4 Ways to Transcend Your Lead Generation Endeavors to Outlast Your Competitors
The modern digital marketing landscape is dynamic and ever-evolving. To optimize your digital marketing strategies for generating high-quality leads and for withstanding your competitors you need to understand the modern digital landscape, it’s evolution, and transcendence.
Transcending your inbound lead generation tactics involves working on every aspect of digital marketing, ranging from personalization to campaign designing, & execution, and finally converting the prospecting opportunities into sales.
Expediting sales cycles by delivering the prospects with personalized and highly-tailored pieces of content, to optimize their experiences by providing them with seamless experiences across omnichannel is the ultimate secret to transcend your lead generation endeavors, in a way, that helps you outlast your competitors.
Read more on: How is Omnichannel Remarketing Effective in Accelerating Conversions
The marketers who argue that modern digital marketing approaches are complex, need to understand that not only marketing but the entire world has gone digital and hence the rapid and unprecedented increase in the field of digitization should not be astonishing.
Here we have tried to cover the best practices for lead generation to help transcend your lead generation endeavors and for you to be able to transcend your lead generation endeavors for optimized sales revenue and to outdo your competitors.
Understand Why Transcending your Lead Generation Tactics is Important
Lead generation lies at the center of every B2B marketing endeavor, be it Email Marketing, Content Marketing, or Social Media Marketing (SMM).
While with the evolution of digitization and technology, generating leads has become simpler than ever before, the generation of high-quality leads is becoming more difficult because of the constant increase in the competition.
Read more on: How to Assimilate Competitive Benchmarking in Social Media
Trends Showing that the Field of Inbound Lead Generation has Evolved over the Past Decade
Lead generation is now no longer a process to simply devise ways to collect leads which can be eventually forwarded to the sales teams, rather it has evolved in many aspects. For instance, modern marketers use a wide array of MarTech tools to generate leads and are often also responsible for nurturing, qualifying, and developing those leads before the involvement of the sales team.
The avenue of lead generation has diversified and it has become an amalgamation of developing and consolidating multiple opportunities for boosting the overall sales revenue besides just discovering people who might be interested in your solutions.
The concept of lead generation has evolved from what it used to be a decade ago. Today, lead generation is not just about prospecting but also about being at the right place at the right time and serving the prospects with the right pieces of information in order to help the prospects make the right call-to-action at the right time.
Serving personalized solutions to the prospects expedites their journeys through the sales funnel and not only boosts sales conversions but also helps in building long-lasting relationships with the customers.
Along with customer loyalty follows the repeat purchase cycles, increased after-sales services, and acquisition of new leads through positive word-of-mouth-marketing (WOMM).
Read more on 8 Reasons why B2B Marketers Should Prioritize Word-of-Mouth-Marketing (WOMM)
The following trends tell the story of transmutation of lead generation process:
1. Social Media Advertising for Lead Generation is Popular; however, the Organic Conversions on Website Generate More High-Quality Leads
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is an important part of a brand’s marketing endeavors. SMM is an important part of building positive brand equity. This helps brands in being competitive with their pricing and winning over customer loyalty.
While SMM helps you in improving your audience base and prospecting opportunities by facilitating the processes such as audience mirroring and creation of lookalike audience base, the leads generated from social media ads might not be qualified. This is specifically true if your website is specific for a sub-niche or a micro-niche.
Therefore, companies should have a clear idea of how well they are accomplishing their ROI goals when investing in social media advertising campaigns.
If you are not getting enough qualified leads from social media marketing, it means that your ideal prospects don’t reside in the platform or you managed to get your prospecting mistaken.
Any which ways, blogging, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) remain evergreen practices to acquire high-quality organic traffic.
By monitoring the influx of traffic on the website and by measuring and optimizing the website conversions, the marketers can not only generate high-value leads but also amplify the rates of conversions.
Tytus Golas, the founder of Tidio, prefers blogging and SEO over Social Media Marketing (SMM).
He states, “We will continue investing into Facebook ads, and they still work fine, but we plan to slowly switch our attention to bringing more organic traffic from Google.”
Even if not generating enough qualified leads, SMM remains an indispensable part of digital marketing endeavors. It can always fetch you some high-quality referral traffic to boost the organic traffic on your website and ultimately bolster the sale conversions.
So, in order to make the most of their SMM endeavors, marketers need to measure and optimize their advertising campaigns on social platforms.
Read more on How to Define & Measure Social Media KPIs
A. Automation and Personalization Go Hand-in-hand
Automating the lead generation campaigns is the need of the hour. You cannot be talking individually to specific customers all the time.
However, delivering hyper-tailored content to optimize lead generation and nurturing endeavors is more important than ever before. Generating dynamic and predictive pieces of content based on users’ intent-data has become the need of the hour.
Read more on How Intent Data Analysis Helps B2B Companies Boost ROI
Arek Ponski, Founder of Teambuzz believes that delivering customers with personalized experiences inspires customer loyalty.
He states, “We believe that the personal approach is the way to acquire leads and later loyal customers.
Read more on 5 Essentials of Dynamic Content for Smarter B2B Marketing
B. Think about the out-of-box Solutions
Do what everyone is doing and go too far with the mainstream strategies. In marketing doing only what everyone is doing makes you part of a sheep herd. If you don’t think out-of-box and implement innovation in marketing, you wouldn’t achieve remarkable results, and chances are that you will keep on swinging to the mean of mediocracy.
Daniel Ndukwu, the founder of KyLeads, explains how following the copybook style and following the mundane mainstream makes your marketing endeavors less effective:
“Content upgrades aren’t as effective as they’ve been in the past. This may be due to the tactics becoming mainstream.”
Read more on Top 10 tips for Content Marketing During Coronavirus
A Right Approach to Market Segmentation is Important for Transcending Your Lead Generation Endeavors & Make Them Stand out Amidst the Competitive Marketplace
We all know that irrespective of the products or services you have to offer or their quality, personalized marketing campaigns will always remain an essential and non-negotiable requirement in the execution of lead generation campaigns.
For driving personalized marketing campaigns, it is essential for marketers to get the market segmentation right.
Segmentation of your ideal persona into different groups is a challenge as:
- The marketers need to define as well as distinguish specific segments
- According to the segmented audience groups, marketers need to create relevant content that will engage with those particular segments
- Marketers need to reach specific audience segments with relevant content – The content funnel should be well-diversified containing general accessible and widely applicable pieces of content for audience groups at the top of the funnel and specifically targeted technical pieces of content to stimulate the down-the-funnel conversions. Also, the pieces of content need to be both textual, as well as, visual in nature.
According to a blog published on Alexa, Targeting is an essential part of marketing.
Therefore, the marketers need to segment their ideal persona into several segments and then deliver targeted pieces of content to specific audience segments through various channels including gated resources and live chats.
Joyce Chou of Compose.ly explains the importance of gated resources as follows:
“Our favorite tried and true strategy is creating gated resources to acquire leads.”
Steps to Transcend Your Lead Generation Endeavors beyond Mainstream to boost Sales Conversions
Modern lead generation endeavors are centered on marketing tactics to capture and stimulate the interest of prospective customers in a product or service at disposal.
With the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and improved social media marketing techniques the marketers need to upgrade their lead generation efforts.
Let’s have a look at the steps you can take to transcend your lead generation endeavors:
1. Focus on Creating Interactive Pieces of Content
Traditional pieces of content put together by the writers and published promote only one-way conversation between the brand and the potential customers. The customers can just read, like, or share such pieces of content.
To transcend your lead generation endeavors you need to interact in a conversational mode with your prospective customers or leads. Conversations between the brands and the customers in an amicable environment allow both of them to gain the vital pieces of information that they need.
Stefan Debois of Survey Anyplace infers the importance of creating interactive pieces of content in the following words:
“Since it offers two-way communication, interactive content generates twice as many conversions as static content.”
The brands can employ the following strategies to make their pieces of content interactive and to engage with their prospective customers:
- Asking Questions
Marketers can employ quizzes and questionnaires to generate leads. Such pieces of content allow marketers to interact with their customers better and simplify targeting.
- Employing chatbots to Optimize the Landing Pages
Having chatbots on the landing pages ensures that the customers who visit the website with specific purposes or questions in mind, get straightforward answers to their questions without facing much clutter.
Chatbots can be automated or humanized with live chat operators. Nowadays, the evolution of AI algorithms allows marketers to make artificial assistance more humane.
Read more on Have no Fear, Chatbots are Here
Serving customers with what they want help in boosting their experiences and eventually leads to optimized conversions on the landing pages.
Read more on 11 Practices for B2B Landing Page Optimization (LPO)
- Leveraging Educational Content
Audiencesnowadays prefer educational content, particularly the ones that demonstrate high degrees of relevance to the areas of interest of the target audience groups and ones that reflect on high-levels of subject-matter-expertise and are considered to be reliable and valuable by the audiences.
When it comes to creating educational pieces of content nothing beats videos in generating leads driving engagement and optimizing the sales conversions.
Michal Leszczynski, content marketing manager at Getresponse explains the importance of employing webinars for lead generation:
“People nowadays prefer learning through video content, live, or on-demand.”
Create online tutorials and webinars, they will not only transcend and optimize your lead generation endeavors but will also help you bolster your revenue goals.
- Re-initiate the Conversation with the old leads
Reconnecting with the lost leads is an effective practice that can give you one more chance with a potential high-value customer whom you failed to follow-up with last time due to some reasons.
Getting in touch with the old leads and striking the conversation by asking them for help to clean up your database can help marketers reconnect with potential buyers.
Not only it helps the marketers with cleaning up their database but it can also help them restart conversations with the prospects that were lost along the way.
2 Showcase the Social Proofs that advocate of Your Reliability
Online reputation management is an art. Mastering reputation management by leveraging the right social tools allows marketers to be perceived as strongly reliable by the target audience groups.
Read more on How Omnichannel Reputation Management Assists in B2B Branding
This not only helps with prospecting and conversions but also assists with customer retention and repeat purchases. Besides, additional revenue is also generated because of winning over customer loyalty.
Carsten Schaefer of Crowdy.ai describes the importance of customers loyalty in winning over additional customers as follows:
“If you already have happy customers, why not use them to get even more happy customers? With modern software tools, it’s easier than ever to use.”
The value of trust in business is immense and displaying social proofs such as customer reviews and testimonials helps marketers with client acquisition, retention, and conversions.
Also, modern customers research online reviews and referrals before investing their money in a product or service. Therefore, to transcend your lead generation endeavors, you must effectively communicate to your prospects why they should trust you with your products or services.
Read more on Why B2B Marketers Should Leverage Ratings and Reviews for growth
3 Participating with Your Niche-specific Communities
Humans are social beings and being with communities is a way of life. The same philosophy applies to the B2B marketing pursuits as well.
Socializing with your niche-specific communities gives you an idea of what’s latest within the communities and an idea of what are the common challenges being faced by the members and what opportunities lie untapped to be explored.
Also, building and participating in communities allows marketers to interact with each other and with the influencers.
Nikola Baldikov of Brosix describes his experience with community engagement as follows:
“I participate in Twitter conversations as well as niche Facebook groups. It’s a good pool of potential customers, and a great way to show them what your business is offering.”
Activities such as guest-blogging, engaging in cross-promotions, and link-building tactics allow marketers to symbiotically benefit from one another as they can improve their credibility, customer reach, domain authority, and drive a greater proportion of high-quality organic traffic on their websites which improves the website conversion rates.
4 Make Your Content SEO Friendly
Marketers need to assure that their content strategy is SEO-friendly. In order to transcend your lead generation endeavors, you certainly need a content strategy that Google loves so that your pieces of content can be easily discovered by the target audience groups.
Read more on Top 10 SEO KPIs for your Business
Focus on making your content strategy E-A-T friendly, that is the one that speaks of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Also, marketers need to keep in mind that following the recent Google core updates i.e. the one in May 2020, January 2020 core update, and the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) Google will prioritize the search intent of the users over the actual meanings of words being searched for.
Read more on How Google’s 2020 Core Update will Impact Your Business Sustainability
Under such circumstances, marketers should consider embedding videos in your pieces of content and write for user intent and not feature for your targeted keywords. In short, make your content strategy more credible, trustworthy, and tailored to users’ search intent at specific stages of their respective buying cycles to transcend your lead generation endeavors.
Read more on How Leveraging Video Content Boosts Organic SEO
Wrapping Things Up
For transcending your lead generation endeavors for the year 2020 and beyond you need to see beyond the obvious. While the implementation of the mainstream strategies isn’t such a bad idea; compromising on innovation and experimentation might make your lead generation efforts stagnant.
Thinking out-of-box and keeping the originality and exclusiveness of your lead generation endeavors intact is the main strategy that will help you transcend your lead generation endeavors. The other core practices are also important but the above-listed ones are absolutely non-negotiable.
With the rapid proliferation of the digital landscape, you need to use omnichannel marketing and remarketing strategies to practice to transcend your lead generation endeavors and talk to your customers in new ways, often through entirely new and unexplored channels. Be a possibilist, experiment, and establish what works the best for your business.
Step out of your comfort zones and try new tactics to generate leads, nurture them, and develop and qualify them before passing them on to the sales teams. Exploring all possible opportunities for generating high-quality leads is like showing the seeds for transfiguring the desired revenue goals to full fruition.
Valasys Media is a well-known name in aiding B2B organizations to enhance their marketing endeavors. We leverage exceptionally well-researched and hyper-tailored B2B services including lead generation, lead nurturing, account-based marketing, list building services, contact discovery services, content syndication services, event promotion, appointment setting, business intelligence, and CRM services to outstandingly help the B2B marketers achieve their desired revenue goals and other core business bottom-lines.
Be it the technical know-how of prospecting advancements, help with the transformation of your sales pipelines, or closing those sales deals, or you need us to simply address your inquiries, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us and we would be glad to help.