Top 15 B2B Lead Generation Hacks You Should Know For 2021

• Updated on: 2021-02-14
• Read original article here

Effective lead generation is an important aspect of marketing that ensures a steady growth rate in business returns.

It is stimulating interest about your products or services in your clients and customers to make them enquire about it or make a purchase. Lead generation is typically done through advertising via different channels.

However, sometimes you can generate leads from non-paid sources such as referrals and search engine results generated organically. Research says 81% of marketers use email marketing to generate most of their leads.

While email marketing may be a major lead generation strategy, you can leverage many more to improve your business. Content marketing, social media marketing, paid adverts, and website optimization are all lead generation strategies.

There are three important things to note as we delve into the lead generation hacks for 2021.

The first is your audience. Tailor your lead generation strategy to cater to your audience. Next is your budget. Carve out a good budget for lead generation and choose strategies that fit within this budget.

Lastly, your ability. Ensure you plan towards lead generation strategies that match your team’s ability. Going above your team’s strength may cause quick burnout, producing only little results.

There’s no quick route to effective B2B lead generation, only effort, and good planning. Check out our top 15 hacks below:

One good place to start is your website. The website is a key port of call for customers and consumers. This makes it a good place to attract and generate leads quickly.

Your homepage or landing page is like the window to your online store or company. Here, you catch the attention of your website visitors and determine if you would be keeping their attention.

A fully functional website with efficient web design is essential to boost your leads. For instance, WallMonkeysfelt that modifying their homepage to give a better view of their services could up their lead generation.

After conducting A/B testing of two modified homepages using usability testing software, conversion rates increased up to 550%.

The issue with content marketing is that many businesses are not channeling their efforts the right way. Content marketing is an effective lead generation strategy given that there are so many different and interesting types of content to draw in your clients.

To do proper content marketing, you should also be ready to do quality research. Find out what your audience likes. What type of content attracts them? Which ones do they engage with? What sort of language will appeal to your target audience?

Technology has made it possible to eliminate guesswork in this type of scenario. All you need to do is use tools like Ahrefs and Accuranker to help you track keywords, provide relevant content for your audience, and stay ahead of the competition.

Kinstaemployed these tools and guide for their content marketing strategy and upped their organic traffic by 571% in 13 months. This, of course, led to an increase in B2B leads.

In 2021, you should strive to optimize your business website for mobile users. Mobile optimization is simply making your website content easily accessible on your users’ various mobile devices.

In 2019, Google announced that they were adopting mobile-first indexing to ensure their users get faster and better search results. This is mainly because more users now access websites from their mobile rather than computers.

Leverage this by ensuring your website is mobile-friendly, fast, and seamless. Include pictures, buttons generally an easy-to-use user interface. This will encourage users to spend more time on your app when you pop up in search results.

Before many buyers decide to purchase something, they spend a lot of time researching the item or service. This shows that they take research very seriously.

One way to build inbound lead generation is to become the leading voice in your industry where B2Bs go to get credible information.

Invest in quality, original research, and curate the data gathered in a knowledge-base software where they have it in easy reach. Partner with industry influencers, run surveys, interview experts and build loads of backlinks as you become the number one source for info in your industry.

Before you think of this as old-fashioned, think of all the times a referral has got you hooked on other businesses. Still doubt that they work?

Referrals are part of the top efficient lead generating strategies. If your business delivers great results, you don’t have to cajole people into referring you. The best part is, they don’t refer your business to those who would not need your services; they likely refer you to someone looking to use your services or products. That’s a lead.

People are more likely to make a purchase from a referral when they know someone who has benefitted from it. To generate more leads through referrals, encourage your customers to refer your business by offering them something in return, for example, a discount.

This is one underused strategy that works wonders even up till today. 53% of digital marketers affirm that it is an effective way to build backlinks, according to a study by SEMrush.

Guest posting simply means to post content on third-party sites. Guest posting helps to build links that improve SEO for websites. It’s also great for generating more traffic to your website. It’s easy, reach out to credible websites and ask if they accept guest articles.

Choose websites that already have a large following or traffic. Now your content can reach a wider audience and generate more leads.

This trick is fairly new in the marketing sphere. Online Influencers are now one of the reigning trends on various social media channels. They are leading voices in their niches, and they pull a lot of crowd.

Building a relationship with an influencer to market your business will grow your business among their audience. This will also pull a lot of traffic to your website, eventually becoming leads.

Social media marketing may not be a favorite for lead generation, but the fact remains that your audience is on social media, and so leads are there.

More and more clients are moving to social media more than other existing media. You would hardly find customers who are not on one or more of these platforms. To generate leads via your social media pages, start by finding out where you would find a larger percentage of your target audience.

Create content that your social media audience will find relevant. What are they searching for, and how can you give answers to their questions? Understanding and implementing this will enable you to boost engagement on social media.

Social media marketing requires time and patience because your audience will need to build a level of trust with the business before deciding how far they want to go with your product or brand.

What’s your competitor research saying? What are their favorite keywords? What sites do they frequently visit to boost their backlinks?

The more you see certain websites use keywords regularly, it’s likely that that keyword is quite effective for them and generates leads substantially. Target these same sites and keywords that your competition uses to drive potential leads to your website.

One pro tip is to do a test run with these keywords. Run a paid ad campaign to see if it converts relevant B2B leads.

This is an offshoot of website improvement. It is important to optimize your website to lead your users where you want them to go.

If you’re not sure what to improve on your web design, check out your calls to action. Boring, irrelevant calls to action will not have the impact they should have, which means no leads are generated.

Try interesting, interactive, and witty call to action copies that pique the website user’s interest. Next, use clear, concise, and clickable calls to action buttons such as Visit your cart, Learn more, Try for free to spur your user to take the desired action.

You can also tweak your headline banners or introduce pop-ups to catch the buyers’ attention.

While this does not suggest that you shortchange yourself or half your profits, giveaways make effective lead generation tactics. Everybody loves free stuff, so they become eager to engage with your business and learn more about it.

It encourages brand awareness and can even be a great tool to help build your mailing list. The key to giveaways is the follow up that comes after, where you continue to push more of the company’s offerings to those that sign up.

Holidays or themed occasions are great times to host giveaways for a more impactful engagement and interaction.

Email marketing is one of the people’s favorite and not-so-difficult lead generation hacks. Thankfully, it is still very much effective when used the right way.

A strong email marketing campaign can yield a ton of results, and so careful planning and research is necessary to make maximum use of it. With email marketing, it’s easy to control your response to leads and how you can track your leads’ response to your sales campaigns.

Build your email list with a fresh angle. Instead of asking them to “sign up for your newsletter” (which nobody reads anymore), you can try something like “Come join our gang of 400+ cutting edge devs and designers.” This sounds more appealing than the usual platitude that nobody wants to be a part of.

Focus on taking a personalized approach in email correspondence. Email them as if you were discussing with your typical buyer persona to help you offer them relevant content.

One grand thing about Chatbots and AI is that they help make a business scalable. Where a human may not always be available to offer assistance to potential leads, chatbots and AI can come in to save the day.

Usually, they are pre-programmed with instructions and personalized answers that improve a customer’s shopping experience or general website use. AIs tend to be more personalized and predictive, which means they can offer your clients a personalized experience.

This is an effective way to generate B2B leads.

Many businesses already have a product or service that’s their bestseller or more popular than their other offerings. If you have something like this, you can upsell by offering clients more value for the product they already have bought.

Upselling is simply encouraging people to get an upgrade of an existing product or buy a more expensive version of it. With a quality presentation detailing the better, faster, or more convenient features of the higher product, you can convince existing customers to spend more, boosting sales.

It can also be effective for attracting new curious customers and converting them into leads. There are quality free presentation templates that can get you started with your upsell strategy.

One way many businesses generate leads is by offering free tools. Tools like these help clients to give a feel of your products. This can convince them to go for your full version or sign up for other services you offer.

Free tools also help make upselling easier since you can always ask your users to upgrade to a paid version to enjoy more features.

B2B lead generation combines patience, research, and empathy. Find out where your audience is and the best strategy that you can use to reach them and offer solutions to their problems.

Learn your audience and take note of how they interact with your business. Test to see what works and optimize your strategies to get the best results.