Digital marketers understand the importance of having a consistent influx of leads. Without leads, businesses simply can’t grow.
But it’s one thing to have leads and another to generate qualified leads that convert to paying clients.
Generating solid leads in the B2B digital marketing space is no mean feat, but it’s not impossible either.
What you need are the right tools to get the job done.
To that end, we’ll be looking at B2B lead generation tools that may help you reach your ideal prospects.
1. Invest in Lead Generation Tools
This is easily a great way to target audiences that are interested in the products or services you offer. These tools work by tracking customers and prospects, inviting feedback, and exploring customer connections online, among other ways.
Information gathered from the software can be used to create effective communication strategies for those prospects.
You can also integrate this software with your customer relationship management software to better understand key performance indicators and analyze data correctly.
The best lead generation tools can help you:
- Maximize brand awareness
- Target your ideal customer base
- Discover new opportunities
- Increase loyalty to your brand
- Collect valuable information about your prospects.
Examples of lead generation tools include Albacross, ConstantContact, Discover.ly, Hunter, HubSpot, OptinMonster, OutReachPlus, ProProfs Chat, and Pipedrive.
2. Gate Your Content
Here, you create content that requires site or email audiences to fill out a simple form before they can access it.
Unlike ungated content where content is offered without asking for any information, gated content helps you gather names, email addresses, phone numbers from audiences.
This information is then used to generate solid leads that can be converted.
Benefits of gating content include:
- Increases flow of quality leads. Which is what you’re looking for, right? When looking for information, people will typically assess how valuable the information is. If they considered it worthy, they will exchange their information for it.
- Helps marketers build robust contact lists they can use in their email marketing campaigns.
- Aiding segmentation of prospects. Use the gated content form to collect essential data about your prospects like industry or job titles. It will help you group your prospects and send information that is specific to them.
So, should you gate all content?
Absolutely not.
You’ll miss out on traffic from B2Bs in need of quick access to resources, particularly those at the awareness stage.
Plus, you’ll be losing the opportunity to showcase your thought leadership capabilities.
If people love your ungated content, they will deem the gated content even more valuable willingly to exchange their information for it.
You’ll need to strike a balance by using both gated and ungated content to reach wider audiences.
The content you can gate includes data-driven reports offering industry insights, white papers, product tutorials, and extensive guides.
3. Use Quora
To answer questions in your field of expertise.
With over 300 million active users every month, Quora is a haven for business audiences. People visit Quora to find information about a product/service or brand.
You can leverage this by consistently answering questions relevant to your business. As you answer the questions, you can hyperlink the product/service to attract warm leads that can be nurtured into customers.
This way, you’ll be growing your online presence, stamping your authority in your field, and making sales.
Here’s how to maximize Quora for lead generation:
- Optimize your Quora profile. Build credibility about your brand by providing short and informative details about yourself.
- Share accurate facts when answering industry-specific questions. Speak like an industry expert who understands the challenges faced by readers.
- Follow groups and topics that relate to your business. It will make identifying questions easier.
- Avoid using company logos as they may be picked up as promotional images, which may lead to your answers being banned. Work with images that you own or are licensed for free use.
On the same note, avoid creating multiple accounts to upvote your answers or boost your profile, as it may lead to a permanent ban.
4. Cold Calling
One thing many sales and marketing teams don’t understand is that there is a science behind cold calling.
Calling random numbers with no information about who they are and whether they need your products/services will get you rejected.
With proper groundwork and timing, cold calling can be an effective strategy.
Here are tips to help maximize this lead generation tool:
- Create your call list. Research your call list. Understand their industry challenges and how your company can solve these pain points.
- Come up with mini-goals to lead your prospects down the sales funnel. The first goal may be sending more info, the next one scheduling an appointment or a demo, and the next one reviewing the package you’re offering.
- Create a calling guide to give your call direction and to ensure you cover all key points while keeping conversations natural. Your call guide should include responses to common objections and hesitations.
- Avoid dominating the call by giving your prospects time to voice their opinions/needs. The more information you can gather, the better your chances of lining up solutions to tackle the prospect’s needs.
- Practice cold calling with your colleagues. They can offer constructive criticism to help you improve your skills.
5. Use Live Chat
Live chat allows your business to communicate with your visitors in real-time.
It beats the FAQs and product/service information pages since visitors receive prompt answers to questions that may not be tackled on other pages.
By improving response time, live chats increase customer satisfaction and nudge prospects to the next stage of the purchase process.
Live chats can also be triggered to push personalized messages to visitors, assisting them in making final buying decisions. This can be particularly useful for buyers who don’t have time to go through multiple web pages to find information.
Further, live chat can provide behavioral data to help you understand customers.
You’ll know the pages browsed, time spent on each page, and how many times the visitors have returned to your site.
With this information, you can create better and more personalized marketing campaigns to generate quality leads.
To maximize efficacy, train your live chat team to deliver a great customer experience. Train them to identify the visitor’s objective and offer relevant solutions in a quick and pleasant manner.
Happy visitors are more likely to convert than those who feel like your services aren’t up to par.