B2B Marketing: Generating the Right Leads for Your Business

1. Introduction: Business owners and teams often skip a step when it comes to planning out a sales strategy. Skipping the important step of lead generation can lead to unaligned teams and one-time only customers instead of long-lasting loyal customers, which every brand thrives for. [MUSIC] Hi, my name is Jenny, and I'm a digital marketing instructor and I specialize in both email and SMS marketing. I've been working in media and advertising since 2007. In the last six years, I've niched into working specifically with clients when it comes to tackling lead generation and sales through email, SMS, and other one-to-one marketing tactics. I love teaching this topic because it's such an important step in the B2B and B2C marketing steps. In this class, we'll cover seven different ways to attract new leads for your business. Some of these topics will include TikTok, email lead generation, and lead nurturing and I'll even show you how to generate leads using podcasts. Often when working with teams, lead generation is the most challenging part of any marketing conversation. That's because not everyone is on the same alignment about the importance and time it takes to generate quality leads for an organization. This class should help demystify and bring everyone up to speed on what it means to generate leads. You'll leave this class with the ability to change your teams mindset from being a sales-driven team to a quality leads-driven team, ultimately helping your business increase not only the amount of sales that you bring in but also the quality of sales. In your class project, you'll have the opportunity to choose three tactics that you'd want to execute for your business. You can tell us why you chose those tactics. I encourage you to share your class projects in the project gallery and feel free to ask any questions that you have using the discussion board below. I hope you're excited to start this class, if so, let's get started. 2. Understanding the Sales Funnel: When you're running a business or if you're part of a large team, it's often easy to forget that quality sales just don't come in magically out of nowhere. In sales, or rather in marketing, we have what's called a marketing or sales funnel. A sales funnel captures the different stages that a customer has to go through before they buy from you. As a business leader or a marketing professional, understanding the process of lead generation is critical in order for you to plan for and make the right decisions about your company growth. Lead generation is first but often overlooked step when it comes to bringing in sales. Knowing this and respecting the order of the sales process or the funnel will take away the frustration when it comes to running your sales and marketing activity. Here's something that I see very often. A business owner or marketing team of a small but growing company will run a Facebook paid ad campaign with the goal of getting direct conversions. Or even worse, the targeted audience set that they're using is a cold audience, meaning that this audience is not from their e-mail list or their social media followers, nor is it even lapsed customers. A few days go by and little to no customers are coming in from this ad. They'll deem that the ad didn't work and that it was a waste of money. The truth is, it was a waste of money but not because the platform didn't work, but rather because it was that they did not take the time to first plan out their lead generation strategy. Another example of a sales strategy gone wrong due to lack of lead generation preparation is when you have a B2B organization with the sales team. Often speak to business owners that want to hire a salesperson so they can bring in sales. But the problems begin when that salesperson starts and doesn't start bringing in sales in the time expected. Oftentimes, this is not the salesperson's fault, but rather the fault of the business for not effectively building out a lead generation strategy or working with that salesperson to give them split goals for lead generation and goals for sales. Without factoring in realistic expectations for leads and the time it might take to close a sale, you're setting your sales person or team up for failure and essentially losing in the sales game before it has even begun. With these examples in mind, can you think back to a time when you try to go after a sale, before generating leads, or a time when you charge your sales team to go after a sale before having an effective lead generation strategy in place? What was the outcome? What would you change about it today so far, knowing what you've learned from this lesson? 3. Grasping the Buyer's Journey: Before we get into discussing the seven lead generation tactics, let's first understand what the buyer's journey is. Knowing that each buyer has a journey before they make a purchase will help further define the importance of building your lead generation strategy. You've probably seen this chart before, it's a simple example of what a customer's buying journey looks like and all the different touch points that they will have with your business before they buy. Now I know what you may be thinking, that it doesn't take every customer this many touch points to buy from you, now, this may be true for some customers, but it's not true for all, and it's definitely not true for those customers that are going to be your most valuable customers. Down at the bottom of this slide, you'll see that there are different types of customers, some customers will buy from you only once, another type of customer will sign up for the free version of your tool and never convert from a trial user to a paid user, they love your product, just not enough to pay for it, and the third type of customer will sign up for your product, use your trial for seven days, then pay to upgrade and stop there. Lastly, we'll have the customer who will not only upgrade to the paid version of your product, but also subscribe to your YouTube channel, and join your group forums and evangelize your product to their friends and colleagues. Now, out of all these customers, which one of these are the most valuable to you? Which one of these customers would you want to spend more time prospecting for and nurturing over time as the new lead? Because we have to acknowledge that there's a customer buying cycle and different customer types, we have to always remember that not every lead generation strategy is the same and not every lead generation strategy brings in the same type of customers. Let's look at a few examples of marketing tactics that bring in different types of leads during their different phases in the customer buying cycle, let's look at this fictitious example of company ABC Laptops. ABC Laptops sells employee laptops and laptop equipment to corporate customers, ABC Laptop has an ongoing paid Google search ad running that appears whenever someone does a search matching their keyword targets. Now, prospect A is doing a search for laptops for the 15 new hires this fall, ABC Laptop appears at the top of their search results, prospect A clicks on their link and begins to browse, then fills out a contact form, prospect A is a perfect lead for ABC Laptops because they are looking for exactly what ABC Laptop sells, they are actively searching for employee laptops. Prospect A is later in the customer buying stage, and ABC Laptops should decide on a lead follow-up that's conducive to this stage, for example, they should have a salesperson reach out rather than director's lead to an automated email funnel. Now, if ABC Laptops also want us to focus on finding a wider net of leads, this means they would have to focus on prospects that are not close to the buying cycle yet, but we will potentially buy at some point, these are our cold stage leads. In order to prospect for early-stage or cold leads, ABC Laptops has to focus on being in places where their target customers are already actively engaging and consuming content, while these prospects might not be ready to buy right now, they are prime targets that may buy eventually. ABC Laptops decide to secure an interview spot with the popular B2B podcasts that interviews business owners and C-Suite leadership, doing this interview allows ABC Laptops to get passive exposure in front of their target audience while they are actively listening to an interview that interests them. Prospect B is listening to the podcast, they hear the CEO speak and now have an awareness of their company, this prospect now looks up your website out of curiosity, they're not ready to buy from you right now but they've shown interests by pulling up your website and maybe signing up for your newsletter, and now they are at the start of the buying cycle. 4. Creating an Email Newsletter: Now that you understand the difference between the cold, warm and hot stages against the customers buying cycle. Let's jump right into the seven tactics that you can use in your business to generate leads. One of the most common ways to build up your list of leads is to start growing an email list. Email marketing is one of the longest running channels that we have in the marketing arsenal. Do you believe that the very first email was sent in 1971. Compare that to the new and upcoming social media apps like TikTok that was just created in 2016. While there are new marketing tools coming to the space every single day, we can't deny that email is one of the mainstays that still work. When you get a cold lead to sign up for your email list, you're moving them quickly down the stages of the buying journey. Effectively speeding up the process of turning them from a cold lead to a warm lead to eventually a hot lead. Having a dedicated newsletter is a great way to keep your brand name and what you do top of mind with your leads. In order to do this, you'll want to make sure that you are consistent and send out emails that inform your audience and that matter to them. Klaviyo a B2B email marketing software is a good example of a brand that uses email newsletters to communicate effectively to both customers and potential leads. Every week, they send out an email that addresses the topics that their customers want to know about. I like the way they lay out their email newsletters, like actual magazine issues, with volume numbers and issue dates. So that way it acts like a catalog of content for their subscribers. There are multiple ways in which a person can subscribe to be a part of their newsletter list. Three examples are; one, their free trial sign up, two their blog updates sign up, or three by signing up for a webinar or free download. Another example that I love is copy.ai, they employ a mix of ideas into their email marketing depending on what stage you're in. Particularly if you are new to their tool and have just signed up as a free user, they take you through their on-boarding emails. That gets you excited about writing copy or about their AI writing copy for you. The theme of their newsletters and every subject line aims to take away the dread from the time it takes to writing copy. They lead almost every subject line with some quantification of how much time you can save in copy writing by using their tool. When creating an email newsletter strategy, it's important to take the time to think about what theme or themes you have for your newsletter. Remember to think about your subscribers as they are signing up for your newsletter. Depending on how they signed up, they may be interested in a different type of content from you at first. Your student planning guide for Tactic Number 1, you will see an example of the three sign up sources that we discussed. I filled in some example themes that I would use for this type of audience. For example, if they signed up via my product free trial, it would make sense to first send a series of emails on boarding them onto the product and get them excited about it during their trial. For those that signed up through my blog site, I would continue to send them more blog content and how to contact because they are probably in the stages of information gathering and research. For those that signed up from my webinar or free resource, they are likely deeper into the funnel and closer in stage to buying from me. Therefore, I would send them a series of specific emails that addresses their pain point and that even introduce them to my product. Use this planning section to think about what series of emails would you come up with for your business based on these same sign up sources. 5. Building a Blog: Did you know that blogging is a great way to build your website reputation with Google and build with SEO? Well, people may not come to your blog every day as a go-to resource, they are definitely searching for content on Google that your blog may be able to answer. So it's always in your best interests and your audience's to create a blog that delivers content that your audience is already looking for. Blogging allows you to build leads passively over time. The more content that you create for your blog, the more credibility that you build for your site. Now, blogging doesn't have to only be a site that has 3,000 word essays on a particular topic. A blog can also be a series of videos or examples that acts as a resource for your potential leads. Take Postscript, for example. They are an SMS software service that aims to attract marketers who want to get started with SMS. They created a sister website or blog called Fantastic Texts, that features examples of fantastic text messages that brands can send. It's a very user-friendly, scrollable page that allows you to search for SMS campaign examples. Take a look down here at the bottom of the page. You'll see that there are links that direct the reader back to Postscript's website to further engage the brand and consider using Postscript as their SMS provider. You can create a blog that does something similar to this. It's a way to be a passive resource for the audience that is searching for the service or product that you provide. For another example, let's go back to Copy.ai. If you have a look at their blog, you'll see that their blog focuses on how to content for marketers. You'll also notice that their blog doesn't just focus on copy-related items. But the entire spectrum of marketing from SEO, to content marketing, startup tips, and advice. Their blog aims to be the go-to resource for bootstrap startups. By continuously creating content aimed at topics that startup teams want to read about, they will continue to attract these type of leads. Creating a blog does take some time and effort, and the results are not always immediate. But once you've committed to generating content for your blog and you add in all the right elements to have your content appear in search engines, you'll find that it's one of the most effective ways to generate leads. When it comes to planning out your blog content, you can make your life easier by using a content matrix. A content matrix is a simple grid that categorizes content by themes. In this case, I have four themes; educational content, entertaining content, inspiring content, and content meant to convince a reader of something. What's great about a content matrix is that you can take one single idea and turn it into four pieces of content just by switching the box of the matrix that it's in. For example, if I wanted to create content that speaks to the pains of new employee onboarding, a topic that target audience of ABC laptops has a big interest in, I can take this one topic and turn it into four by simply adjusting the headline of the blog. For educational content, my headline would be how to create a new employee onboarding process. For entertaining content, my headline would be six ways new employee onboarding can go wrong, explained in memes. For inspiring content, my headline would be seven companies that have mastered their new employee onboarding process. For convincing content, my headline would be how to make life simpler for new employees with pre-loaded laptops. Now you see how using the content matrix can make your life easier when trying to come up with content for a blog. Under tactic number 2 in your student planning guide, you'll see this example and a section where you can try out the content matrix for your first blog topic. Use the matrix to come up with four different blog headlines based off of a single topic. 6. Getting on a Podcast: Podcasts can present a way to get in front of a lot of people with your specific knowledge and expertise. Being interviewed for a podcast is a great way to be on a podcast without actually having to create one yourself. There are currently over 2 million podcasts out there to listen to, with an overwhelming 40 plus million episodes to accompany that. All of this is just to say that there are millions of podcast hosts who are looking for more content to put out there. A good way to get featured on a podcast without actually having to create your own podcast is to be a guest on one. Oftentimes podcast hosts are in need of content or run out of people to interview, and your interview may just be the one that they need to fill in the next episode slot. In the B2B space, there are tons of different types of podcasts that you can be interviewed for you just have to look for them. The Marketing Podcast releases a new podcast every Friday interviewing bestselling authors of you guessed it, marketing books. This is an interesting twist on a podcast because it's taking books that B2B business leaders are probably reading or want to read, and then interviewing authors of those books, getting further soundbites. This is a win-win for podcast hosts and the book author interviewees. For one, the podcast host gets their slot filled in with another interesting interview that their audience may be interested in. For the book author, they're getting another way to plug their book in front of a niche audience that's likely to buy their book. Another podcast that I love is Startup Stories by Mixergy. Andrew Warner, the podcast host has over 2,000 episodes that feature interviews with startup founders. What makes his podcast unique is that he asked founders the tough and most likely unasked questions. While there may be times where the interview feels a little bit uncomfortable, like when he asked a founder what their annual profit or loss is, it's these types of moments that keep the audience coming from more episodes each time. For the business owner being interviewed while uncomfortable, it makes for a more memorable emotional connection for your business. The listening audience for this podcast is B2B, business owners are listening to their peers getting asked tough questions, while at the same time being introduced to new tools, software, and services that may be useful for their own company. In order to get featured on a podcast, you'll likely have to do some reaching out. By luck, you may have a host specifically reach out to you but for the most part, you'll be the one doing the outreach. To start doing outreach, first, make a list of podcasts that are aligned with B2B and the audience you'd like to attract. Try to imagine your audience listening to this podcast if it seems like a fit, add them to your outreach list. As a rule of thumb, you want to reach out to more rather than less, since it's a numbers game after all. start with 15 for starters, then build up your list from there. You'll want to find an email address or a contact that you can reach out to and craft a simple email that directly asked if they're looking for interesting content to add to their episode lists. Keep your email outreach simple and to the point, repeat this until you get at least one yes for starters. If you're unsure about where to start researching podcasts, you can use a podcast search tool such as PodSearch. You can type in your category or keywords and start browsing for a few potential podcasts that may be a good alignment for your brand. In your planning sheet under tactic number three, you'll see a grid where you can jot down three initial podcasts that you think you'd like to be an interviewee on. You will also see a few more additional resources to help you on your podcast, discovery. 7. Becoming a TikTok Expert: TikTok is one of the latest social media channels to arrive on to the marketing landscapes. But it often gets overlooked when it comes to B2B marketing. Brands often think that alignment with short-form vertical videos of dancing teams, is not the environment that they want to be surrounded by. But as all marketing channels that are new to the landscape, they eventually evolved into a wider audience that grows beyond its initial intended demographic. For a B2B brand, TikTok is actually a great way to get in front of the right audience, simply by being a wealth of knowledge, and facts in the form of short-form video. Now it's not easy as just creating a TikTok account, and creating content that's not engaging not true to the platform. You have to spend some time on the app first to understand what users are engaging with, what other content creators are putting out there, and what videos are getting the most hits, or going viral. It might even be worth it to hire someone that is extremely familiar with TikTok already and have them be your content creator. They can learn more about your business and come up with creative ways to create content that will speak to your audience in the right format. Shopify is a great example of a brand that made its way into TikTok with useful and engaging content that isn't necessarily about their product, but that attracts potential users of its product. By sharing TikTok videos, of useful tools that their potential audience will find useful. In one of their TikToks, they're sharing a tool that people who work at home may want to use. It's a website that plays sound, mimicking the sound of an office environment. It's such a simple video, but it aims to attract exactly who their target audience might be. That is entrepreneurs who are working from home, chipping away at their new business idea or even remote workers who haven't quit their job yet but want to. Browse around at Shopify's TikTok page, and go through more of their content to see the type of videos that they are creating. Another great example is Zoom's TikTok account. Zoom has done a very good job at recognizing that while they are a B2B product, it's really the users or the employees of these companies, that are doing the most chatter about the brand, and they capitalize on that. It's very apparent to see that Zoom wants to become the verb of video conferencing apps, like Uber for ride-sharing, or Google for search engines. By getting more users chattering about Zoom, or better yet using Zoom as if it's a verb, the brand spreads its brand recognition even further, ultimately making the decision process for B2B decision-makers, a no-brainer. Zoom's TikTok content is robust with tons of TikToks sharing their user tips, user hacks, and even fact-checking rumors about their products that are being spread by TikToks. Zoom has really done a great job at using TikTok and creating content that the end-users will enjoy. But that ultimately helps its brand name funnel up the chain of command. Before you begin creating content on TikTok, be aware that it will take some time to evolve in your voice and your theme on TikTok. You have to do a few trial and error videos, in order to see what really resonates with your audience. Try not to be a copycat, but also try not to reinvent the wheel with something that doesn't make sense for the platform. Humor is a big plus, but if it's not authentic to your brand, don't force it. As a team, come together to brainstorm what your pillars will be for TikTok. It's best to come up with 3-5 pillars. Your pillars will be your content themes that you will stick to when creating content ideas. For example, common content pillars are, educate, entertain, user generated community content, advice and tips, or tools and resources. The pillar is purely meant to act as a content guidance for anyone that will be creating content on your channel. Be sure to share these pillars with your entire team. Can you come up with three or four content pillars that would work for your TikTok page? 8. Building a YouTube Resource Library: YouTube is the destination site to visit when people are searching for all sorts of topics. Most especially when they're searching for how to do something. As a B2B marketer, you may find that YouTube will offer a wide range platform to create both long and short form content. This makes it especially easy to be a resource for your audience that's researching for topics or questions that you can potentially answer. It might be easier to think of your YouTube channel like your blog. Try to come up with a theme for your channel. When it comes to creating content pillars, try to limit it to one, max two pillars. Your content pillars are the content themes that you'll focus on. With YouTube, you don't want to be all over the place. If people expect to go to your channel to get tips and how-to's, you'll want to be consistent about delivering that. You can of course sprinkle different themes of topics every now and then. Brands that are doing YouTube content creation well are the ones that are focused on creating a content library of video resources for their audience. They created a totally separate channel called ConvertKit Creator Education geared specifically towards online creators. In their channel, they created over 100 videos that serve as a how-to catalog, an informational resource for creators who make a living online. On average, their videos are 4-8 minutes long, usually no longer than 10 minutes. This length makes their video easily digestible and encourages their audience to keep coming back for more. [MUSIC] Struggling to build your following? Unsure how to market your creative talent? Then you're in the right place. I'm Angel Marie and welcome to the Creator Education YouTube channel. [MUSIC] Something to keep in mind when creating videos for your brand is to choose a single person to be the face and voice for your YouTube channel. While it doesn't have to be the rule and you can always switch things up at anytime, having a consistent face appear on your thumbnails helps the audience quickly recognize that this is the expert that I like to watch videos from. To get started on your YouTube channel, first create a laundry list of topics that your audience may be asking. If you're unsure about the popularity of that topic, do a quick search on YouTube for that topic. See if there are any videos posted on this topic. If so, how many views does that video get? For instance, using my ABC laptops example, I could do a search for a topic that I know my audience will be interested in. How to onboard new employees. If there are a lot of videos on this topic, that's a good thing. That means it's a heavily searched topic and you'll want to be a brand that can uniquely answer that question. If the topic is not popular, don't worry it's still a valid video topic to create. However, you may want to put it further down in the priority. That way you can focus on publishing the most popular topics first. Also when creating topics, don't worry if some of the topics feel like they are overlapping. The more videos that you create that speak to different nuances, the better. Content creation on YouTube is all about having the answers that people need at any part of your video. Search engines now have the ability to scrape videos on platforms like YouTube and pull up snippets down to the exact minutes where their answers appear, so people can get the answers that they're looking for it without even having to watch your entire video. Use the topic brainstorm table in your planning guide to list out five topics that you'd want to create on YouTube. Rank the topics in order of interest to your audience. 9. Creating a Homepage Quiz: If you're selling a service or a software as a service, it may take a bit more time to convert a lead. Therefore, it may take a bit more effort to get to know your potential leads. A great way to generate leads for your business, while also getting to know your leads a bit better is by having a quiz on your homepage. Quizzes can be easily created using a tool as simple as Interact quizzes. B2B brands can benefit from quizzes because they allow you to get a deeper understanding of your audience in a way that's not intrusive and a little bit fun. For your audience, it's a more engaging way to benefit with your brand while getting some answers that they may be looking for from your quiz. Have a look at this quiz by online marketing coach Rick Mulready. It's a quiz that takes you through 11 questions to ultimately find out what's your business blind spot. As you go through the quiz, it asks you questions about your business style, your personality, your fears, and your goals. The quiz is a great way to gain more qualitative data about your leads. This is all valuable information that Rick Mulready has to personalize his content for you now that you are in interested lead. If you're going to take the quiz approach, you first want to plot out what are the goals for the quiz. The last thing you want to do is create a quiz just for the sake of creating a quiz. Usually quizzes are centered around finding out more about that particular individual, more than it is about finding out more about that company. But you can test out different ideas. One of the best places to host a quiz is by placing it as a banner on your homepage. This way, new visitors will see it and interact with it right away. 10. Joining a Community or Group: A really great way to stand out as an expert in your space is to join a community or group, such as a Facebook group or a Slack group. These types of forums allow you two-way communication amongst peers and potential leads in your space. It's also a great way to offer an introduction to what your company does without actually having to push your product or service. Slack groups are trending more and more when it comes to B2B networking spaces. It's a great way to build relationships virtually and an even better way to learn about the challenges that others in your space and potential leads are having. Once you join a Slack community, make sure you read the group's code of conduct to make sure you know what's considered against the rules and what's totally okay to post. Some of these groups may ask you to fill out an application or a quick questionnaire to make sure that you are a right fit for the group. In general, anytime you join any group, you want to kick off with a strong introduction on who you are. You also want to make sure that you browse around the different channels to understand what topics are being discussed, where and by whom. You may also want to kick things off with your own question that someone can potentially answer. Contribution goes both ways. You should ask questions and if you know an answer to anyone's questions, you should answer them. If you're new to a channel, you can do a search to pull up any threads, have any keywords that are relevant to your expertise. For example, maybe your company recently created a subject line generation tool. You could do a search for that on the Slack channel and see what threads have been discussed, and see if you can be of any help in any of those threads. Remember to log into this Slack channel whenever you can. The key to success with any group or forum is to be present as much as possible. When you show up, people notice and they will start to view you as a valuable contributor to the group. Well, spamming or self promotion of any sorts are typically not allowed in these groups. By simply being present all the time, others will begin to organically learn what it is that you do or sell. 11. Final Thoughts: As with all marketing tactics, Lead Generation, no matter what type, need to have clear goals. They need to be tested and they need to be optimized. For your class project, you will choose three tactics that you would like to execute and that you would potentially execute within the next 30 days. I always recommend trying out no more than three tactics at a time. This way you're able to focus on 2-3 things and do them well, rather than trying to manage five or different campaigns at a time. Lead Generation can seem like a daunting and cumbersome step in the customer sales cycle. But it is truly one of the most important steps. Start off on the right path with Lead Generation and the sales part will be a breeze. I hope you enjoyed this class. Remember to upload your class project and ask any questions that you may have in the Discussion section about this class or if any of the lessons in this class. I look forward to seeing your class projects.