The most effective channels to generate B2B leads

Most SMEs realise that sustained growth requires a consistent influx of new leads and heavily invest time and resources in proven tactics – including email marketing offers the best ROI, SEO, content marketing, Social media marketing – but in a crowded marketplace in which we are bombarded daily with marketing messages across every channel, it is becoming increasingly difficult to cut through the noise. 

So rather than re-hashing your current strategies or seeking our new lead generation channels for the sake of it, let’s examine complementary marketing activities that support your current efforts and provide an overall boost for your lead generation.

Get personal

A key idea is to make the delivery of your marketing messages less generic and more personalised – while you may not have the time or manpower to craft individual messages to prospective clients, you can segment your database better to divide it into smaller groups – this could be by job title, age of the company, or niche within the industry – with common concerns, pains points and issues. Aim to make emails sounds less automated but rather address very specific and timely issues that directly impact on your audience.

Leverage audiences

Rather than publishing content to sites and boards that are a direct, obvious fit, look into content syndication to audiences of services and solutions that complement yours – while not entirely relevant, there is likely to be a lot of overlap and it increases your exposure to audiences that may have not been aware of your company otherwise. In a similar vein, seek out backlinks on sites that discuss, review and are involved in the same industry or solutions that complement your own.

You can also build brand awareness through such question-and-answer websites as Quora, addressing questions on topics directly linked to your company’s solutions and also those more indirectly related.

Get interactive

The more innovative, interactive, engaging and highly visual forms of marketing are the most difficult to produce yet the most effective in terms of creating brand recognition, awareness and recall.  Entertaining and engaging pays dividends, while merely educating and elucidating does not. Invest resources in create less items of memorable content than high volumes of mediocre content – whether an interactive white-paper, gallery, survey, quiz, assessment, audit, calculator or interactive infographic or captivating video, this focus should be on standing out in a positive, memorable way. It is worth making the full content – whether the article, eBook, video or resource- gated so that viewers can opt-in to access the full version.

Similarly, useful interactive tools – such as template documents (contracts, proposals etc) spreadsheet templates with calculator functionality, will create a positive impression that your company has something of value to share and is credible. It is also a good way of building your database/pipeline as prospective clients opt in to download the resources.

Tie it all together

The above tactics should be combined with a solid content and SEO campaign – both work hand-in-hand with the other strategies as effective content marketing – perhaps in the form of posts and articles on LinkedIn or other social media sites –  will generate traffic to your interactive tools and landing pages, while a robust SEO (mainly off-page) campaign will ensure your company is consistently found by an appropriate audience particularly if tied to a strong backlink building programme.