead nurturing is that, it builds the brand and product preferences moving them gently along the path of becoming a customer, long before they are ready to buy.  

Here are a few effective lead nurturing best practices that needs to be followed at each phase of the sales cycle to ensure a successful sales conversion.

1.    Understand the Needs of the Customer and Map out a Strategy – You need to clearly map out your typical buyers buying cycle with an interesting and attractive introduction. It is the basis of any good lead nurturing campaign.  Plan out the kinds of content that you want your leads to receive, keeping in mind their interests. The kinds of content that can be sent include white papers/articles, case studies, data sheets, videos, podcasts, webinars, links to specific industry news/resources and interviews with experts/executives.

2.    Personalize Your communication – Start building relationship by personalizing emails. Send relevant content based on the interest in the prospect. Provide information they want rather than filling their inbox with information that is irrelevant to their need. You have a much higher chance of keeping your prospect in the fold if you provide information they want.

3.       Build and Reinforce Brand/Product – Brand building is absolutely necessary today. If you are a known brand, lead generation will work better. With information in abundance online buyers are not dearth of information and choice. Web 2.0 has changed the brand building scenario. If the prospect has shown interest in your product, it is up to you to keep his attention with timely messages. Share white papers, videos or demos about your brand or product. Develop case studies and share success stories with clients. In this way you will be able to create an image about your brand.

4·         Create a Thought Leadership –By engaging prospects early, you build awareness and increase your chances that the prospect will respond to future demand generation efforts.  Develop a schedule for sending out information to the prospect. This helps you keep track of where you are in the lead nurturing funnel.

5.       Strengthen Relationship – Once the brand is built, you need to strengthen it and maintain that interest further. You now need to send a controlled communication to influence the prospect’s buying decision. This helps your prospects learn more about you and your background and helps build the foundations of a healthy relationship.  Use whitepapers, eBooks, demos, case studies and let loose yourself in the social media. Remember the first eight seconds are very important to get their attention, so be precise to the point, short forms and definitely no external navigation.    

6.   Close the Deal – Once the prospect is ready, it is time to pass them on to the sales team to close the deal.

Marketing is a dynamic job and you need to be malleable, ready to automate building and managing lead generation and lead nurturing best practices.  By nurturing your prospects database, it is easy to identify your most qualified leads that are sales ready. The ones who are not, regular follow up and regular consistent nurturing can help them move up in the pipeline.

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Choose the Best Process for Success in Lead Management

The secret to any B2B success lies in the process. In marketing automation, it’s not about creativity or conducting a better lead generation campaign. Leveraging the conversions of inquiries into qualified leads and leads into qualified sales is what is important. Prospective leads originate in a wide range of different ways, and there needs be a process in place to manage all those leads. And Lead Management begins with the ability to hit revenue targets in your sales pipeline.

The intent of lead management software is to build a relationship with each prospective customer in a way that their interest develops into opportunities for sales. It is therefore important to choose the best process to ensure success. For example, a marketer places certain ads with the intention that readers will respond and perhaps make a purchase. There may be many inquiries resulting from paid ads, which carry calls to action including  a web site or toll-free number. For this there needs to be a process in place to handle all enquiries. Without investing much, a company can create a great inquiry management process by optimizing each step in the inquiry management chain.

• Plan a response

In the campaign development process, it is important to plan a response. It is necessary to have a specific code to identify the responses from all outbound communication. Offer multiple response media, like phone, Web, BRC, fax, e-mail, etc. This way there is a wide set of options for a prospective customer to get back to you.

• Efficient response capture

It is necessary to put together a cross-functional team as the response capture process will work well if it is designed by the people who manage the inbound responses. By considering the best strategy you can ensure that the enquiries do not get mixed up with daily business communications.

• Fulfilling enquiries

The secret to inquiry fulfillment is speed. Most B2B companies make enquiries asking for more information, and the faster they get that information, the faster they will respond. Matching the fulfillment material to the need and the value of the prospect quickly indicates the value the best companies put on fast delivery.

• Lead nurturing

Move a lead into the lead nurturing process when the prospect is not yet ready to see a sales person, but may be ready soon. You can use a number of lead nurturing methods like catalogs, newsletters, surveys, white papers and/or birthday cards. With a series of ongoing communications, you can build awareness and maintain trust and contact until the prospect is ready to buy.

By choosing the best practice in your lead management process you can optimize your inquiry management process and greatly increase your revenue from lead generation campaigns.

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