More content. More channels. More views. More subscriptions. More is, all too often, not better – simply increasing bandwidth does not necessary impact the bottom line. In fact, the upshot of pouring more manpower and budgets into a faulty funnel is often inflated acquisition costs and mediocre results.
Rather that channelling resources into creating ‘more’, focus first on getting the basic rights so that you can captive the right audiences, capture leads and convert. Landing pages impact significantly on conversion rates and overall campaign performance yet are often the weakest links – improving poorly optimised forms can dramatically turn campaign performance around so use a tool to test and track form performance.
Email strategies
Marketing automation is key as is reduces the workload, allows quick and easy segmentation to highly target outreach efforts and personalise campaigns to specific industry and their particular needs, issues, and pain points. Many email and marketing platforms and tools allow you to track, A/B test and gather insight and intelligence on how audiences are responding – this is essential as it enables you to improve campaign performance based on accurate, timely feedback. Setting up an automated referral campaign is a particularly effective tactic – provided you offer a strong enough incentive to encourage others to refer.
Create a lead magnet by offering something of value to drive sign-ups and subscriptions to your list or channel is a simple means to build an extensive database and lead pipeline. A (genuinely) free and useful audit, report or white-paper/ebook are some of most common and effective options. Not only does the offer entice readers to sign-up or subscribe but also serves to establish your credibility and authority – as a source of knowledge and insight – in the marketplace. Even higher conversion rates can be achieved by re-establishing contact with previous or prospective clients that have gone cold. It is also worth keep existing clients in the loop and engaged as a retainment strategy – it is more costly to find new clients rather than retain existing ones.
Content Strategies
As the vast majority of B2B buyers carry out extensive research and self-education before approaching the supplier, it is the content they encounter and their faith in their own assessment that convinces them to purchase – and not expensive ad campaigns and biased, overly self-promotional content.
So create authentic, factual content that presents an (almost) unbiased and non-hyperbolic assessment of your solution – support is with ‘social proof’ examples in term form of case studies and testimonials. Segment where possible so the content is relevant and useful to the audience slice viewing it. Remember to make it easy for readers to connect and take next steps through CTAs that make it clear what is required and what they can expect in return – use them on every form of media including videos and interactive content to entice signups and subscriptions.
Creating an automated webinar, while requiring time investment upfront, is one of the most effective lead generation tactics – on the sign-up and attendance process is set-up, little work is required for the pre-recorded content beyond occasional updates, tweaks based on performance and tracking of conversion rates.
Recycling existing content to create a more substantial offering squeezes additional value from less fresh content and can provide a useful resource when compiled e.g., creating an eBook or comprehensive guide from similarly themed articles, blog posts, and other content can revitalise your previous work and bring it to an entirely new audience. Updating and rehashing content to ensures it caters to a certain segment is another way of getting value from the time and financial investment involved in creating content.
Overall, in very broad strokes, email, content marketing and SEO outperform alternative B2B channels by a long shot in terms of lead volume and ROI. Which channel will perform best in your particular case depends largely on your audiences preferences – the places they group, post answers and pose questions – and how you use that lead generation channel. In other words, the campaign and strategy and channel will impact on your lead generation efforts to a certain extent but, by and large, it is the manner in which you execute that determines results.
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