Are you in B2B E-commerce industry for a while now but facing lead-lack? Are you engulfed in deep worry for finding solutions to get rid of this situation? Are you putting all your enthusiasm to do anything mad to give a real boost to increase the number and quality of your leads in a real sense?
Don’t worry! Use your perception a bit… Think about strategic B2B marketing that could bring a sudden smile on your face which you are seriously missing for a long time!
‘Lead’ – the word itself is so exciting for this industry that will directly kick on your mind to force you to do something special for your business/industry. This is like a pinch of salt in your delicious dish without which you can’t get the flavor of spices used in it. Sans lead there are no clients, no revenue, no business growth, nothing… you are gone. If you are determined to survive in this ever evolving competitive market, then you must bring in more B2B leads, which is quite a challenge to get. But I will give you some direction.
Firstly, the obvious question that will come to your mind is how to bring leads?
Below are 7 result-oriented marketing strategies which you can explore:
1. Using LinkedIn:
Among all other social media platforms, this one is identified as top notch in an aspect of bringing quality leads by using it’s organic and paid features. Experiments and experience voted this as the best solutions for bringing qualitative leads. The following stat clears the view:
Source: moneyjournal.com
Source: therealtimereport.com
Images say everything. From the above 2 images, it is evident that paying your attention over LinkedIn will surely give you a lot of benefits in terms of generating more leads. This platform is the only one, where the big boys of your industry verticals actively response and interact. Their response rate is the highest here. If you create high quality, utility content and share with your important connections, you are directly having an impact on the minds of your probable customers or partners. You can find the top-notch of an organization, decision-makers, technical/product head/specialist here by building a connection with them. Try to engage them with your business/industry/product by providing them something catchy to engage with and make them feel excited to come to a communication with you.
Also, you can use the paid features of LinkedIn, which is most effective paid social media platform without any doubt but a bit expensive for sure. You need to have a big budget in your wallet and a brave strategy to jump here. The beauty is that you can even select your audience according to their industry, member skills, groups, company size, job title and much more.
The powerful features are shown below:
All the yellow marks in the image above indicate the diversity in targeting criteria that we can choose.
LinkedIn Lead Generation Campaign:
Another very important paid feature to use to arrest the leads by showing a pre-filled form to the relevant audience. This is the most effective among other campaign types through which you can directly get the customer/lead details by showing relevant ads to them.
Below is the image of the form that forces you to put your details when you interact with the ad. This detail is the lead, with which your sales team will start potential communication further:
Sponsored Content:
It is another effective promotional way to show your content to your targeted audience who matters to you the most. This is not directly bringing you leads but helps you to a great extent to increase the visibility of your brand. Also, the scope of the leads coming to you in the future from this type of content network is high. So, you must try this for a while to promote the best content that you think is effective from lead generation perspective. The screenshot is shown below:
Try to implement all the strategies shared above, to see how many leads you are getting from it.
But again, you need to remember that you need to put an immense amount of effort to bring good leads from this platform Leads will not come easily, you need to bring it.
Following tricks will be useful for you:
Mark your Presence:
Be uber-active through interacting with your probable prospects, share potential and action-oriented information always. Connect with your audience and discuss things.
Optimize your company profile:
Your company presence is the most important aspect. It should be clear, concise, updated, interactive.
Group Joining and Announcement:
As you are in eCommerce B2B industry, try to join in relevant groups in many numbers. Once you are a member of your group, your any further post sharing in those groups, an announcement will reach to all the members present in those group. The important thing is constructing the content to be shared in those group, with proper links to your highlighted product page. This will increase audience engagement with your eCommerce business.
2. Email Marketing:
This is another rocking way to increase leads for your eCommerce business. It’s considered as an undisputed king of B2B marketing. 87% of B2B marketers use this strategy to bring new leads, while 31% depict this as the biggest impact on revenue making channel. Direct Marketing Association (DMA) found that email marketing delivers a $40 return for every $1 spent in terms of investment.
Two important statistics are shown in the below image:
Source: blog.capterra.com
9 important email marketing types are given below:
- Company announcement email
- Product update email
- Webinar email
- Attend an event email
- Case study email
- Request demo email
- Thank you email
- Survey email
- Free trial email
3. Attend Offline Events:
Sometimes, physical interaction with your clients/customers matters more than online activities. Your customers/partners want to interact with you face-to-face for business specific discussion. You need to be the face of your company to take the stride and bring the relation forward. Attend different trade shows, product conclaves or conferences to meet with the people in person who matters for your industry. Sometimes happy and fruitful discussions may help you to get more reference customers – ultimately referential leads. Many reputed and large organizations practice direct meet-ups with their audience for discussion rather than engaging only through web. This helps you with huge trust factor build-up.
Suppose, you are in Magento eCommerce business now for a while. You can chalk out a plan to attend different Meet-Magento events organized worldwide to share your understanding about product/technology/understanding. You need to sketch an event calendar and target specific events (e.g. Meet Magento Croatia, Meet Magento Prague) if your target audiences are located in and around those areas, where you will get ample scope of interacting with a number of Magento eCommerce professionals like C-level exec, partners in the most effective way. You can promote your company cut-outs, product specs and have verbal discussions.
4. Using Marketing Automation:
This technique makes your B2B marketing effort more simplified. This is the way to reduce a huge amount of manual work of promoting your relevant content to the relevant audience. Use automation software to do the same on your behalf. It helps you streamline and reduce the time-intensive labor of marketing tasks. As a marketer, you just need to tell the software what outcome you want.
Automation software uses the intelligence to monitor the user behaviors on relevant websites and user’s social profiles and brings leads for you. Your sales team then takes the primary role to nurture those leads through targeted messages/responses. The software itself recommends the email marketing tactics to guide those leads through the marketing funnel.
If you use advanced automation software, it will ease out all the hurdles starting from market research to lead generation, lead management, lead nurturing, campaign analysis, qualifying leads and effective sales scores.
However, the budget to use such kind of software is very high. So mostly the big organizations with very high budget, use them. Also, the process of orientation is a bit complicated. You need to be qualified enough to run the software into proper direction.
An important stat is shared below:
Source: emailmonday.com
However, some issues are always there while your company is opting for automation. This image has the information:
5. Webinar Promotion:
There are a lot of controversies if hosting a webinar is good for your B2B eCommerce lead generation strategy or not. A webinar is a very good way to generate quality leads if used properly. You need to focus on the topic, content, presentation and promotion to bring leads from that.
Show below are the stats which prove this point:
If the process is done right, it plays a big role in your business growth.
You need to remember that promotion of any particular webinar should start at least 3 weeks before the scheduled date.
Some pre-webinar promotion ways are:
- Listing webinar to your website’s webinar section.
- Submit it to different webinar submission sites (e.g. Webinara) for free of cost.
- Create a Facebook event from your official Facebook page. Use the webinar information in the Facebook page banner during the promotional period.
- Run ‘Event Response’ and ‘Event boosting’ campaigns to targeted audience to make the event awareness program
- Tweet a lot about the webinars from your official Twitter account, change the official Twitter profile banner with the webinar details.
- Promote your webinar in LinkedIn (organic promotion)
- Make weekly announcements from your relevant LinkedIn group.
Post-webinar promotional ways are:
- Sending emails with webinar details to the attendees and registrants
- Writing post-webinar blog on your website, elaborating how the webinar performed and addressing solutions to the questions that asked during webinars.
- Putting the recorded webinars on YouTube platform
6. Lead Magnet:
If you want a successful customer lifecycle, you need to optimize the process of converting visitors into leads. As a digital marketer, you put a lot of effort to promote your business without knowing how visitors are interacting. It is very important to monitor if you want to grow the number of your leads through marketing/promotion. Most of the time there exists a gap between traffic generation and lead generation.
As you are already aware of the process of traffic generation, you also should know the art of converting the traffic to your customer. There comes the lead magnet concept, which is nothing but some techniques/tweaks in your website to hold your traffic to your site and force them to put their details to you so that you may contact with them in future. This is essential for B2B business.
Lead magnets are tools that provide value to your visitors in exchange for their contact information. Businesses use lead magnets to nurture some signs of interest from their site’s visitors with the goal of receiving some sort of permission from their visitors to follow them up with potential giveaways.
Below are some lead magnets which you can use:
- Free Trial Form/ Free Shipping
- White papers
- eBooks
- Webinars
- Training videos
- Email opt-in
- Newsletter/Blog Subscriptions
- Coupons / exclusive deals
- Case study
- Sales materials/free consultation
- Toolkits
7. Lead Scoring:
This is another component of marketing software that helps you prioritize your leads according to their level of engagement with your inbound marketing content and finally find out the ultimate buyers. You can also find out buyers’ interest. You can use this technique to measure interactions that prospects have with your content by conveying points for different types of engagement.
An example is given below:
- Watch a product overview video – Add 9 points
- eBook Download – Add 7 points
- Opt-in form fill up – Add 9 points
- Unsubscribe from list – Deduct 9 points
This point-based approach to identify and analyze a company’s hottest leads will save your valuable time and money when reaching your target audience and focusing on sales opportunities. Once you are able to identify the hottest leads through this process, your sales team has gold coins in their hands to ease the communication with them knowing that they are already have shown a high rate of interest with your business.
I hope the above tips help you generate more quality B2B leads for your business.
If you are having a hard time in managing multiple applications for your business, you can seamlessly connect them using an integration platform. This will help you save a huge amount of time and effort and boost productivity and profitability of your business.
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