Lead generation is the process of attracting high-quality visitors to your website and converting those visitors into meaningful leads. At its core, lead generation involves understanding your target audience, creating content relevant to that audience and encouraging visitors to offer some personal information in exchange for that content.
The Value of B2B Lead Generation
Inbound lead generation grows your web traffic and fills your pipeline with a wealth of ideal prospects. Because these prospects have already shown an organic interest in your product or services, your sales and marketing teams can more easily nurture them into customers. For high-growth companies in the Saas and B2B space, the lead generation process is essential to acquiring new customers, scaling the business and driving results.
Generating leads is a highly-involved process that requires the right mix of talent, technique
1. Your website isn't attracting visitors.
No traffic, no leads. The first hurdle to overcome in a successful lead generation strategy is attracting visitors to your website. If prospects aren't even reaching your website in the first place, you could have issues with your blogging strategy, SEO strategy, social media strategy or persona development.
Start blogging on a regular basis
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Read More2. You don't understand your audience.
Maybe your website is attracting ample traffic, but generating few conversions. In cases like these, the most common underlying issue we see is that marketers don't fully understand their audience. If your ideal buyer personas aren't developed correctly and completely, then you won't know how to target them effectively — and every other lead generation technique you employ will suffer because of it.
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Read More3. You don't have enough relevant content.
Content is the fuel for all of your other lead generation efforts. It's the reason that people visit your website, it's the reason they stay and it's the reason they convert into leads. If you're not creating enough content — or if the content you are creating is unhelpful, low-quality or irrelevant to your personas — website visitors will not feel compelled to convert, and your lead generation efforts will fail.
DO NOT ignore the power of content marketing
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Read More4. Your website doesn't have conversion opportunities.
Too often, marketers make the mistake of thinking that accurate personas, great content and lots of web traffic is enough. To generate leads, you need to give your visitors the opportunity to offer some personal information in exchange for the valuable content you've created; you need conversion opportunities spread strategically across your website.
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Read MorePersona Development & Buyer's Journey Alignment
Successful lead generation begins with buyer personas. Consult your sales and marketing teams and conduct some outside research to understand who your ideal customers are, what their goals are, what their main challenges are, how your solutions solve for their challenges and which messages would resonate most with them.
Once you've developed three to four primary personas, combine external research and current customer data to understand the buyer's journey for each. Ask yourself: What content would be most helpful to my personas at each stage in their buyer's journey? What content is so valuable that they'd be willing to share their personal information in order to reach it? Use this insight to inform and optimize all of your other lead generation tactics.
SEO and SEM
Attracting high-fit leads requires fully-optimized on-page SEO, a killer keyword strategy and — when appropriate for your personas and your business — paid search advertising. Once you've developed optimal buyer personas, you can begin determining the key search terms that your personas will use when searching for solutions to their problems.
Use these terms to optimize your on-page SEO from the title to the metadata, create topic clusters and pillar pages to build your domain authority, develop an SEM strategy that will put the right ads in front of the right people and continue to audit, update and optimize your content for the best results. Remember, Google now understands the context of and intent behind search terms, so an effective SEO/SEM strategy takes into consideration a searcher's intent.
Strategic Content Development
If you've poked around the inbound marketing community for any amount of time, then you've probably encountered the phrase "content is king" — and it's true. Content may be the single most important component of your lead generation endeavor, so it's important to get it right.
Revisit your buyer personas. What information are they looking for? What content would they find helpful? How would they prefer to consume that content? Create or repurpose genuine, relevant and informative content with the goal of educating your prospects and giving them the tools they need to make informed decisions.
Conversion Optimization
With an in-depth understanding of your ideal customers, an abundance of content that educates your prospects and builds brand equity and an SEO strategy that attracts quality visitors to your website, you're well on your way to accelerating your lead generation. However, you still need to optimize your website to drive conversions.
Using a data-driven approach, determine the most effective conversion pathways for each of your primary personas. These pathways will start with relevant, ungated top-of-the-funnel content, lead into premium content offers via compelling calls-to-action and end with landing page forms and delivery of the offer. By optimizing your website for conversions, your prospects will be able to navigate the buyer's journey without any additional input from you.
Smart Tech to Support Your Strategy
An effective, data-driven approach to lead generation requires a number of tools and technical capabilities. Without the following tools, you'll find that your lead generation techniques are apt to fall flat, no matter how much time and effort you put into them.
Premium Content Offers (PCOs)
Visitors to your website will never convert into leads if you don't give them something to convert on. Premium content offers, such as e-books, webinars, templates
CTAs
Calls-to-action do exactly what you think they do: They compel visitors to take
Landing Pages
When visitors click on a CTA to download a PCO, they are taken to a landing page for that offer. Landing pages host clear and concise messaging that describes the offer, compelling CTAs driving visitors to download the offer and forms where visitors can enter their information and become leads. Landing pages can include
Forms
Forms are where the magic happens; using forms, you force your prospects to enter relevant, qualifying information in order to reach the desired content. With a strategic approach to form building, you can ensure that the details you capture are the right ones to help your sales and marketing teams nurture leads more effectively. The structure of your forms will differ based on your buyer personas, the funnel stage and the type of offer.
Lead Flows
Lead flows are small pop-up CTAs, forms or messages that slide into the webpage as a visitor is browsing. By implementing compelling and contextually relevant lead flows on your website, you offer alternative conversion opportunities for visitors to convert into leads. Lead flows can be used to deliver more relevant content to your visitors, promote events or connect visitors with your sales team.
Proven, Predictable, Data-Powered Results
The tools and strategies we've outlined are proven to increase website traffic, boost lead generation and drive the best results for B2B businesses. Not convinced? Check out a few of the companies who used significantly accelerated their lead generation efforts with New Breed's data-driven approach.
Pwnie Express: A 1002% Increase in Lead Generation
Pwnie Express, an information security software company, came to New Breed with the goal of generating more, higher-quality leads. We helped them define their buyer personas, create a master form strategy and build pipeline snapshot reports for how leads were progressing through the funnel, increasing the number of leads generated for their company from an average of 2,486 to 27,416. Click here to read more about Pwnie Express's lead generation success.
Hireology: An 86% Increase in Lead Generation
Hireology, an HR software company, came to New Breed with the goal of increasing their lead generation efforts. We helped them define their buyer personas, develop and optimize a website that would drive conversions and create a resource center to highlight their contextually-relevant content. After the website launch, they experienced an increase in leads generated
UrbanBound: A 100% Increase in Lead Generation
UrbanBound, a cloud software company, came to New Breed for help with developing a sales-ready website that would drive conversions. We helped them define their buyer personas, produce conversion maps for each persona, strategically place CTAs around their website and optimize the site for conversions. After their engagement with New Breed, they experienced a 100 percent increase in quality lead generation. Click here to read more about UrbanBound's lead generation success.
New Breed can help you attract and convert more, higher-quality leads to grow your business. Our lead generation services include our Growth Acceleration Workshop, Sales-Ready Website development, content development, search engine optimization and more.
Assess Your Current Lead Generation Strategy
We can help you identify gaps in your lead generation strategy and provide recommendations for attracting and converting more qualified leads.
Content Audit
Maybe you already have a wealth of content at your disposal — but are you maximizing its worth for rapid lead generation and business growth? Our content audit will help you understand if you're speaking to your personas, mapping your content to the buyer's journey and optimizing your lead generation efforts. Learn more about how our content audit can help you boost conversion rates and generate more qualified leads.
SEO Audit
If you're not generating enough high-quality leads, your problem could lie in your SEO strategy. Our SEO audit will comb through your website to uncover technical SEO errors, discover quick wins and provide actionable recommendations for optimizing your SEO strategy and driving lead conversions on your website. Learn more about how our SEO audit can help you generate more leads.
The first step to effective lead generation is gaining a deep understanding of your buyer personas and developing a website that has the power to convert. Our foundational services can set you up with these lead generation basics.
Growth Acceleration Workshop
An effective lead generation strategy begins with fully-developed buyer personas, a roadmap for each persona's buyer's journey and clear metrics to track your success. In our Growth Acceleration Workshop, we bring together your sales and marketing teams to discuss your goals and challenges, gain organizational consensus on your ideal customer profiles and develop a plan for generating leads and scaling your business. Learn more about how our Growth Acceleration Workshop can set you up for lead generation success.
Sales-Ready Website
To generate more qualified leads, your website needs to be more than a standard digital brochure — it needs to be fully optimized to drive conversions and generate leads. Our Sales-Ready Website redesign process helps you develop a persona-driven architecture that encourages web visitors through conversion paths and puts them in front of the content most relevant to them. Learn more about how our Sales-Ready Website can transform your website into a lead generation machine.
Our premier services can help you create powerful lead generation initiatives that work well with your ongoing strategies and programs.
Content Premier Services
Content helps you attract high-quality traffic, convert leads into visitors and create long-term brand evangelists. Our content strategists will work with you to create a content plan that will speak to your personas, guide your prospects through conversion paths and encourage visitors to convert into leads. Learn more about how we can help you produce high-quality content that drives lead conversions.
SEO Premier Services
Organic lead generation begins with a Google search. Our SEO strategists will work with you to increase your search visibility, boost your website's authority ranking and attract more of the right traffic to your website. With an effective and ongoing SEO strategy, you can optimize all areas of your site for high-quality visitors and lead conversions. Learn more about how we can help you develop an SEO strategy to attract and convert more leads.
Inbound Premier Services
Lead generation is just one staple in a well-rounded inbound marketing strategy. Our inbound strategists will work with you to define your goals and KPIs, grow your marketing efforts and create search engine optimized content that will drive lead generation and help you hit your revenue goals. Learn more about how we can help you develop an inbound marketing plan that helps you convert more leads.
