leads

You have to know that a lead isn’t just a potential client that randomly comes in your way. It is the one, which is only a single step away from you. The only thing you need to do is catch their attention, showcase your value, and make yourself presentable by showing how your service will tackle their problem. Producing and developing quality leads will end up as a strategic backbone for your B2B marketing strategy.

If you have issues generating quality leads and establishing a reliable and strong pipeline, your business will face issues.

You will have a tough time growing your business. You should also remember that B2B marketing is way different from a B2C type of marketing.

The best way to establish a stable pipeline is by utilizing a mixture of both outbound and inbound.

An inbound helps in establishing your credibility, and it brings more qualified leads to you. At the same time, an outbound is an instant method of having to connect with leads.

Today, we will be discussing the five best strategies for generating b2b leads. By the end of this article, you will have all the required knowledge to garner sufficient b2b leads and thrive your business to its maximum potential.

Let’s look at the top five strategies for garnering b2b leads are as follows:

1. Referral Contest

An educational and learning company called “Testbook” was able to obtain over 57,873 new emails, 27,920 social media followers and shares, and 7035 app downloads through a referral contest.

Testbook consists of a full preparation platform for 100+ governmental exams, which focuses on test-taking and education.

So, when students take test exams and courses with the company, the others will also come to know about the service. So, that is where referral marketing comes into action.

Their campaign’s goal was to generate a ton of social buzz to bring excitement into their community.

In this way, they will have more awareness of their payment plan and give back to the community. They were able to do so by leveraging referral marketing via contests.

Testbook started attracting the right people who will go on to refer to others about the brand. Some of their marketing tactics include:

  • Leveraging their present community by utilizing gamification via a contest.
  • Using their present video channels such as YouTube and Tik Tok for securing more social reach and sign-ups.
  • Collaborating with Tik Tok and Instagram influencers for sharing + promoting their campaign that generates multiple referral sign-ups.
  • Giving free content to the influencers for promoting their content is a healthy trade-off.

Create your very own referral contest by following these important key pointers:

The Contest Prize – Considering the referral’s incentive is the first step because no one will share and promote your goods for free.

You need to take your customers’ needs, desires and wants into account for picking the prize.

Because there is no possible way that Testbook could generate that many leads by gifting an Amazon gift card worth $100.

So, make it a priority to create a prize worth the time and attention of your participants.

You have to make it share-worthy if you want them to start raving about your business. Try considering the perceived value and not just the monetary value.

Contest Positioning – Positioning your campaign around a relevant event is important because it gives your brand meaning.

There should always be a genuine purpose behind your product and the event around it.

For Instance, the launch of the Testbook was during the exam season, and their campaign positioning was titled “Win Everything You Need for Your Exam Preparation?”.

Referral System – You need to be tactical and smart with leveraging referral marketing.

Making it easy for people to share and promote is the key here. You can start using VYPER to allow every participant to have unique URLs and dashboards. Make sure to remind them to start sharing in every chance that they get.

Promotional Partners – When you are running a contest, you can easily make use of the opportunity to connect with influencers and publications.

You get to have a reason in pitching your campaign and also enable them to share it. But you will need to spend a little bit of money to get the job done here.

Soon, you will have a larger engagement, which is one of your key measures for growth.

2. Quizzes

Conducting quizzes is another smart strategy for producing b2b leads in your business.

A great example would be how BuzzFeed was able to garner over 10,000+ qualified leads. Quizzes have a future because of its interactive content.

The average quiz receives a share of up to 1900 times, according to BuzzSumo. Also, from a 2015 CMI survey, 75% of the marketing participants believe that their company will increase interactive content marketing.

You can see the growth in quiz engagement up till 2017 in this chart.

The top stories of BuzzFeed were all quizzes a few years ago.

With quizzes, you will have a deeper insight into your business’ target audience. It helps you get an idea of your client’s desires and needs.

You will find that one result from the 5-6 options outnumbers the rest. In this way, you will have better future content by locating what your audience resonates with.

Segmenting your list is also a vital aspect of quizzes. Here, you have control over creating the targeted messages of marketing for your audience’s distinct segments. Here is how you can do it:

  • Creating the results of your quizzes based on the varying audience segments.
  • Setting up the tags for everyone.
  • Placing the quiz takers’ inappropriate funnels automatically.

The content of your quizzes should be engaging. It shouldn’t feel like they are answering questions like a boring government survey.

Both the questions + answers should be able to connect to your verdict or bottom line. You can also attract over 10,000+ leads or more by following these steps:

Creating a Quiz Based on Your Attraction Goal – Your quizzes title + description should be able to catch the attention of your target audience. It should target what the audience has in their minds and the solution for it.

Asking Questions – You need to ask the right questions to receive sufficient data for refining your message and strengthening the value props.

Formulating your questions/quizzes around what you are ultimately trying to sell is the key here.

Writing Perfect Outcomes – Producing shareable outcomes, which offer value and a sneak peeks inside the solution you provide, is crucial. It helps in differentiating your quizzes from yet another boring post.

The copy that you are creating for your outcomes must provide insight, along with some actionable strategies.

There should be a real value, or the audience will feel like they only wasted their time on your quiz.

Testing Copy Variations – You have to understand your targeted audience before a quiz goes out.

It is important to consider certain factors, such as how they are speaking, the Facebook pages that they are liking, demographics, age groups, etc.

Setting up a few targeted ad campaigns on Facebook is vital. Proceed to test out some of the variations of your quiz’s description and title against one another. In this way, you will be able to conclude which performs the best.

Welcome Emails – A welcoming sequence is going to warm up all the cold leads. It will help them know you because the odds stand at them, taking up the quizzes for fun.

They will easily forget you if you are not following up. The worst-case scenario would be the fact you could have potentially assisted them.

3. Leverage Bad Reviews

COPYHACKERS was able to turn a ton of bad reviews into 100s of brand-new customers. Nobody wants to end up with negative reviews.

But what you don’t realize about receiving bad reviews is that you can bring light to the situation.

You can easily write some great copies, start optimizing your offers, and utilize what the unhappy customers tell you.

Here are some of the bad reviews that COPYHACKERS received:

But instead of refunding his client, COPYHACKERS got the idea of adapting the age-old method of sales for managing the objection all before his customer starts bringing it up. Just like COPYHACKERS, you can start leveraging bad reviews by taking up these measures:

Compiling Negative Reviews – Seek out all the bad reviews about your brand that you can locate.

A Google search will bring up all of them from Yelp, Facebook, and Trustpilot. Also, make sure to have feedback present in your slack channels, emails, phone calls, and text messages.

Start pulling out all bad comments and proceed to compile them. You can follow a similar approach in doing so, like COPYHACKERS, and record them in your Google Docs. It will be like a swiping file for all the negative feedback.

Identifying Pain Points – Now, you need to go through all the negative reviews and highlight the pain points.

Here, a pain point refers to the problem that your business should solve for functioning successfully. Some of the common instances of pain points are:

  • Making too much payment for average service and product.
  • Bad or non-responsive customer support.
  • Slower delivery.
  • Broken promises.

Start highlighting the texts, which appear to reveal the source. It is important to understand the reason behind the customer’s unhappiness and dissatisfaction. You can do as COPHYHACKERS did here:

People’s Review on Your Competitors – You need to repeat the same procedure, but this time it should be for your rivals’ feedback.

Start using all the publicly accessible channels and compile documents as you did for your brand.

Why? Because you can fill in the market gaps where your competitors are lacking.

Since the customers aren’t satisfied with certain aspects of their services or product, you can be the solution.

The customers would want to find a solution where all of their grievances are attended to. So, you can go through their criticism and create the solution.

Extracting the Largest Offenders – Organization, extraction, and analysis of your pain points, along with those of your competitors, is necessary.

It is advisable to create a table for recording all the pain points. You also have to sort them for all the times that they occur.

Doing it for a ton of reviews will get messy, so making a simple table such as this is important:

You can sort all the pain points into the big paint points. You can see it from the image present below. Plus, you can take them as your pain points categories.

This ‘big’ pain points are going to differ for everyone. The more entries you have under the big pain point, the more crucial it is for you to address and tackle it.

Also, there will be more impact when you are using it in a copy. For your competitor/rivals’ table, the same logic will apply, but you will have more entries, which eventually leads to a bigger fill for the market gap.

You can also create a column titled “Key Problem” for summarizing all the pain points. It allows you to witness the main problem and keep it aside for working on it later.

4. Visual Storytelling

Nowadays, it is possible to easily market via visuals, social media, and videos. Visual storytelling garners its power from potential presentations, images, infographics, other social media visuals, and videos.

Many social media platforms allow you to create a graphical story surrounding your brand’s offerings and key values.

It helps you to showcase what your brand stands for and also allows them to connect with you.

The content of visual storytelling works because it is simply thinking. The human brain can process visuals about 60,000 times quicker compared to texts.

Here, nonverbal communication forms about 93%. According to studies, blog posts that come with visuals can bring 180% more engagement than those without. The visual imagery is going to determine if a reader wants to continue reading.

Sephora is an excellent example of a company that utilizes images quite well. According to their data, their followers on Pinterest spend over fifteen minutes more on Sephora merchandise than their fans on Facebook.

Just like Sephora, you can also get the most out of your visuals by getting a hold of the 20 Best Webinar Software. You will have a chance to enjoy all the features in this software for your brand.

Another perfect example would be Dunkin’ Donuts. They don’t necessarily possess the largest budget, but they are excellent masters of content behind the scenes.

Also, you will come to know about how Dunkin’ Donuts tends to work with their fans on Facebook, which goes a long way in telling their story.

Dunkin’ Donuts tend to utilize both Pinterest and Instagram masterfully. Even their employees tend to partake in fun, meaningful ways.

Always remember that, at times, it is about real sharing and also real-time. It goes to prove that sometimes images from a smartphone POV are sufficient in the moment.

leadsOnce Dunkin’ Donuts even utilized vine videos during ad breaks at the Monday night countdown of ESPN.

This series was titled “#DunkinReplay.” There are many reasons behind its success and how storytelling played a major part here.

You can convey your brand’s authenticity, story, and what it has to offer with visual storytelling.

Start by saying how your brand came to fruition, the key message, and the type of initiatives that you are pushing for.

It is important not just to stress the specific product but also how you are going to market your brand and the folks behind it.

5. Leveraging Emotions in Your Content

Psychological triggers are important for getting customers to start clicking, converting, and engaging, etc.

Having an emotional bond with the audience is super important for steering them towards the desired outcome.

You create trust with your audience through an emotional connection, and it opens doors for both suggestions and ideas.

Marketing biggies like Joshua Glen and Rob Walker came to know about the importance of an emotional connection in marketing first-hand.

For an experiment, the duo purchased over 100 items from the thrift shops and similar locations. They wanted to sell the items by utilizing an emotional bond tactic. They wanted to exercise the power of stories.

The duo started generating fictional stories by taking the help of over 200 writers. They did so to sell all the thrift shop products on platforms such as eBay and auction.

The duo was successful and generated over a profit of 2,700% by raising under $8000. All of it was possible with the help of storytelling.

Almost a 3rd of marketers report a significant increase in profit while running an emotional campaign.

However, there is a dip in the number of successful campaigns with the introduction of logic marketing.

Successful marketers are smart enough to lean on the emotional tactic rather than the logic type.

leadsBut you have to realize that emotion isn’t the only thing that is making everything work.

Yes, it is undoubtedly important, but other key factors such as the content’s format, timing, presentation, exposure, and producing and sharing it also play a major part.

An array of emotions attract engagement. A ton of emotions tends to fuel both our behaviors + decisions.

According to a study by BuzzSumo, there was an analysis of the 10,000 mostly-shared articles present on the internet.

BuzzSumo started mapping all the emotions to see the biggest influencing emotions in all the content.

leadsKey Takeaway

Generating b2b leads isn’t easy because the trick of simply copying and pasting isn’t going to work.

A strategy that works for a brand may not work out for you. It is always important to know the key strategy for you.

There are a multitude of strategies for generating b2b leads in the market today. However, these five strategies are the ones that stand out and will work 100% for the general party.

Start hosting referral contests, quizzes, utilize visual storytelling, and start leveraging negative reviews and emotions into your business.

Soon, you will be at the top of the game with these strategies.

Kudos!! To you for reaching this section of the article. Now you will be better equipped and prepared to use these strategies for jet-setting your brand to the next level.

You can drop in your queries or any comments that you have to share with the group. We encourage you to be a part of the discussion.

Alex Chris is the Founder and Digital Marketing Manager of Reliablesoft, a digital marketing agency offering SEO and digital marketing services since 2002. He also authored the Digital Marketing Full Course. Connect with him on Twitter.

B2B Stock photo by Gustavo Frazao/Shutterstock