Lead generation via email marketing, LinkedIn, and social media is great but let’s face it, they’re expensive, and the competition is fierce. Even if you cut through the competition, you end up with numerous leads, interested only in free trials or marketing collateral.
It’s time you stop going after the herd —or try different strategies along with popular ones —to generate leads for your business.
Below are the top 3 most underrated lead gen techniques to fill your funnel. But first, let’s understand how B2B lead generation works.
What Is B2B Lead Generation?
Types of Lead Generation Techniques
Most Underrated B2B Lead Gen Sources
What Is B2B Lead Generation?
Lead generation refers to capturing the attention of your audience. Once a person – who initially didn’t know about your product – becomes aware and develops an interest in it, they become a lead.
Generating leads is the first part of the sales funnel. After you capture a lead, your sales team begins to nurture them with content like blogs, paid ads, and other marketing collateral to guide them further down the funnel.
Types of Lead Generation Techniques
Inbound
Who doesn’t like leads coming to them on their own? Inbound refers to attracting potential customers and not chasing them, depending heavily on content marketing.
You put your product out there by posting across various social media channels. One attention-grabbing post makes your potential customer follow your page. From there, they might check your website and read your blogs.
After consuming a lot of your content —valuable, we hope —they become interested in your product and check out landing pages or directly enquire about the product. Then, it’s up to your sales team or copywriters to convert them into paying customers.
Inbound lead generation is lucrative but indirect. If you want to take matters into your own hands, you’d like the outbound method more.
Outbound
Outbound refers to engaging with your target audience and making them aware of your product.
As a business, you can send emails, DMs, or calls — pretty old school to be honest — to your potential customers to develop an interest in your product.
Outbound lead generation involves heavy research on the customer’s background. You create a buyer’s persona and find people who fit the mould —your target audience.
Get their email in exchange for something valuable like an ebook, a template, or a free guide. Then, you can reach out to them with a great pitch.
You can pursue outbound via social media DMs where you directly message prospects with your pitch, and it’s a bit direct and demands more nurturing. You have to engage — like, comment, and share — their posts before you slide into DMs.
Most Underrated B2B Lead Gen Sources
Quora
190 million monthly active users discuss more than 400,000 subjects on Quora — plenty of room to hunt for your prospects. Lead gen on Quora depends on the value you provide. You can generate leads organically and via paid ads. Let’s understand both.
Organic Lead Gen on Quora
Build an authoritative profile: People trust answers from a person of authority. Write a clear bio highlighting your position and what you do. Post valuable content and share wins and failures with proof to build authority on the channel.
Engage in topic discussions: Find discussions by searching for industry keywords. Look for popular answers and analyze how they’re written. Then, implement the same to enhance your solutions. Don’t forget to drop links to an elaborate blog on your website. Remember, you’re there to drop value, not to sell. Your answers should tempt users to check out your profile.
Make connections: Network with people with interesting questions and answers in your industry – that’s the first step to warming a cold lead.
Paid Lead Generation Campaign on Quora
Quora has its own lead gen campaign, allowing users to run ads and gather lead information via the form.
The campaign starts with setting an objective. Since you’re there to generate leads, choose lead generation among other options like app installs, conversions, and awareness. Define your budget, create an ad, pay, and you’re all set to bag leads from Quora.
As a part of lead generation, Quora offers a form to gather user information inside the app. The form contains your brand logo and can also guide users to your website landing page for further details.
You can create a form from the “lead gen tab” or “create an ad” tab on Quora. The form appears with your image and text ads and promoted answers.
Quora is strict about the value your business provides in exchange for user information. Therefore, it only accepts only the forms that fulfil its guidelines.
Guidelines for Quora Forms
Fields: Choose 12 fields regarding contact information, occupation, and location.
Examples:
- Name
- Job title
- Company name
- Country
- State
- Zip code
Headline: The headline of your form should convey what users will get upon filling out the form. The character limit for headlines is 65 characters.
Write a clear headline. Example: “Sign up for the newsletter” or “download our SEO guide”
Don’t use headlines without any information about your office. Example: “Interested in business?” or “Free masterclass”
Confirmation message: The confirmation message should lead the user to the next step. For instance, if they filled out the form for an ebook, the confirmation message should be, “click below to download your ebook.”
Texts like “Thank you” or “Good day” are unacceptable and will get your form rejected.
Facebook Groups
Facebook groups house 1.8 billion people across the globe.
Facebook ruthlessly cuts down reach on the news feed, making these groups a haven to network and communicate with people in your niche. Let’s understand how you can generate more leads with Facebook groups.
How to Generate Leads via Private-Visible Facebook Groups?
Facebook has two types of groups: public and private. Anybody can join public groups, but I wouldn’t advise that for lead generation. It crowds the community with unnecessary posts, reducing the chances of finding exciting leads.
Create private groups that are visible —come up on search —to everyone. It’s like an invite-only party but for your business which offers a sense of exclusivity to the members and builds a strong community.
Here, you control your membership as you’re the one to allow people inside the group. You can reduce spam bots as well.
Create Facebook lead Ads for your groups
Create ads to invite more people to your groups. Include videos and ad copies to maximize the impact.
Create onboarding questions to ensure you’re allowing the right people inside your group. Ask questions like, “can you provide email to stay updated with group activities and offers?” or “would you like a free guide?” to gather emails while onboarding.
Once you have your group up and running, drop links to lead members to your landing pages.
- Hosting a webinar? Drop a link with the post.
- Answering a product-related query? Drop a link to the solution.
Remember, the group’s purpose is to build a community—balance lead generation with providing knowledge to avoid being sales. Provide free information and invite people to trial. Then, aim for upselling.
Business Events
Strong relationships always lead to business growth, and what’s better to build relationships than face-to-face communication. As per the Client’s research, almost 85% of business decision-makers like senior executives and board managers believe in the power of in-person events. They consider it “essential” for a company’s growth.
Business events were always famous for lead generation and networking, but the pandemic slowed their impact. Marketers drove towards virtual events and claimed to have seen better results with them.
Either way, events are a great way to generate B2B leads. To create a successful event, you must follow a three-step strategy.
- Planning
- Content Creation
- Outreach
- Event
Planning
It encapsulates your ideal customer profile, outreach strategies, and goal setting. Planning involves much brainstorming as you don’t have anything on the table.
How to plan your event?
- Create an ideal customer profile, so you know whom to invite.
- Assign a team of copywriters, researchers, and outreach experts. You don’t want to miss opportunities to turn a product conversion into a demo appointment.
- Pick your outreach channels – social media, emails, or offline. The more, the merrier, as the multichannel approach is the best. If you’re doing it online, create a content strategy for each funnel stage – which brings me to my next topic.
Creating Content
This part is crucial for online events. Buckle up your copywriters to create pamphlets, ads, landing pages, outreach emails, blogs, and social media copy.
Tips for creating content:
- Focus more on getting meetings instead of marking sales.
- While creating content, put your customers the centre stage. The emails must be about them, and landing pages should highlight their pain points. Then, tell them how you can solve those.
- Don’t add too many links to the email copy. The goal is to get them to the event so add the joining link only.
Outreach
Collect data about your attendees’ names, companies, and contact numbers. Your SDRs must research sales and ensure the attendees match your ideal customer persona.
Tips for Better Outreach
- Talk about their pain points and ask questions about their struggle. Explain how the prospect may benefit from your product.
- Follow up with an email with a summary of your conversation.
Event
Continue your outreach during the event. Follow up afterwards to remind you of your conversation. Also, send emails to people who didn’t attend the event or who didn’t agree to the next meeting.
Conclusion
If you’ve spent enough money on popular yet competitive lead gen methods, but still didn’t see any ROI, try these. These techniques focus on the number as well as the quality of the leads. With the right strategy, these techniques work wonders for your business.
FAQs
What is B2b lead generation?
B2B lead generation is identifying a customer and then attracting and nurturing them to buy your product or services.
How to generate leads for b2b business?
Attend business events, Send cold emails, Be active on online forums, and use remarketing.
Why are B2B sales hard?
There are many chances to make mistakes, sales cycles are longer, and lack of time are some of the reasons that make B2B sales hard.
