26 Feb 2020

11 Ways to Automate your B2B Lead Generation Campaigns

By Admin

Every business dreams an automated B2B lead generation system, which is not all easy and requires a lot of efforts than generating leads in the first place.

We are B2B lead generation company and have dealt with multiple projects of our clients and also of our own, and what we have noticed is the real challenge lies in streamlining processes rather than implementing them for once.

With a lot of tests and trials, we successfully developed a system that is self-dependent. Below are some of the ways that we have implemented in our campaigns to improve our results.

1. Set Up a Strategy

Everything starts with a strategy. Without any predefined strategy and planning, no one knows what direction one should follow.

But how should you proceed?

There are certain phases of a B2B lead generation that need to be streamlined for better results:

• Awareness Phase- A content strategy that encompasses content that delivers awareness into your audience.

Examples of content that you have to use are how-tos content, demo videos and content that discusses your products’ significance in the market.

• Consideration Phase- This is the phase where your customer knows about your product or service but needs more consideration to make a decision.

Planning a content strategy that makes them envision the experience they would get by availing your product or service would be exactly what you need to do.

The type of content that you can use is more demo videos, people’s experiences, product catalogues, product specifications and more user guides.

• Decision Phase- This is the phase where your customer knows everything about your product and is on the verge of coming up with a final decision.

All your customer needs is a validation of your products’ functionality and credibility in the market.

The type of content that takes care of driving the customer through the right road is product reviews and ratings, testimonials, and more videos around its functionality in the real world and in the hand of real customers.

A content strategy is what smoothens the process from the very start of the execution process. When you have the clarity and strategy with each phase in your B2B lead generation funnel you will be able to automate your processes.

But the question arises- How do you do it?

Well, that is obviously a completely different chapter of discussion and this makes us come to the second point.

2. Content Optimization

It all starts with the content. You create content, you share your content with your audience and hope your audience get engaged with your content.

Almost all B2B companies use content marketing in their B2B lead generation campaigns customized based on their audience personas.

Optimize your content for better results:

• Do proper keyword research: With the right keyword research, you would have the clarity to optimize your content around those keywords.

Shortlist the right keywords that have the highest intent of solving your audience’s pain point.

You can use Google keyword planner or other third-party tools like ahrefs to hunt down those keywords.

• Plan a content strategy: There is different content for every customer persona in each phase of a marketing funnel. Plan a content strategy for every phase of the marketing funnel keeping your audience behaviour in mind.

With the right content strategy, you would notice a considerable change in your conversion rates.

• Make them visualize: This is such a powerful idea that deserves a separate mention. Optimize your content in such a way that it makes your audience visualize what they will experience with your product or service.

Content optimization will help automation in the long run. If your content is optimized for your audience as well as for search engine, your content will have more potential to reach a much larger audience without any promotion from your end.

3. Create a Lead Magnet (Landing Page)

A landing page could be the first thing you need to set up in your B2B lead generation campaign.

A perfect landing page aligning with your business needs could be the best investment towards automating your lead generation campaigns.

But the question arises how you should create a landing page that will drive the desired results?

The things that make a lead magnet convert:

• Simple and clear: Keeping things simple will always yield better results. Your landing page should be simple with a minimalistic design template.

Make your landing page to the point with a clear and visible CTA that your audience can easily digest.

• Social signals: You need to incur your expertise with proper proof that validates your authenticity in the market.

This can be done by incorporating social signals of your success. Including testimonials, feedbacks and demo videos will increase the likelihood of a visitor to act on CTA.

• Proper funnelling: A landing page permits very little space to showcase your content. You need to cover every phase of your marketing funnel to make a visitor take the desired action, starting from producing awareness to the desired result.
• Solves a real problem: Your landing page should address the real pain point of the customer. Unless your landing page does not seem to try to provide value people will not consider clicking through.

A right landing page could be the best investment in your B2B lead generation campaigns and at some point of time will contribute to generating leads automatically.

4. Use Forms and Surveys to Gather Leads

Forms act as a great automation tool when incorporated correctly.

A form that aligns with customer persona and your B2B lead generation funnel beautifully in generating the right leads for your business and also helps put them in the right phase of your funnel.

You can add forms at every page of your website but you need to be aware of customer funnels into your content.

Simple psychology that worked for me is that I have incorporated options in my forms that are either questions that my audience already faces or are the answers around those questions.

And another thing which needs no mention is that your forms should include options that are exhaustive in nature that makes your customer believe that they can find a fix through your forms.

Believe me when your customer starts feeling that you can help people by providing them with the right information through your forms they fill those forms.

5. Offer Value in Facebook and LinkedIn

This process might take a longer time than others but the seed you sow here will give you sweeter fruit in the long run.

Offering value on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn ultimately increase your credibility in the market.

But how do you do that?

There is no simple answer as there are multitudinous ways you can do that.

One such way that worked well for us is to create and share case studies related to your industry on these platforms.

Another way is to host webinars and share it on social media platforms.

An experiment which was super niched towards our campaign goals was how we used a microcontent strategy on all our social media profiles.

What we did is we created super short content snippets from our long-form content which are share and click-worthy. The difference it made was, we experienced a considerable boost in our traffic onto our website.

There are a million ways to provide value on the web and when you gain some grip through these little efforts it will contribute hugely to your B2B lead generation automation.

6. Go Where Your Customers Go

Facebook and LinkedIn are not the only platforms where you find your customers online. There are options for finding your audience online that you can’t even imagine.

In practice, this could mean becoming more active on platforms like Reddit, Quora, Blogs, Product Hunt, Angel List, gust.com, spoke.com, Slack communities, review sites, related forums, and other similar channels.

This doesn’t mean to bloat your audience with just information that they don’t even need, go out there to provide true value.

Try to reach every corner of the web keeping your customer journey in mind. You don’t know which opportunity is becoming your customer.

And once people start recognizing you on several platforms they want to connect with you and those platforms will become your automated source of business.

7. Offer a Referral Program

Referrals are not new in the industry, though they are common, they possess a huge potential of scaling your business which can compound your business growth.

A referral program is more like a word of mouth in a digital form.

You acquire a customer not to serve for once but to make a long term relationship with you. Every person has his/her circle of people who have similar interests. If you have made a connection with the person you already have his/her network to explore.

People tend to share what they feel important and helpful in their community. A referral gives them an easy opportunity to share. Once your referral or affiliate campaign start reaching people you will witness a compounding business growth.

A referral program or an affiliate system is a great B2B lead generation automation hack.

8. Amplify Word of Mouth Promotion

A referral program might seem similar to word of mouth promotion but they are different in the way that a referral program needs a discount offer to be promoted in your audience.

Word of mouth, on the other hand, depends only on the experience people get from your service or product that you provide them. The better the customer experience the better the amplification of promotion through word of mouth.

The actionable thing you can do is putting together what is saying about you on the web, maybe from tweets they share, reviews and ratings they give on different platforms on the internet.

You can present all of them in the form of customer stories and experiences on your websites or inside your blogs.

You can also make a case study out of it and share on your social media profiles which will act as a solid social proof and add up to your credibility in the market.

And once people start seeing people like them having great experiences, you will discover an automated lead generation source for your business.>

9. Automation through Marketing Toolsss.

Incorporating a marketing tool could be the best investment you can do in automating your lead generation campaigns. Action with a plan is always the most important thing but doing things without tracking and adjusting won’t give you results.ss.

Choosing the right tool will help you discover things that when refined will increase your conversion ratio exponentially.ss.

But how do you know which marketing tool you should use?ss.

Below are the segments that you need to consider while choosing a tool for your B2B lead generation campaign:ss.

• Market research ss.
• Email marketing and communicationss.
• Sales and prospectingss.
• CRM (customer relationship management)ss.
• Advertisingss.

Keep these workflows in mind while choosing a tool for your B2B lead generation processes. ss.

10. Automate Mail and Content Outreachingss.

Creating personalized emails based on customer personas is the first thing to do before you start your outreaching campaigns but the thing that drives those campaigns is the automation process that streamlines everything.ss.

The easy answer to automate your personalized email marketing campaign is using a good email and content marketing tool.ss.

The best email marketing tools that we have experienced in the market are MailChimp, Active Campaign and Constant Contact. And examples of CRM tools that you can use are: Hubspot CRM, Salesforce, ZOHO CRM to streamline your processes. ss.

Investment in an email marketing tool will not go waste if you use it the right way. Believe me, this is one of the most important decisions that can amplify your B2B lead generation. ss.

11. ss.Rinse & Repeatss.

Once you crack the code of automating your B2B lead generation you only need to rinse and repeat. Once you start getting results all you need is to maintain the pace with a little bit of experimentation. ss.

Conclusion: Automated B2B Lead Generationss.

Generating B2B leads is one of the toughest tasks not because it is difficult to reach to your targeted audience but the process becomes so overwhelming that it takes a lot of efforts in streamlining your processes.ss.

Focus on planning and strategizing in the right way will help you to automate your B2B lead generation campaigns and yield better results in the long run.ss.