At AdLuge, we focus on internet marketing lead generation and lead measurement, but any seasoned marketer knows that a holistic approach is the best way to achieve saturation; SEO and PPC fit very nicely into this mix.
Business leaders are a much harder demographic to reach and convert than the general public. When spending a company’s money, business people are usually much more cautious than spending their own. A business buyer relies on careful research and critical thinking to make a purchasing decision. For most business purchasers, purchases begin with online research of different companies.
This makes internet marketing even more important for B2B than for standard purchases.
Email. I can’t stress this enough, email is a growing and increasingly effective way to generate online leads. You can set up a drip marketing campaign, using newsletters to potential leads to generate interest. Alternatively, you can use personalized emails and offers to build relationships with potential business buyers.
Online Discussion. Use LinkedIn groups, professional websites, and news releases to create a vibrant online discussion about your brand. This will help you rule the SERPs and will give business buyers a better idea of what to expect if they go with you.
Demonstrate expertise. Create content that will help people solve problems. Interact with other online bloggers to help spread news and solutions. You never know when a potential business buyer might be reading.
Webinars. Holding free or cheap seminars over the internet is a great way to meet picky and powerful business buyers. Be honest and helpful, and the leads will follow.
Podcasts. If you are a true expert, put aside an hour each week to release a podcast. You can set up a home studio with passable sound quality fairly inexpensively, and you can release tons of content by recording an hour and then releasing it in five minute segments. This adds another medium to your content creation machine, and appeals specifically to busy business buyers who listen to podcasts on their commutes or at the gym.
Sponsoring Professional Events. This is a great way to focus your advertising on business buyers.
Relationship Marketing. Be active in the community of your industry. Connect and build relationships with specific buyers. Don’t just offer your standard solutions and value propositions, offer a solution and value proposition that meets a client’s specific needs.
Picking and choosing. There is a lot to be said for choosing your most promising leads and following them up. Personal contact from a salesperson greatly increases the chances of a lead coming back, but your salespeople only have so many hours in a day. Come up with a quantitative way to decide which leads are worth the most profit.
Remember that Adluge can help you track offline efforts just as a effectively as your online efforts through unique URLs and phone call tracking.
For a great graph representation of current effective B2B lead generation methods, check out this link from Marketing Profs.
