Yet, the market is as replete with success stories as with failure sagas. Considering the important role lead generation plays for your business, it is important to look at some advances strategies and tactics one can employ for guaranteed returns.

However, the first step better not be a leap. It is much better to start from the basics and then keep adding paces at each new step. The idea is to not sacrifice the strength of basics.

Begin from Ground Zero

Unless and until you have penned down a clear and sharp marketing strategy for your business, working toward a specific target like B2B lead generation is not going to yield results. You can either formulate a campaign on your own, with your team or take assistance from an effective online tool for the same. The idea is to get hold of the “what”, “when” and “who” before plunging to the next biggie, “how”.

Now, picking the best B2B lead generation strategies out of the multitude of options available also requires some groundwork. Having a well-rounded idea about the target audience and their habits is a great starter. Besides, what your option promises to deliver must also guide how you deliver it.

That being said, some marketing strategies emerge as clear winners. Topping the list would be email marketing, search marketing, content marketing, social marketing, and conversion rate optimization. While looking at each of these individually, let us try to discover advanced strategies and tactics for B2B lead generation in 2021.

Email Marketing for B2B Lead Generation 

Email marketing is a domain that holds tremendous potential when it comes to lead generation. It has proven its relevance time and again and continues to be one of the most sought-after marketing tools by the biggest companies to date.

The reasons are plenty. Wide reach, simple interface, the scope for flexibility and value-addition happen to be some of them. So, how do you use email marketing for generating leads? Here are some hacks you could put to use.

Automation is Key

There is no smarter way to ace the marketing game than by automating the entire marketing campaign on email. Essentially, this entails lesser manual effort and time toward managing email lists, tedious but repetitive tasks and user-based targets. With suitable automated email marketing tools by your side, it becomes much easier to manage and sustain such campaigns in the long run.

Referral Campaigns for Leads from Leads 

Imagine getting your leads to get more leads for the business, sounds cool, doesn’t it? With a well-planned email marketing campaign, this can become a reality. You could use the platform to run a referral campaign, which gets even better if it is automated.

The only thing you need to take care of is of giving attractive yet smart incentives to your leads for the referrals. This could come in the form of reward points, freebies or discounts – whatever you would like to cater to. Another great marketing tactic many uses these days is to offer rewards to both the users to double the attractive element.

Generate email leads from video views

Another smart way to power your email marketing campaign would be using video views to generate email leads. Short and engaging videos have emerged as one of the best tools for businesses to reach out to individuals, especially one that is unique and comes with a strong message.

Using video views to generate leads and convert them into profits is one way of successful campaigning. Adding product or website links or attaching enticing offers to lure them to your services is another.

Content Marketing for B2B Lead Generation 

When it comes to making a solid online presence, content is king. No business today can hope to succeed without delving enough into the world of digital content marketing. No wonder, more and more enterprises are taking to blogging and vlogging to expand their reach and hence leads. But how to do this best?

Invest more time in Curating Content 

You can begin by turning your blog posts into in-depth guides instead of just superficial content. This will not only make readers value your content more but also lead to higher rankings in search engine results. All the time, energy and effort you invest in a single blog post can have a pronounced impact in the form of more readership, higher shares and hence more qualified lead generation.

Organization is Key

Plan your content schedule effectively. A smart way would be to use a tool to assist you in the purpose instead of creating and managing calendars manually. You can also try segmenting your blog posts into readable, easier-to-grasp sections to make it more appealing. Simple strategies like appearance, themes, topic research and niche targeting can go a long way.

Dynamic CTAs can help

You can also leverage the power of quality blog posts which force readers to scroll to the very end. For instance, add dynamic CTAs to your blog posts to have a direct positive impact on downloads or web activity. This is because you do not just want higher readership but also higher leads.  

You can take help from automation tools in this regard as well. They can automatically insert CTAs that point to relevant and related articles depending on the blog post in question. Besides saving you tons of time, the tool can also assist you in checks for errors and irrelevant tagging.

Search Marketing for B2B Lead Generation 

Successful search engine marketing entails a careful understanding of advanced strategies and hacks. Not just this, timely and repetitive implementation is what can ensure long-term sustained impact. 

Keyword is King

It is keywords that your content must target for increased visibility. Basically, your service and products must cater to exactly what the other person is looking for. Therefore, working with and on keywords is a great place to start. You can use Google Ads to build negative keyword lists. You can simply pick one particular keyword to focus upon or expand to related phrases and search lists.

Audit your Content Again, and Again

No amount of hard work is going to remain permanently relevant over time, especially when it comes to online content. Therefore, make sure you review your content from time-to-time to keep in touch with the latest trends. Give your readers and viewers enough data and sharable ideas packed into the content to increase referrals.

At the same time, you can customize your landing page and review it once in a while to match the user search intent. You could rebuild it on the lines of your latest campaign or a popular ad feature.

Intelligent Remarketing 

Another smart way of lead generation through search engines would be to use remarketing strategies. Say, you use multiple landing pages for different services – this not just increases interaction but also lends the greater possibility of them revisiting your site later. You could also use multiple engaging steps, say a questionnaire or survey, to lead them to email signup.

Besides, there is always the scope of content remarketing using an array of platforms. The idea is to implement as many remarketing strategies as possible at different stages of your sales funnel.

Social Marketing for B2B Lead Generation 

Only a detailed understanding of how social media works for a user can help you plan a successful social media marketing campaign for B2B lead generation. For instance, content popping up in someone’s feed is not random at all, but based on an entire algorithm involving the viewer’s interests, liked or viewed posts, search history and so on. Therefore, curating a smart social marketing campaign keeping these points in mind will always help.

Cross-Platform Promotions 

The more, the merrier. You can use LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook advertising campaigns to reach out to your target audience more effectively. LinkedIn would be the better pick because are looking to expand in the professional sphere and make your services known among business decision-makers.

Twitter is another powerful platform to venture into successful B2B marketing campaigns. Facebook and Instagram come with targeting tools, which can serve your purpose really well. Leverage the fact that a wider social media presence builds automatic trust in the mind of the user.

Working on a Brand Image

When delivering from one business to another, it is equally important to work on your brand’s image. This involves not just working on a professional website, contact cards and a solid online presence, but also a powerful online community. Platforms like Quora and Reddit are proof today of how engaging professional online forums can turn out to be.

Actively creating and engaging in groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, Quora and Yahoo can do wonders for your promotional stints. The only important thing to keep in mind is what your contribution to these communities are – it should be meaningful, useful as well as unique if you are looking for lead generation.

Conversion Rate Optimization for B2B Lead Generation 

Optimizing conversion rates is more crucial than you think, and requires a great deal of strategizing and effort. After all, CRO has a direct and much more pronounced impact on your leads. It is interesting to note that there are several ways to implement effective CRO for B2B lead generation.

Web Form Optimization

No matter how certain you are of converting viewers into leads, a web form is the inevitable pre-final step before the conversion, isn't it? Whether it is about contact information, content download, payment data or email signups, web forms are the first thing you need to optimize.

You can resort to multi-step forms to increase user engagement and higher conversion rates. 

Online form submissions can also be designed in a way to serve multiple purposes at the same time. Say, a form for account creation can also ask for newsletter subscription and so on. At the same time, make sure to track the performance of your web forms, which can give you a clear insight about where to improve further.

Account Creation 

Very often, businesses tend to overlook the importance of asking their visitors to create an account with them. If you look at it a little deeper, asking users for account creation serves many purposes at once. Offering them incentives on account creation can increase chances of lead generation. Besides, you can gain their contact and other information through this step to build reach, gather user stats and expand your target base behaviour research.

Research Matters

Catering to businesses involves a much different approach compared to one designed for audiences. Factors that matter more here are whether or not you are keeping up with industry trends, are you offering a larger bandwidth of quality services or are you specializing in a particular domain where you are the best? Also, is your service answering the raging questions of industry professionals and can they find what they are looking for with you? All these little elements add up to a lot when it comes to Conversion Rate Optimisation for B2B lead generation.

Final Words 

The biggest factor when it comes to strategizing for lead generation is your business itself – what it stands for, what it aims to achieve and who it plans to target. For business-to-business marketing, building a trustworthy environment and specialization of service is a must.

Having said that, lead generation in any genre requires strategic thinking and even innovation to some extent. Although you can choose to play by the rules of the game and resort to some time-tested tactics for the purpose, there is no harm in learning from experience and innovating for advanced strategies over time for better results. Eventually, you must be able to make the most out of the tools and technologies at your disposal for a planned, organized approach to successful campaigning.