As someone who works in marketing every day, do you feel you’ve found the right lead generation technique to support your sales reps?
Not always easy, you might say… and that’s perfectly understandable, given how regularly, and ever more quickly, lead gen techniques evolve 🙂
Every study confirms it: B2B buyer behaviour has changed enormously over recent years. Today, buyers reportedly complete 60% of their purchasing journey without any contact with a sales rep (source LeadGenerator,2019).
Hence the importance of keeping them informed and staying constantly in view, without hounding them, because their digital maturity is now greater.
So how does new-generation lead generation work?
1/ A twofold requirement… that can seem contradictory
On one side, the need to stay constantly in front of your prospect, which implies plenty of content and campaigns that are fairly frequent, repetitive and large-scale, and on the other, the need for considered marketing, precise and responsible, just as the authors of the GDPR would dream of.
At Mixdata, we believe B2B outbound marketing must become more precise and more responsible to be effective, and should ultimately enable smarter “lead generation”.
The value of a sales intelligence or “Smart Data” tool like Mixdata lies precisely in letting you build better-segmented lists and engage the right targets. We move to acquisition marketing that is far more refined and personalised than before.
On the sourcing side, Mixdata lets you combine many search criteria and business indicators (over 900 in total). You get the right company list to work on, with as much contextual detail as possible and the lowest possible risk of going “off-target”.
On the email side, the platform ensures you identify the right decision-makers and can work from pre-qualified, validated business email databases.
You can therefore optimise impact by exporting the most precise email lists possible. These lists then feed your lead generation.
2/ Sales Intelligence and Sales Automation: two tools that work well together to generate leads
Once your sending segments are built, all that’s left is to keep your activity regular and maintain a continuous presence with your core-target prospects by designing smart sequences.
This is where Sales Automation tools (Hubspot, Prospect.io, Datananas, etc.), which connect automatically to Mixdata, really come into their own.
They let you reach selected prospects with automated email campaigns, at the frequency you choose, sent from your own business inbox. You build your targeted prospect list in Mixdata, then export it automatically into the Sales Automation tool of your choice.
In other words, these are simple email sequencing tools, no frills but highly effective for SMEs and mid-market companies that don’t necessarily have a large marketing department.
Provided, of course, that you craft smart, personalised messages that are more original than the tired ones we’ve all seen, usually drawn from banks of poorly translated American “templates”.
For this channel, as for the others, the idea is to be able to continually create value-added content to “push” it out via email or sales automation.
3/ The need to distribute your content across different channels: omnichannel is the watchword.
Every “growth hacker” will tell you, and you’ll have seen it for yourself: a single channel is no longer enough. Your prospects are now found and reached across several channels.
So you need to devise fresh approaches on familiar, and sometimes long-established, channels. Here’s a quick rundown of the various channels you can test, because depending on your market and how digitally mature your prospects are, some will be more relevant than others!
The email channel
- Educational emails and value-added content
- Transactional emails
- Promotional emails (on a regular basis, as recurrence is a success factor)
Social media
- LinkedIn ads, of course, for all B2B needs: through sponsored links or editorial content, taking part in discussion groups, or sharing news from your market.
- Viadeo, perhaps still a little…
- Twitter for highly digitalised sectors, in a very targeted, surgical way
- Facebook or Insta ads for agencies or companies with both B2C and B2B activity
Here too, you need to target your lead generation and be able to make yourself visible only to the right strategic accounts, otherwise you risk spending a lot of money for a huge bounce rate!
A few more tips on lead generation with LinkedIn in this article.
SEO and SEA
- Copywriting on your website, optimising your blog, creating various sites or mini-sites
- Organic and paid search… don’t hesitate to get help from an expert, as the rules are complex and change often
Behavioural targeting: retargeting and the like
- Tracking visits to your website, together with cookies, lets you stay present with your visitors as they browse
- Effective, but be careful to stay “reasonable” and avoid causing saturation 😉
Trade shows and physical, “real-life” events
- Because some prospects will only remember you if they meet you in person (yes, that still happens…)!
- Finally, a channel not to overlook for generating leads if you have content: the webinar, sharing value-added information as an online web conference, watched live or as a podcast, which often generates high-quality sign-ups.
In conclusion
Just like an angler who gradually improves, a winning lead gen approach can’t be declared into existence; it’s optimised over time, with hands-on experience of the tools and the learning curve that exists in every market.
It’s also optimised with good sourcing and good lists upstream “to get the fish biting”!
If you’d like to discuss it with our experts, this way!
