With cold calling and mailing looking the things of the past, and smart lead generation techniques like customer profiling from ML, news, social media, and forums making a way, what should an aspiring entrepreneur consider as their lead generation strategy?
This is a good question, thank you for asking it. I'm sure there are many business owners and newbie entrepreneurs who constantly wake up with the sweats trying to make ends meet by increasing their lead generation, strengthen their pipeline, and increase conversions. At the end of the day, it's all about converting, right? I'll give you what I consider a basic guideline for building a pipeline of good reliable high-quality leads that are easier to convert. We use this methodology for our clients and for our own marketing agency.
www.Unthink.me is just a 4 people team with a few contractors helping us on certain projects but the structure that I have created for ourselves is what allows us to work with only certain clients we like and the ability to charge as low or high as we want. For context, we have clients that pay as low as $100 per month and some that several thousand and that is because we get a lot of client requests and proposals, etc. Let me start by saying that you are right and wrong at the same time. Many very large, publicly traded, tech companies rely heavily on cold-calling while mailing is still king for certain industries.
Here is a basic methodology guideline you should consider and keep top of mind with any effort you put out there for lead generation or customer facing effort.
Voted Best Personality
1. Don't forget that people, humans, work in these companies. If you are able to truly understand what you sell, the value, the critical pain points it solves (with no fluff or ego boosting mentality) you should be able to clearly identify who will get the most value out of what you offer in any company you plan to target, or industry for that matter. You should also be able to understand their needs and their goals. As you decide on campaigns, pitches, offers, products, pricing, and placement this insight will determine better decisions and better outcome. Present yourself in a way that they can relate to, in a context they appreciate and with a medium they enjoy.
Clarity On Them
2. Have a stupidly clear positioning statement if you want your prospect commercial clients to pay attention, remember what you have to offer and give you the benefit of the doubt to prove yourself first. At the end of the day, when you get a contract with another company - you are simply given the opportunity to prove yourself and continue the relationship. By starting with a clear and simple positioning statement you give yourself the opportunity for questions, curiosity, and most importantly branding consistency - imagine that everywhere your prospect sees or hears about you, they are exposed to the exact same pitch or statement about what you do for companies like theirs... It's powerful!
* Position is the actual value service of what you sell, while the positioning statement is the pitch you use in every medium. Start with a good, potentially viable and scalable position with a niche industry or market and particular use and try to own that before you want to expand your position on a broader market (this is off the Blue Ocean Strategy approach, I follow).
Hit'em Where They Ain't
3. Segwaying from the last statement, having a good position and statement will only work if you know where to go pitch right? Again, it's all about reducing those lead costs while increasing conversion rate off the pipeline. For that, you need to be where others are not. Your competitors may not be as sophisticated as you are, maybe they have grown some unorthodox way or maybe they are as clever as you and maybe more. So try to win a battle without having to fight directly with your competitors for clients through pricing, innovation for innovation sake and find both losing the fight through loss profits, lack of attention and clarity and your clients getting all the rewards while you slave yourself to a sinking ship. Instead, spend time doing your homework on what different industries use your service or product for, what other companies might need what you offer, where would this companies' leaders congregate (their watering holes)? Go present yourself there, in the lesser known niche markets, the lesser known watering holes.
Thought:
You could try to fight and bleed your company's profit for 1% of a large generic market pie, or you can go after a smaller less understood pie elsewhere and with a lot less long term effort you could own 100% of that small pie.
Educate
4. At Unthink, we use Hubspot, a content led generation tool for marketers. We handle other Hubspot client accounts. When it comes to building a B2B pipeline you will heavily depend on content and education more so than advertising budget to constantly bombard and interrupt someone's feed on social media or Google Search. If you invest in creating education content that proves you are a market leader and product expert with the best interest of everyone at heart you will be more likely to be liked and trusted when someone needs your type of product or service. We Hubspot because it enables to produce great content and manage our pipeline, but don't be fooled - in itself it does not help generate the content nor drive leads simply provides tools to create and manage them... Whether you use a paid or free tool, create content and educate as much as you can. Once you know who your customer is, where they hang out and the pie you want to go after then you should know what type of content they want and you can create it for them.
* Think about it, me writing here gives me content ideas and allows me to position myself well through a non-invasive channel while providing actionable guides to others.
Strategy Is Not King
5. This pains me to admit, after all I am an MBA Strategist and have been helping many startups as a stealth partner or advisor exactly on strategy - how to compete more efficiently. But it's actually my years of experience that force me to admit that the most brilliant of strategies can be outperformed by someone who can execute passionately. While I have also seen great strategies fail due to lack of execution, testing, or any other marginally expected effort.
thought:
A lot of B2B marketers/owners rely heavily on the idea that if they belittle others or make themselves look like experts or promote their years in business or experience that it's enough. And it's not. Client's could care less about your experience or expertise - again people like doing business with people. Show your scars, leverage failed projects as ice breakers on email campaigns or on social media, stop pretending your company is perfect and show your bad reviews too!
Strategy Is Queen
6. It may not be king, but it is definitely Queen and at least in my house, Queen rules. A strategy will dictate where your efforts go and how much of them. After all, why would you invest all into something if you have no clue as to how much potential it has or how difficult it is to sustain? There are various strategies for conversion such as the lesser logic (www.BetaBulls.com for example, starting to promote that their code is good enough for fighter jets but amazing for corporate needs). Or the Recency Effect which might drive an accounting service like www.BluePearlTax.com to heavily look for startups who are being audited or need to pay back taxes so that they can help them reduce or eliminate their financial responsibility. Something that just happened and has a huge impact in our lives has an incredible potential for driving us towards buying or trying something we wouldn't otherwise. Leverage the recency effect if you can when you can and drive it with a no-brainer value proposition without assuming people will be smart enough to see the value - instead clearly state it for them. Also deciding whether maybe your business as is now or for ROI purposes if you would benefit from being the Good Enough option? If you take the good enough option, your prices should most typically be lower than the best alternate, wider known brand, but not as low as the one scraping and fighting on price - instead you position your company as a human, person led company that has its struggles, its potential and its dedication towards the end user and what you lack elsewhere you make up for in commitment and price driving up the value. Sometimes people look for good enough but many companies struggle to position themselves as the best or cheapest that they forget the middle grounds making the decision that much harder for these type of consumers which delays the pipeline build and the conversion into leads and then into customers. Maybe your pie (whatever niche in a market you chose) can be owned by being the good enough option?
I will give you an example using our team, Unthink is becoming widely known as the most helpful agency. Since we have clients worldwide we figured we would leverage this because being helpful translates into any language and culture. We also clearly state through our communications that we let our clients negotiate their monthly budget which allows us to bring big business tools and experts to small growing companies.
We break these branding statements because another thing to consider with anyone is that the more you say the less people hear. Especially when it's about yourself and not for them.
This messaging has allowed us to constantly get new client requests, the opportunity to prove our worth no matter the budget, and the transparency that companies (people) ask for when they are hoping to make a connection with a partner who is invested in their success as much as their own. This has an added perk of clients reaching out and talking to us when they aren't happy instead of publicly shaming or simply instantly cutting us off. Typically their unhappiness is a matter of a simply missed communication and our clients average at around 2 years with us until we have either built something sustainable or it's out of our scope of interest.
I hope this has been helpful if you would like I would really appreciate your follow in any of our platforms. Get in touch and stay engaged.
www.Facebook.com/iWillUnthink
https://twitter.com/OfficialUnthink
https://www.facebook.com/groups/MySmallBusinessResource/
- Humberto Valle #Unthink
With more info about the business you're creating, I could provide a more specific answer, but in general the process might be something like this:
1. Identify the entire universe of potential customers
- Are they all in one type of business, or in several potential segments?
- Do you need to do some testing and have 1-on-1 conversations with people in those segments to understand which ones are the most realistic / lucrative / desirable potential B2B customers?
- Who are the specific humans within the segment(s) / companies you've identified, who would be responsible for buying the product or service you're offering?
- What is that person's title or position? What seniority levels (above or beneath them) could be important in influencing the decision to buy what your company does?
2. Decide on a multi-pronged plan of attack to bring your message to this specific audience
- Put together several versions of a short, compelling written pitch for why a B2B decision maker should care what your company is doing
- Warm introductions via email or social media are great if you have access to that
- If not, cold email outreach works really well, as long as the messaging is truly compelling and you don't land in spam folders (hire a consultant if you need to; this is critical)
- If you have a little bit of advertising budget, you can amplify your message to the people who read your emails via display remarketing (I recommend AdWords or another CPC network; don't pay CPMs for early-stage remarketing)
- You can reach your target audience in places like LinkedIn Groups, Quora.com, Twitter... wherever they hang out and talk shop
Drop me a note anytime with specific questions. This should get you started.
igor@cleverzebo.com
www.cleverzebo.com
Good luck!
Igor
Effective Lead generation is gone beyond traditional methods to achieve great result. I can offer you the right answers with my digital experience in auto leads generation software and instant Facebook,watsapp fastest methods that I used to drive traffic to my site. I guarantee you maximum leads conversion with awesome sales volume
HERE ARE 3 LITTLE-KNOW OPPORTUNITIES TO GENERARE HIGH-QUALITY B2B LEADS (WITHOUT PAID ADS)
... Still untapped by many players in the industry, but that are producing crazy good results!
COLD EMAILS
People still get outraged when you tell them to use cold emails. They think they’re too spammy or they don’t get results, but let me tell you a story.
Nine months ago I was in a bar with my friends when I looked around and saw the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
I am not a cynical person. I just thought that “love at first sight” didn’t exist, and that was just a foolish thing for people that never grew up.
She looked bored, and the bar was about to close, so we were all a bit tired. I went to talk to her…
Nobody would expect what would have happened in the following nine months, our trips around Europe, cooking nights, and so on.
People think cold emails/outreach are spammy. They are when you are sending them to sell viagra. However, when you have a business and that this is right there because of giving out a service that creates value for your customers. YOU ARE GIVING VALUE. You are in fact improving the life of your clients. If they do not want to do business with you, and you know that your product/service can offer great value, don’t bother anymore, ain't everybody will love you, and we are all out there for the ones that have a good taste :-)
Cold emails and Linkedin automation are currently the main ways to generate leads. That is because when I started out, I did not have the money for running paid ads properly, and the time to setup complex sales funnel (I was running a business while being a college student in a top-university… All while working in a 9 to 5! Feel me)
People sometimes reply with messages like “Oh, nice spam email.” or they are skeptical about the results (ignoring that multiples Fortune 500 companies use these methods every day)
If done properly, this stuff works. Trust me. However, it is not as easy how people sell it to you. However, it is not as easy how people sell it to you. If you want to guidance on how to get started just call me a here on Clarity, I don't want you to waste several hours of trial and errors like a did.
LINKEDIN
It’s NOW the moment to leverage Linkedin’s full potential. In the future, this social network will start to get overcrowded (see Instagram and other ones that in the past were money-printers for the first ones who fully understood them.)
How to leverage Linkedin to generate leads?
1. Use your personal account to post relevant content. Don’t put external links (if you really have to write them in the first comment and tell people to look at it) as the post which includes them are penalized by the Linkedin algorithm that tends to make people remain in their platform. Use Grow a targeted social media following via hand-curated content suggestions at Quuu. If you want materials related to your niche posted every day on your account, but don't expect an engagement from those. The best posts come from your stories, what you'd learned, and they give the hell out of value to your audience.
2. Select target audience. Just hit the search button and look for the location, title/position, etc. where your leads are.
3. Optimize your profile. Treat like it’s your sales letter, but more related to your person. Firstly, write something eye-catching on your headline, for instance, “Contact me if you want to generate more leads for your B2B Business.” Then the first paragraph should be customer oriented (explaining the benefits of working with you/your company.) After you can tell more about yourself, and of your story if you’d like to.
4. Start with the automation. Download “Linkedhelper” or “GPZWeb” to automate the following actions:
- Profile Views. People will visit-back and see your “optimized profile” (see point 3.) And many times they’ll contact you.
- Connect with 1,000 People, including a 1 line message (less-salesy messages get a higher-acceptance rate.)
- Send a Direct message with an intro summary & calendly/ web/email link to everyone who accepts (better if one day after they accepted your connection request.)
- Reply to your messages, and watch the leads roll in!
I repeat! Linkedin (and his automation) will soon get less effective as more and more people are starting to do it. So, do it now (the same applies to Facebook groups, see the third paragraph) and you’ll be ahead of 99,9%.
Stick with the limits for Linkedin.
FACEBOOK GROUPS
B2B Marketers/Founders/CEOs… Your audience is on Facebook. Trust me, or better, trust people that are seriously smashing it on this niche thanks to Facebook Groups. I’ve started my Facebook Group recently after Vin Clancy and Charlie Price from the famous “Traffic and Copy” group suggested me various time to do it.
In the word of Vin Clancy’s: “It’s the perfect place to build your 1000 real fans.” Other reasons why to start one are:
- You have a community! To test our your ideas, and to gain a sustainable momentum (people from your group will invite more in the future, and so on.)
- There are way too many blogs out there, and people are sick and tired of optins, they tend to give their emails much less (only when the content it’s remarkable, but with so many competition it’s hard to standout.)
- It’s the only public area of Facebook. For the rest, FB is pushing down all the organic to push you to buy FB Ads (on groups it’s still not possible.)
Just call me here on Clarity if you want to know more about these three methods.
Conferences - I've found attending industry specific conferences and networking there has lead to the most productive leads. This gives me a chance to identify potential business and then understand who in the organization is an important audience and decision maker to get in front of to make a pitch. The downside is the cost and travel of attending conferences. Even better, if you can figure out how to be invited to a conference as a thought leader, presenter or speaker to have the admission fee and possibly travel covered.
Some detailed and well structured answers are below.
I want to highlight the "education" side which has been mentioned a couple of times.
B2B sales is always a decision by committee and takes quite some time. If you are always focused on education you are always providing value. Think about consequences of businesses not using your product or service and build risk mitigation talks/white papers/etc around that, for example.
In terms of positioning, answer three questions:
1) What problem does your market have?
2) What is a good solution to that problem?
3) Why are you best positioned to provide that solution?
And build your education content around these points.
For Online and online strategy:
1.- Website with content. Ideally, a Blog with segmented themes targeted to your audience.
2.- Search Marketing Campaign: making sure you are visible at all times in the search engine.
3.- Once you have your blog with enough content, a paid content distribution strategy with B2C and B2B platforms.
- B2C platforms using native advertising like Outbrain
- B2B platforms using LinkedIn or Content Based Marketing Platforms (it would depend on your budget though)
I would continue with cold calling and mailing as well as conferences.
All would depend on you product/service and budget.
The premise of your question, that methods that have worked in the past suddenly and magically no longer work, is not correct.
No lead generation method should be used in isolation. But phone prospecting and direct mail still work...especially when combined with other methods.
Really look into things...and test. Don't just blindly believe what the marketing department of a marketing company tells you about the effectiveness of their service. Many "white papers" are actually sales documents in disguise, directed to devaluing one marketing method in favor of the one the seller is offering.
No magic bullet exists. I recommend picking two or three methods, committing to them, and working on integrating their activities.
For instance, you'll probably need one method to pull traffic out of a platform. Facebook ads is an example of this. But does the marketing funnel end there? If you're a newbie I suppose it does. But experienced marketers know you can't just throw an offer in front of someone who clicked on a FB ad: it almost never works.
The funnel has to have a next step, a next method, for the prospect to move to. So they are directed to sign up to the autoresponder series (email marketing). Or a trial of a site membership. Or to complete a quiz. Or fill out a request for a mailed CD.
Emails in the series may direct the prospect to a video sales letter (VSL). That's hosted on a web page and a third component of the funnel. We're at the conversion tool now.
Lead attraction >> Warm-up funnel >> Conversion tool.
Each component can require its own method and they all need to work together. You could try to run everything in an email series, I suppose--use an email in the series as the sales letter--but the traffic has to come from somewhere. And that will require an additional marketing method.
A factor that stands out to experienced marketers as a "newbie alarm" is someone trying to combine traffic generation and conversion into a single step. You have to get good at drawing the right traffic (pre-qualified leads) first...before you start trying to nail down conversion. Otherwise you can't test and you can't understand your effectiveness. Newbies want to make traffic and conversion one step, and that's a mistake.
So your lead generation strategy should be:
1 > Identify your customer avatar
2 > Traffic generation from a platform (FB, Google, Bing, direct mail, inbound phone leads from a postcard, getting the idea?)
3 > Lead capture into a remarketing funnel (FB pixel, autoresponder series, CRM with follow up calls scheduled in a sequence)
4 > Conversion via tested method to understand which is most effective and cost-effective (high ticket closing call, VSL, print sales letter by direct mail, webinar to application to closing call, etc.)
I hope I have opened your mind about the process and possibilities. There's no magic bullet. It's a system and you have to test it...develop it in consecutive steps, making sure one step functions correctly before moving onto the next. Otherwise you muddy the waters and can't tell what you're doing--even if you're "successful" you won't know why and won't be able to duplicate the results.
Great question!
Here is a 32-step tutorial on how to generate warm leads using a lead scrape, a couple free extensions, a CRM and a salesperson to not only generate, but properly nurture your new leads from cold to closed.
I have been asked often about my approach to LinkedIn lead generation and how it works in conjunction with digital ads and telemarketing. Here is a very quick/dirty guide that will help clarify the process, timeline and stack needed:
What you will need:
* Google Chrome Browser
* A Linkedin profile
* LinkedHelper
* LinkedHub
* A verified email list
* Cold email templates
* Tool setup for [cold] email sequences

Week 1: Start Gathering Data
You can either write a scraper (Upwork, the world's largest online workplace search for “scraper”) or use a tool (recommend https://data-miner.io/). If your list requires some serious digging let me know your criteria and I'll see if the team I use can help. If you are in need of a fast and effective You can start this step 1 week before you have an SDR trained and ready.
1. Set scraping criteria - industry, title, location, company size, Linkedin profile (Y/N?), phone number (Y/N?)
2. Create a google sheet with correct headings for your CRM - search your CRM + “bulk import .csv template”
3. Load one example of a good lead to the sheet
4. Share sheet with your scraper
5. Order
6. Verify these yourself if you did not order a pre-verified list - Use a tool like Verify Email Address Online
Week 2: Start Connecting
This is a very powerful step that requires LinkedHelper to automate the connection requests. You can upload your scraped list, as well as run the bot on any network search.
1. In your Google sheet with the scraped contacts, create a new tab for “Linkedin Profiles” - find/copy/paste the LI profile URLs to one column there.
2. Download this Chrome extension: Linked Helper - automate work with LinkedIn
3. Login to whatever Linkedin account you want to use to prospect this list.
4. Follow these instructions to load the LI profiles list to LinkedHelper: https://medium.com/linked-helper...
5. Select the options to invite/connect and view profile - This will give them two notifications (viewed your profile and requested connection)
Week 2: Auto-Messaging Sequence
Like cold emailing, you will be able to cold message connections gained in the previous step with a timed sequence using LinkedHub. This allows you to serve more messages and more impressions without much downside (like spam complaints).
1. Create a LinkedHub account - linkedhub | LinkedIn Lead Generation
2. Setup your connection sequence - use a simple one-line connect message like “It’d be great to have you in my network.”
3. Time your second and third messages appropriately - The second message should not be a sales message. You want your second message to go out 1 min after they approve the connection, and be a simple one sentence "thank you for connecting" message. Use the contact fields to personalize it.
4. The third message can be your “ask” - make it a great offer, or something unique for your LinkedIn connections otherwise it won’t get much of a response.
5. Add the URLs you used in your scrape to as the target for this sequence - Make sure to add the exact search terms which will include everyone on your list of contacts. Use title and industry search terms, and multiple URLs if you have to. Contacts not in your email list may get these messages, but this is ok, so long as the search criteria is for potential customers.
6. Start sequence
Week 3: CRM Retargeting
The main purpose of CRM retargeting is to serve brand impressions and educate your list on what exactly it is you do. The last thing you want to do is cold email or cold call prospects who have zero idea who you are and what your company does.
1. Load your lists to each platform for ad retargeting - Depending on your list size, you have Adwords (1000 minimum) Facebook (relative, but no min), Adroll (500 minimum), Linkedin (3000 minimum).
2. Facebook - Use FB to serve video ads explaining your product/service to the audience to educate using a medium they’ll engage with.
3. Adroll - Adroll you will use to serve impressions of your brand. You do not even care about the clicks.
4. Linkedin - You want to serve valuable content that shows thought leadership on Linkedin - ebooks, white papers, and webinars - collaborations with other brands is preferred.
5. Adwords - Load your videos to YouTube and serve “TrueView” ads to your retargeted list.

Week 4: Cold Emailing
Now that they have [hopefully] been served one or two impressions of your brand, it’s time to send them a cold email sequence. It’s very important you do not do this too early. You want it to be as warm as possible, which is why we serve LinkedIn profile impressions and ads to these people first. It’s also important you use a correctly timed sequence with if/then rules so that you make sure not to bother those uninterested, and you keep inboxing.
1. Load contacts to your CRM - If you used the formated bulk sheet provided by your CRM, you should be able to simply upload the contacts. If your CRM allows for tagging, tag every 200 contacts with a unique letter (A, B, C….). This allows you to easily decide who to send what/when by segmenting them by tag in your CRM.
2. Run a spam and record test - Before you send a single cold email, make sure you have the correct any record issues - verify DKIM/SPF settings with your host. Make sure email clients can verify you are permitted to send from that address by following the corrections this site gives you: Newsletters spam test by mail-tester.com
3. Use a drip sequence - Make sure unopened emails get the same email two days later with an alternative headline. And those who do open, but do not click get another option later. And if you are using a CRM, make sure sales is notified while someone is browsing the site so they can contact/close them right then. I recommend CRM Software - Customer Relationship Management - Agile CRM
4. Limit sending to 200/day - The last thing you want to do is show up on any blacklists. Too many complaints in a day will get you listed. This is why we want to throttle sends. Make adjustments to messages that are getting no clicks/replies and complaints before sending the next batch.

Week 5: Cold Calling
The process is created to make these calls much 'warmer', but you will want to make sure your SDR's or AE's understand the brand impressions each contact has been served prior to these calls - i.e. "We are connected on Linkedin..." or "I sent the details to your ___@___ email...".
1. If your CRM is giving you notifications when contacts are browsing, make sure to call those prospects immediately - CRM's like CRM Software - Customer Relationship Management - Agile CRM will allow you to install their tracking pixel on your site and setup desktop notifications for if/when contacts are on your site. Make sure your team has these on and are calling during the browse.
2. Next, call those who have opened, but not clicked - Then call those who have not opened.
3. Finally, call your Linkedin connections.
4. For these cold campaigns, one your SDR or AE's tasks should be getting them to open/reply to the email. This keeps your IP health up so you can continue cold emailing.
Week 5: Triggering Follow Up Sequences
Follow Up sequences should be ready for each type of call - no answer, not interested/ready... So you can keep these contacts in your funnel and at least offer them relative content they may be interested in. Have a few sequences ready to be deployed when the call is done.
1. As soon as the call is done, trigger the appropriate sequence.
2. At the end of every sequence should be a transfer into some sort of evergreen content drip - This last step ensures no contacts are ever left floating as they continue to get your content regardless if they are in an approaching/nurturing sequence, or not interested in the product, but have not opted out of emails.
From here you can get into content marketing and true lead nurturing techniques using whatever you have of value to display thought leadership and trust - case studies, white papers, collaborative content with known brands...
Reach out to me here if you need help.
-Alex
The answer depends on several factors. But if you're looking for outbound marketing solutions, visit salezgen.com. They do LinkedIn marketing, email marketing, telemarketing, CRM & Pipeline management, lead nurturing, and even custom marketing support. They will solve all your pre-sales online outbound marketing needs.
This would depend on your services. If you sell courses then use a lead magnet for your most popular course. If it is consultation, offer a great consultation checklist or a free consultation of a value amount. If its products then maybe a tip sheet on how the product works. We sell courses and training to other business, checkout our lead magnets at https://interpersonalwellness.com/
A lead is not just a random potential client. It is the one that is only a step away from you. All you need is to grab their attention, provide value and prove that your service will solve their problem. Generating quality leads is the backbone of a good B2B marketing strategy and establishing a strong pipeline will ensure you maintain a steady growth rate. And B2B marketing is a lot different compared to B2C. Here are the most effective lead generation strategies in B2B marketing.
1. Content Marketing: This is an amazing option for companies that have interesting content to share: articles, videos and so on. To make it work you should do very profound research to know what kind of language you should use; what content your clients would enjoy; whom they listen to etc. Learn your target group and provide them with a high-quality copy. This will provide you with great search engine optimization (SEO) for your website. SEO is about increasing page views in a typically untargeted way so that more potential leads will find your website through search engines. Search engines can be one of the best tools for marketing any business. If you have success with SEO, you will gain new customers faster and essentially for free. To win the SEO game, you should have a strong content marketing strategy that provides information that your target audience will find value in. Make sure to have a strategy that is not only best for your customers but something your team can keep up with on a consistent basis. Tools like Ahrefs (backlink, keyword research, and competitor research) and Accuranker (keyword rank tracking) can help your business stay ahead of the game. Kinsta used these tools and was able to increase their organic traffic by 571% in just 13 months, which resulted in more B2B leads.
2. Social Media Marketing: Social media lets you refine your lead generation process as it allows for a more targeted approach. 62% of marketers believe that social networks like LinkedIn are proven to be effective in generating leads (suggested reading: how to create a company page on LinkedIn). It gives businesses and brands a platform where they can engage with potential customers. Also, social media advertising is amazingly effective, especially nowadays that it is very rare to meet someone who doesn’t have a Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account. Ads placed on these sites are highly targeted because you can set up the location, age, gender, and interests among many others. You can generate lots of leads through social media, but it is not easy and takes a well thought out strategy. A highly recommended book called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk is a great way to learn what will give you the best results. The book talks about communication on Social Media platforms with an approach that “Jabs” are content that your target audience will be interested in but not sales messages. A “Right Hook” is a marketing/sales message with a call to action e.g. fill in this form, buy this product, share this offer. You should do 3 jabs for every right hook. A good example of this can be seen with advertising that Kinsta ran on their PHP benchmark article. Kinsta is not directly selling anything in the Twitter ad itself, but it is targeted content that they know their audience of WordPress developers will be interested in. The “Right Hook” is then placed on the blog post itself to generated B2B leads.
3. PPC – Pay-Per-Click: SEO and content marketing definitely take time. PPC is of the easiest ways to get results quickly. It can be super effective if you know who your target audience is. However, it can also be awfully expensive depending on the industry you are in. It is also important to remember that a lot of people are using AdBlock (or other programs) nowadays, so there is a possibility that they will not even see banners or other clickable ads. Or because of the GDPR laws, they might simply opt out of your advertising altogether. You can post adverts in various ways online. The most frequently used is Google AdWords – this platform allows you to post ads across the Google Network. Here are three different routes you could take.
1. The Search Network: Adverts that appear when you “Google” something, these are generally situated at the top of top the search results. One of the great things about the search network is that search intent is already there. Unlike social media advertising, if someone is searching for say “managed WordPress hosting,” they are most likely researching or are remarkably close to buying.
2. The Display Network: These adverts appear on various websites that have agreed to allow Google to serve adverts to its visitors. These adverts are usually visual and can be created with the Google automated visual advert generator; saves you having to create multiple ads for various sizes. These typically have lower CPC but are also lower quality in terms of conversions.
3. Remarketing: This ties in with the display network, however, the adverts are served to people that have already visited your website making them very targeted. This is also sometimes referred to as retargeting. For example, people browsed the Perfect Audience website just moments ago. We head over to Mashable.com and suddenly we see an ad for Perfect Audience. Remarketing is basically a way to keep reminding people that your brand and product exists. Unlike the display network, they offer higher conversion rates as the user has already visited your site previously and is most likely interested in purchasing. For remarketing, you can do this directly in Google AdWords, or utilize a third-party platform like AdRoll or Perfect Audience. No matter which platform you use, give yourself a good 2-3 months when first starting to remarket. This is because you will need to build up a decent size list of people who have visited your website. This is done via a pixel you place on your website.
4. Get More Social Shares: In his latest article, Bryan Harris owner of Video fruit shows real examples of viral marketing tactics that used social sharing to increase new leads. He shows how you can use asking for a share to grow your audience and get your content to go viral. This is a great strategy to use for your B2B marketing to get extra conversions without paying more for marketing. The team as Kinsta does this on a regular basis and it consistently drives more reweets and shares. Viral marketing is a lucky thing that happens after producing great content. What most of us are not aware of is that we can create viral content from just asking our current clients or opt-ins to share with their friends. In one of Bryan’s examples he shows a post that received 3,483 social shares on Facebook. This happened because after the customer signed up for the offer, they were promised bonuses if they shared! By using bonuses and extra offers you are becoming a trusted influence in your industry. When you have your customers share your offer with their friends, that is when your word of mouth referrals will increase without extra ad spend. This is exactly why Kinsta has an affiliate program.
5. Turning “Out of Stock” Into an Opportunity: When products are out of stock, you are losing customers. But lucky for you, there is a way to turn that into an opportunity. Instead of just displaying a red text, as most online retailers do, add a form below your “Out of Stock” text with the message. If you know when your item is back in stock, add a timer that counts down to the expected date of arrival for your product.
6. Use the Godfather-Strategy to Build Your Email List: What sounds more appealing to you: “Sign up for the newsletter” or “Join our tribe of 2500+ world-class marketers and salespeople.” Old pitches like “Sign up for our newsletter” just do not work anymore because the truth is that nobody reads newsletters anymore. They want content personalized to them. Laser focused, point-solving, specific content that meets their interests and needs. As the legendary Gary Halbert once said: You should think more about how to “sweeten” your offer than any other aspect of writing copy. You might have already seen this above, Kinsta uses this same approach with their email marketing CTA. And that certainly proves to be true even to this day with social media ads, content marketing, and conversion-based copy.
7. Using FOMO to Increase Your Conversion Rate: Applying scarcity, or FOMO, is one of few tactics that almost instantly can increase your conversion rate. Here is a real-life example: Jessica Parker and Melissa Burkley conducted a study where they showed women a photograph of their potential dream man. Half of the women were told the guy was single and the other half were told he was in a relationship. The results might surprise you. 59% said they would be interested in pursuing the single guy when they thought he was single. But that number jumped to 90% when they thought the guy was taken! We want what we cannot have, and it is just the way we’re wired. But you should think twice before just throwing up a countdown on all your pages. Your visitors are not stupid. They will spot false offers pretty quick, and those who do not will just feel deceived if they find out your offer continues to run after they have purchased. So, make sure you use it sparingly. Here are a few situations where you can use it:
1. When you actually have a limited offer
2. When there are only a few seats left for your webinar
3. When a product is running out of stock
4. When a product is purchased (just do not show too often)
8. Use Intent Popups or Slide-in Opt-ins on Key Pages: People either love them or hate them. And whether you like it or not, popups work. Especially personalized intent popups. But first, some words of caution: your customers like to be shown where to go, not blocked from reading your content. There are websites out there that will actually block their customers from seeing their content to gain an opt-in. There are also many out there that have more than one popup on their site, whether that is on purpose or accidental that is not how you gain loyal customers. OptinMonster wrote a great article describing how to personalize your popups with customer names. Imagine that, a popup with your name in it telling you what product they think you should sign-up for, how could you say no? When a business can build a relationship with their customers, they will see an increase in sign-ups but more importantly conversions and sales of their product. You can also try using exit-intent popups on your website, just remember exit popups are your BACKUP to your web pages. Also, the HubSpot All-in-One Marketing WordPress plugin lets you easily create a free user-friendly popup and slide-in forms. If your exit intent popup has a higher conversion rate than your website, you probably should think about redesigning your website first. But if you use it as a hail mary on your most important pages, they can work well. Or last but not least, you could take a more middle ground and go with a slide-in opt-in. This usually will not be as effective as a popup but works well and is easy to configure so that it does not annoy your readers. Kinsta uses a slide-in opt-in once readers scroll 50% of the way down their blog posts.
9. Asking Questions to Get a 50% Conversion Rate: Except for Facebook Messenger, quizzes are the latest fad in lead generation strategies. And the best part is that it is not a mainstream strategy – yet. Neil Patel and Eric Siu discussed quizzes in episode 135 of their podcast and said: “We just don’t talk about it much because we don’t want everybody copying us.” I don’t know about you, but when the guy that runs one of the world’s biggest marketing blogs shies away from talking about a specific marketing strategy they use, it’s probably working pretty well. Surveys are inexpensive to run, are flexible when it comes to the types of questions you ask and are more dependable thanks to anonymity and your customers like them! Hubspot wrote a great step by step article on how to create a survey form using Google Forms. Google Forms can easily be embedded into your WordPress site, contact form plugin, or sent via email. Remember to make the quiz fun, engaging and most importantly easy to use.
10. Gain Trusted Backlinks: We all know word of mouth referrals are the best customer! When you have someone raving about your business, you’ll gain immediate trust and confidence in your product. The second-best referral is a trusted website sending their clients your way. This is called a backlink – when a trusted website is referring customers back to your website. There are numerous ways to build backlinks and gain trust from other websites. You can:
1. Write blogs for other companies.
2. Have other websites share your content.
3. Get on a websites resource page.
4. Provide infographics other businesses will share.
5. Get free backlinks if people copy your images.
6. Write amazing content that people actually want to link to.
TaskDrive wrote an article about getting your infographics shared and linked back to your website.
11. Get Creative with Cold Emails: Cold emailing is hard because you have no prior relationship with the company or person, you are sending it to. So, you must make a good first impression to get results. Here are a few things recommended to see more leads from cold emails:
1. Be creative to stand out from the crowd. Include things like animated GIFs or memes to catch people’s attention.
2. Be funny! Life is boring enough as it is. Sometimes humour can go a long way.
3. Get straight to the point and do not spam people with marketing lingo. Many simply ignore this.
4. Send at least 2 follow-up emails. Just like social media, things tend to get lost in people’s inboxes. Sending two or three emails gives you a better chance of getting seen.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath
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