When discussing B2B industries, all their marketing campaigns should be geared toward lead generation. In fact, research says that approximately 85% of B2B marketers prioritize generating more leads over anything. Basically, lead generation is a streamlined process of making people interested in your services and gradually convincing them to turn into paying customers. However, generating high-quality leads is no more a doodle now.
In today’s world, customers are overwhelmed by marketers vying for their attention. So, people have learned ways to block the approaches that no longer resonate with their interests and aren’t tailored to meet their needs. Hence, the strategy behind generating leads has evolved drastically over the last few years. With the changing techniques and dynamics of customer behavior, you must learn how to set up a B2B lead gen campaign effectively.
In today’s guide, we will discuss a step-by-step process of setting up a B2B lead gen campaign that will help you grow your business drastically. Let’s keep reading to help your sales team spend more time on selling rather than prospecting.
The Step-By-Step Process to Set Up a Lead Gen Campaign
In this overly competitive market, driving new leads is getting more and more complex. Especially, when you don’t have a streamlined process set up for the campaign, then driving positive results will be pretty challenging. On the other hand, a perfect setup for your lead gen campaign helps you have an edge over others. It gives you a road map. But, what’s the process of setting up a lead gen campaign? Well, the entire process can be divided into four steps, planning, lead list building, outreach, and analyzing. Let’s take a look below,
Planning Phase:
- Identify Your Target Audience
One of the important parts of this planning phase is to identify the target audience. The process of finding a target audience for B2B models is a bit different. Generally, marketers divide their audience into a few segments like location, company size, industry, and job title. From these segments, you can create a proper buyer persona. But, it’s not going to be a typically B2C persona.
It’s a bit different as a few things play a critical role here such as the customer’s role in the company, their problems, challenges, and motivation. This information can easily be compiled through surveys. But, remember to create at least 4 to 5 buyer personas through your planning stage to represent the different stages of your target audience.
- Use a Robust Strategy
Well, it’s not a surprise that everything requires a strategy to be successful. Especially when you’re dealing in B2B industries where campaigns are more directed towards establishing an ongoing relationship with the clients rather than forcing them to make a purchase. A successful B2B lead generation strategy will help you utilize your resources at their best. You need to decide how you will promote your service, what your campaign goals will be, and what reporting system you will be using.
Also, there are multiple marketing channels available such as social media, paid media, content marketing, videos, events, blogs, PR, email newsletters, infographics, and whatnot. So, along with buyer personas, you will also have to pick the outreach channels through which you will reach out to your audience. Your strategy will help you decide how to utilize a channel for your target audience.
After all, you can’t use a single channel to hit your audience over and over as it will get annoying for them. So, having different strategies for each channel will help you stay ahead of the game.
- Create a Lead Magnet Strategy
This is pretty unfortunate but in reality, visuals and content don’t guarantee a repeat visit of your customer. Neither you can collect their email address by any chance. Therefore, you must create a lead magnet strategy in your planning phase to make people visit again. It could be an enticing offer, a free trial, or a case study for which people will enter their email addresses and other contact information in exchange.
But, for your lead magnet to work effectively, your website must have incorporated forms into every page of your site. These forms should be very specific, briefly explaining to customers how the offers will benefit them. Also, the lead magnet should address and solve a real problem of a customer. Lastly, demonstrate your expertise in the field to make people believe in you.
Lead List Building Phase
Once, you’re done with the planning phase, now it’s time to build the high-quality list of prospects that you will be targeting. There are basically two ways to acquire these leads. You can either purchase it from a third party like from a lead generation company or you can purchase it from a platform.
Outreach Phase
- Use Outreach Channels
As we’ve told you that there are multiple channels that you can use for outreach. Using only a single channel will only decrease your campaign’s efficiency. The top-tier companies use three basic channels; emails, phones, and LinkedIn. Usually, the process of outreach looks like this. You send an email to the prospect, followed by a phone call or a LinkedIn message.
Recently, the experts are also beginning to apply additional channels like personalized videos for prospects, and display advertisements to reach out to more people. However, regardless of the channels you use, the messaging should strictly focus on the customer’s challenges, goals, and KPIs. Most lead generation specialists also suggest applying for A/B testing for your emails to understand which is working.
- Automate Your Campaigns
Generating leads in the B2B landscape isn’t a one-night game. It takes time. Even when you have the most robust lead generation strategy in place, the process takes time. So, it’s better to automate your campaigns to save your precious time. Meanwhile, your team can focus on creating another rock-solid marketing strategy for you. There are automation tools like IFTTT, Zapier, and OnePageCRM that help you automate your sales process.
Analysis Phase
This is the last phase of setting up a successful lead generation campaign. Analyzing the health of your B2B lead generation campaign is undoubtedly an essential part. You should make reports on the number of lead generations, the number of emails sent, bounced, opened, and everything. This will help you check whether your strategy is working or not.
Conclusion
It’s no doubt to say that setting up a lead generation campaign is a lengthy process. It takes not only your time, but your effort, determination, focus, and whatnot. So, in the end, it will all be worth your effort. If you think that you don’t have this much time to take care of your lead generation process, there’s nothing to be afraid of. There are top-tier lead generation companies to help you out. We have the experts, knowledge, and industry experience that will help your business grow massively.