B2B lead generation is never a single-channel affair.
If you focus on a channel like an email alone, it could help with your specialization, but it won’t bring as many leads and maximize your growth potential.
This is why it’s critical that you know how to generate leads across different B2B channels and create an omnichannel presence.
In this two-part guide, we take a look at how to conduct lead generation across multiple channels and how to position your organization for growth.
We start the list off with the crowd favorite: email.
Email is one of the most powerful mediums in B2B lead generation because it is still the primary platform where we conduct most of our formal business, and it’s easy to use especially if you want to conduct cold email outreach.
Doing B2B lead generation (and nurturing even) via email can be divided into three different stages:
- List Building
Email list building is basically building out a list of emails of your prospects based on a concrete target customer profile.
The way you approach this can either be in-house or via a third party. Email collection can start with current leads and expand to using tools such as Hunter.io, Snov.io, etc. to look for specific emails. Marketers can also use platforms such as LinkedIn to look for emails, or physically collect emails from events.
Emails that come in through lead magnets and forms should also be built into your individual lists at this point.
This stage is critical because it forms the markets that you will be reaching out to.
- Actual Outreach
This refers to creating the content that you’ll use to reach out to your leads and nurturing them until they’re ready to get on a call with your organization.
You need to design multiple stages that cover everything from objections to different paths that conversation may take.
Adding elements of automation will also help you make your campaigns more efficient.
- Lead Nurturing or Layering With Other Campaigns
After the initial lead generation stage and they’ve fallen into your funnels, you can now aim to nurture them with emails by using newsletters, resources, etc.
You can also start combining email with the other campaigns that you may have, this helps spread out your surface area.
Socials
Some people might say that you can’t run a B2B campaign on social networks because it’s too casual, but what a lot of people should understand is that as long as your prospects are on a medium, you can always run a campaign.
There are a lot of things you can do on social networks, such as generate new leads, nurture, engage, or launch brand awareness campaigns.
B2B lead generation on social platforms is a great way to subtly guide your prospects into making a buy decision because it’s a casual outlet to engage with them.
Use socials for:
– Lead generation – you can set up lead magnets using valuable resources or gated content, put up ads for your products, and launch promotional campaigns.
– Brand awareness – one of the great strengths of social networks is the ability to retarget. On mediums such as Facebook, you can grab leads’ emails and throw ads along their way depending on where they are in your funnel.
– Lead nurturing – just as in the example of brand awareness, there are plenty of things you can do to guide prospects towards a buy decision. You can regularly post about new developments in the industry to establish yourself as a thought leader, post valuable and actionable resources to help prospects with their daily struggles, etc.
When using social, you can start by focusing on Facebook and LinkedIn, unless your market is also readily reachable through Twitter and Instagram.
We find Twitter to be incredibly powerful when doing outreach because you can reach influencers and industry captains easily.
Instagram is great if you have a lot of visual material to send your prospect’s way.
Phone
Don’t dismiss cold calling.
It’s inherently different from telemarketing and it can be extremely powerful as long as you know what you’re doing.
To cold call, you have to start, again, by building a list of the leads that you want to reach.
After doing that it’s time to develop scripts to use and put systems in place for follow-up calls and monitoring.
However, it doesn’t end there.
You need to incorporate voicemails into your systems and make sure you know how to deal with gatekeepers and the like.
Also, make sure you use phone lead gen as a part of other campaigns to make it even more powerful.
We’ll end our list here, for the time being, stay tuned for part 2 of this definitive guide on B2B lead generation across multiple channels, and how you can leverage each channel for maximum growth in your industry.
