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Lead Generation

Best B2B lead generation strategies for technology companies

July 30, 2021
Ultimately you would want to engage with prospects who show interest in your product or services. These quality leads can be the advocates of your brand by being your customers. Leads are nothing but qualified prospects who have taken some action on your shared content.

You had made them aware of your brand by educating them or being present before them when deciding. Here comes the time to plan how to marry your audience’s wants and what you want to offer them. It should be the right mix of inbound, outbound, and paid marketing to get quality leads.  

Outbound methods include cold emails, cold calls, LinkedIn messages. Outbound is tricky because the prospect doesn’t have any or little idea about your product.  

Inbound leads can be attracted by offering them YouTube videos, blog posts, LinkedIn articles, demo videos. Paid advertising can be included with your inbound marketing strategies. Yet, you can look at it as a separate process. When you create a 360-degree lead generation campaign, paid ads can appear on Google search, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. 

How do tech companies generate leads?

The lead generation process, also known as ‘lead gen,’ can be tedious. B2B lead generation is all about establishing trust and growing your business. When prospects sign up to learn from you, that’s when they provide their contact information to you. Your knowledge-sharing materials can be a newsletter, an offer, a webinar, or an eBook that is of value to them.  

It’s beneficial to keep a customer-centric approach while creating a campaign for lead-gen. It sends the right communication and also makes your content precise and targeted. Of course, everything starts with research. Know your product, list down the profiles you’re targeting, create potential customer personas and b2b buyer journeys to make sure you’re reaching out to the right people.  

One of the essential parts of the lead-gen process is to be ready with the content marketing strategy. Gated content asks the users to provide their information. It includes eBooks, brochures, datasheets, infographics. And ungated content includes blog posts, videos, and social media posts.  

In B2B SaaS marketing, lead generation and demand generation and used interchangeably. While the purpose of demand generation is to build an audience around a business. B2b lead generation efforts focus on finding and qualifying leads that are most interested in making a sale.  

Get involved with communities

To build strong advocacy for your brand and make a great relationship with your customer base, find communities that match your target market and personas. A brand community is about creating an environment of belongingness, as your brand is the most recognizable asset you have. 

A brand community is a powerful tool for your business. You can discuss feedback, share blog posts and other content, give early access to the users. It helps to incorporate timely changes into your solution. 

Your brand community is already out there. That means people who love and talk about your brand are already present on social media and other networking platforms. Let’s talk about a few most used platforms for community building. 

Reddit communities 

Reddit is an engaging platform to find your smart bunch of audience. It is for driving traffic and disseminating information about your product. Reddit has the option to join subreddits, a board dedicated to a specific topic.  

Some of the best subreddits to be a part of today, are: /r/futurology/r/privacy/r/startups. If you’re a technology company looking forward to engaging with passionate communities, this list will help you. 

Use the power of AMA (Ask me anything) and connect with your audience directly. Start meaningful and productive conversations to build some authority for your brand. 

Facebook comminutes 

With a base of 1.88 Billion daily active users (DAU), Facebook can help you reach a broad spectrum of audiences. SaaS growth hacks, is one such community for b2b SaaS companies. It has 26 thousand members who are entrepreneurs, CEOs, founders, and technology enthusiasts.  

Indie Hackers Community 

Unlike Facebook and Reddit, which have widely-known popularity, Indie Hackers is gaining popularity. Slowly geeks, entrepreneurs, and subject matter experts are starting. It’s a place where founders share their success stories and knowledge. It’s a great place to find your niche. 

Be a source of expert knowledge and be present where your target audience is. 

Gated content best practices for your Content Strategy

Gated content offers knowledge to the viewers in exchange for their information. The content could be in the form of eBooks, whitepapers, guides, online tools, which are available once the user fills the form to access it. Inbound legend Hubspot does it while offering great marketing. 

With relevant content for your product, you can start optimizing the b2b lead generation journey. This includes adding lead magnets, lead capture, and designing a great landing page. Just keep in mind that you may need a data enrichment tool to enhance the information you get from your lead from. 

Optimize landing pages for demo or trial signups 

Building a solid landing page is one of the keys to high conversion of your leads. Your CTA and your message on the landing page should be in sync to guide your prospects on the right path.  

Pay for ads on competitor branded searches 

Organic CTRs (click-through rates) for branded keywords are higher than non-branded keywords. Google keyword planner, SEMrush, Moz, Arefs are a few tools that can help you with keyword planning and PPC (pay per click) marketing. 

Send Surveys to your Prospects and Customers 

It’s a good idea to check with your customers and probable leads from time to time to understand the market and improve your product and communication. Surveys are a set of questionnaires that are used for market research and also for b2b lead generation. This can be both gated or ungated based on the theme and intent.  

Analyzing the actions on gated content 

A thorough competitive analysis will help you understand what attracts users. Knowing your content is halfway through. When you put it out there, it must be in an actionable format. This is where your gated content comes into play. Gated content makes it possible to share long-form content in exchange for user information.  

Influencer marketing

Brands such as Microsoft and Cisco have aced influencer market. It’s a reasonably booming space and can even cut down on the conversion timeline for b2b lead generation companies. “Campaigns are now being associated with social media and influencer marketing, rather than just eBooks, events, or downloadable content.” 

Partner with other companies that service the same target market 

Partnering with brands that cater to your target market can bring organic leads. If you’re starting out or your complex sales and b2b lead generation strategy, it might cost you a huge amount of time and price. it’s great to collaborate with brands as partners. You can keep your audience engaged by giving them a partnership discount or a VIP and early access to your products. 

Create a YouTube channel

While YouTube is home to viral videos, it’s also the most prominent video repository of knowledge exchange. B2b sales companies can create an audience base by sharing information for free. It can help in understanding the market’s needs by engaging with viewers. 

One such example is a YouTube channel called Ahrefs. It provides actionable digital marketing tutorials. They can help you optimize your YouTube channel, bring organic traffic, and establish your online presence. Through their educational content, they also promote their SEO tool. 

These are the few essential points that every brand needs to follow on YouTube: 

Optimize your Video content and YouTube Channel 

Research the keywords and phrases people search for to view videos of similar kinds. Create your video description with those keywords. You can also add links to the desired landing pages. This can, in turn, help you increase traffic to your website. 

By including keywords and your brand name in your video title, you can have better visibility when google indexes your videos. Using YouTube’s tagging feature, your video can appear as ‘related videos’ when someone watches something similar. 

Engage With your Viewers by providing interesting content 

An engaging and interactive video will increase the user base loyalty. By making it educational combined with the usefulness and features of your product you can increase engagement. By answering the questions your viewers ask or discuss, you can make it more interactive. If you want your viewers to visit a page or take action, include a call-to-action (CTA) and inform them about the same in the video. 

YouTube has various options for targeting, such as contextual, behavioral, geotargeting, retargeting. With spot-on targeting, lead generation yields better leads. So, you can consider YouTube ads to reach people who are interested in your product. With the help of YouTube analytics  

Webinars for long-term content marketing 

If you’re a B2B SaaS tech company, lead generation remains almost incomplete without webinars. More so now, in this Covid19-affected-world when physical events are almost non-existent. Even though planning a webinar takes time, effort, and cost, it helps you produce high-quality content.  

Types of webinars 

Webinars serve various purposes. It can be educational/trendspotting webinars for lead generation. Product launch, new feature-specific webinars are relevant for lead nurturing and customer retention. Whereas demo webinars are for your sales funnel activities. Internal subject matter experts, by partnering with industry leaders, you can host a webinar.  

Webinars are a great marketing effort for these 

Finding high-quality b2b leads 

These are the prospects who have shown interest in your brand and webinar content. They also remained throughout the journey till the webinar day. They are better ready to take action. 

Webinars are not restricted to locations. This gives you the leverage to meet leads from various backgrounds. 

Partnership Opportunities 

Webinars can open the gateway to a partnership with SMEs, influencers, and other brands that work in complementary space. The partnership gives a fresh perspective to your communication and sales efforts. Hosting webinars can be your building block to creating trust and authority in your product space. 

To host a successful webinar, you have to start defining your target audience and goal. Start building the repo with your partners. Set up your webinar landing page and keep content and content strategy in hand to reach out to the most audiences. 

A few successful rehearsals can make sure you’ll have a great kickstart to the webinar. 

Content Syndication

Content syndication means publishing your content on third-party websites. These can be association websites or industry consortiums in both free and paid formats. This re-published content has appeared somewhere, such as on your company website blog post. And by adding a canonical link to that original article or your website, you can know who are your prospects.  

These websites target your preferred geo-location, professional titles, company size, and specific industries. You can look at the reputation, reach, audience size, segmentation capabilities of this third-party website before deciding on partnering. 

Content syndication can give you the buyer’s intent data, goal, interest level, time spent on your content. This information can help you personalize your campaign and content both. 

B2B Referral programs

Referral programs not only save your time but also builds trust and reputation. Referral marketing is reaching out to people who will advocate your product out of goodwill. They can be customers, friends, partners, etc. 

Referred customers are loyal and valuable. The referral process also improves their retention rate. Customer acquisition cost is very high. As a respite referral marketing increases your brand awareness at almost no cost. 

This idea can be related to influencer marketing, where your influencers have their unique working code. It gains them commission for each sign-up and gets you more b2b leads. Dropbox runs an amazing referral program, for which they retain their customers as well as onboard new ones by giving extra storage space as the incentive.  

A well-planned b2b lead generation strategy can help you create interest and demand in your product and create a unique space for it. Using your data wisely can help you create a scalable and successful lead-generation campaign. 

Author

Greg Tucker