Many B2B marketers still seem to rely heavily on "traditional" marketing methods to generate interesting sales leads for their sales team.
Some examples include: placing ads in trade magazines, conducting direct mailings, telemarketing campaigns and a nicely dressed booth at a trade show.
The above activities can consume quite a bit of the marketing budget, while the marketing channel par excellence for sustainable sales lead generation gets a lot less attention (budget): the B2B website.
In this article, I want to list 5 building blocks that can be used to turn every B2B website into a sustainable lead generation machine.
Building block 1: relevant content
Make sure your website contains information that is relevant to your ideal customer. Map out what business challenges your ideal client faces and write about them in the form of blog articles or more extensive knowledge documents such as e-books and white papers. In doing so, also take into account the "buyer journey" of your potential client and write content for each stage of this buyer journey.
Building block 2: at least 1 conversion path
If your potential customer finds the information on your website valuable, he or she is quite willing to fill in some contact details, such as name, e-mail address and the organization for which he or she works.
Make sure you build at least one conversion path on your website. A conversion path is the combination of:
- a call-to-action button ("click the button for this white paper") ,
- a landing page ("fill in your details here") and
- a thank you page.
Building block 3: lead management system
Because the buying cycle in B2B marketing is usually a lot more complex and lengthy than in a B2C environment, far from all incoming leads will generally be a match to your ideal customer profile.
Therefore, it is important to set up a lead management system that:
- You can qualify the incoming leads based on uniform criteria, preferably composed in consultation with your colleagues from sales
- Follow up the interesting incoming leads with relevant additional information(lead nurturing).
Building block 4: demand generation: inbound and outbound
Once the above building blocks are properly set up, it only makes sense to invest time, money and energy in getting more traffic to your website.
For this you can use inbound marketing tactics such as blogging, social media participation and search engine optimization, complemented by outbound marketing tactics such as search engine advertising, email marketing and display advertising.
Building block 5: marketing automation
In order to automate repetitive tasks and keep track of the return on investment of all the above activities, it is necessary to have sound marketing software.
By setting up this software properly and in a logical manner, you will save yourself a lot of time and you will be able to provide conclusive reports on your lead generation program at any time. And thus the added value of your marketing activities for the company!
