Scratching your head for new and better ways to keep your B2B sales pipeline full? If so, you’re not alone.
In fact, the two biggest challenges high-tech marketers are facing this year are exactly around lead generation. 54% of B2B marketers struggle with improving lead quality and conversion rates, and 41% with generating more leads, according to a recent B2B marketing trends report.
If you’re looking for inspiration to generate and engage leads for your tech company, we’ve got you.
We’ve put together a list of the top 10 lead generation ideas that’s worked for us and B2B lead-generation experts in the field — to give you the space to test and see what works best for your marketing and sales team. Let’s get started!
1: Add relevant pop-ups throughout your site.
Converting a casual website visitor to a lead — and getting their valuable contact details — is a huge top-of-funnel goal for many B2B marketers.
But how many of us are constantly looking for ways to decrease bounce rate?
There’s a simple yet powerful tactic: relevant pop-ups throughout your site.
Pop-ups appear when visitors are entering, scrolling through, or leaving your site. The ultimate goal is to capture their information before they go, and convince them to stay and take action, such as filling out their contact information so a sales rep can reach out.
For instance, use entry pop-ups to greet new visitors with a warm welcome. Offer them something valuable, like a free guide or webinar, to keep them intrigued.
Then, consider using timed pop-ups to appear after visitors have spent some quality time on your site. This is your chance to showcase testimonials or case studies to build trust and credibility.
And if they’re about to leave, exit-intent pop-ups can give them a gentle nudge to opt-in to see a demo of your solution, or claim an incentive.
Poptin does a great job of this!
2: Conduct or publish market research
Looking for ways to create content that really stands out?
Especially in today’s generative AI era, producing original stats through market research goes a long way in presenting your brand as credible and an authority in your space.
Offering prospects valuable insight and statistics into your market can help them make more informed decisions, and also help differentiate your content with thought leadership.
What if research doesn’t seem like it’ll fit in my budget?
We totally get that. Oftentimes, research gets the back seat to what managers see as more valuable like paid ads, virtual events, or social media — especially because common research providers charge upwards of six digits for a research project.
The good news? With ViB, your team can conduct research affordably.
Leveraging the ViB Community, it’s easy to create and promote targeted surveys, and in turn produce in-depth reports that are actually budget-friendly, saving you ⅔ the cost of traditional analysts. And, with no extra cost, you retain the rights to the information collected.
Check out this B2B marketing trends report for example, that leverages ViB Research for a comprehensive yet customized look into the state of B2B marketing.
Discover the latest trends and statistics — and the key actions B2B marketers and leaders need to take today.
3: Run A/B tests for every marketing campaign
It’s no secret that some lead generation strategies work better for different companies depending on their customers.
Whether you’re running a personalized email campaign, an information-based newsletter, or starting an industry-specific podcast, every customer segment will engage in different capacities depending on what they value most.
What’s the best way to find out which works best for your audience?
A/B testing. Your competitors may be doing one thing well, so it may seem like a good idea to implement that strategy yourself. But, without further testing, you may overlook a stronger strategy that would put you two steps ahead of your competitors.
With A/B testing, it’s best to split your audience with similar buying patterns into different segments to test variations of copy to determine which performs better.
A/B testing helps drive traffic to your site and boosts overall conversion rates. It also helps determine what’s offputting to customers, therefore decreasing your bounce rate.
4: Add testimonials to build social proof
We all want to know if companies can deliver on their promises, especially if you’re selling a big-ticket solution, which most IT and SaaS companies deal with on a daily basis.
Hearing about your offerings from your loyal customers is that extra reassurance that could push the lead through the decision making process.
“ViB delivered what they promised. We were blown away by the quality of the leads, the quality of our meetings, and the high rate of conversions.”
🎞 In this customer story for example, David from Automation Anywhere talks about his experience with ViB Appointments, a B2B appointment setting service.
Testimonials like these help prospects get a better picture of how you operate, what makes you different, and if your previous clients would recommend your products or services.
In the B2B tech space, there are a lot of decision-makers, so it’s crucial you use social proof and valuable statistics to prove why your product or service is superior to your competitor’s.
5: Repurpose highly engaged content on other platforms
If you know what’s working, why not repurpose it for other platforms?
ViB recently reported, “53% of B2B tech marketers say they are focused on repurposed content this year (ViB, 2023).”
Repurposing B2B content is about maximizing your ROI on your current assets. Whether that looks like converting videos into blogs, or white papers and case studies into ebooks, repurposing content gives your team more time to focus on gaps in your strategy, gives you a greater reach, and helps your company scale faster.
A great way to repurpose content is through content syndication platforms. Especially if you’re targeting a high-tech audience, ViB’s content syndication service can take your existing assets and promote them to your ideal customer segments — filtered by job titles, job level, geography and company size.
Plus, look out for syndication solutions with pay per lead guarantees, so you can be sure to generate qualified contacts with your content.
6: Add a Chatbot to your website to increase engagement
According to Adobe, 28% of leading companies use chatbots as a part of their marketing strategy.
Chatbots create better employee efficiency because they have the ability to have multiple conversations at once — resolving the easy tasks so your employees don’t have to.
Hubspot recently reported that 90% of customers value an “immediate” response from customer service. And if you’re selling a complex technical solution, there’s a high chance your prospects will have burning questions.
Chatbots allow 24/7 customer service and can be programmed to respond in as many different languages as needed, giving your prospects the convenience they’re looking for while maintaining the highest level of customer service.
Source: Forbes
The good news? Generative AI has made it so much easier to build customized chatbot — whether you’re doing it from scratch or using a tool that integrates with your tech stack.
7: Prioritize effective, industry-specific visuals.
This tip is for the designers and content marketers out there.
Consumers tend to focus on “information-carrying” images because they’re easier to learn and keep visual statistics to memory.
Around 40% of marketers say original infographics are more persuasive than traditional visual content.
With our brains processing images almost 60x faster than written information, negating the two biggest issues marketers face when dealing with B2B clients — time and uncertainty.
Visuals like infographics, diagrams and one-pagers help your audiences get quick, easily digestible pieces of valuable information in a fraction of the time it takes to read the same content if written.
And once you invest in producing these visuals, remember to repurpose and repromote them to the fullest.
8: Host webinars to attract and engage new leads
Webinars offer companies a powerful platform to engage their audience and establish themselves as thought leaders.
For high-tech marketers, B2B webinars are gold. They keep your audience engaged for longer, giving you ample time to dive deep into your complex solutions, such as with dynamic forums and live demos.
By delivering actionable advice during sessions also helps your company position itself as an industry resource and build brand recognition.
🌟 Get more tips on this — B2B Virtual Events: A Pro’s Guide to Planning and Promoting Your Webinars.
The main caveat is the effort to manage so many moving parts in your webinar marketing strategy.
Here’s an easy fix: run end-to-end webinars without the hassle by using ViB’s webinar services. The ViB team plans, promotes, hosts, tracks, and most importantly delivers a guaranteed number of leads to each session .
And, you can even record your webinar so your team can repurpose again and again, in different time zones or as part of different campaigns.
There are several different B2B lead generation ideas you can implement into your own business. These can be used to attract B2B leads and help you learn more about ways to generate leads in sales.
9: Send precisely targeted emails
Did you know that the average email open rate in 2022 for the B2B tech industry was 14%? And, a staggering amount (almost 61%) of marketers confirmed their email open rate was below 20%.
Email marketing is an important tactic to nail. So what’s causing a lower open rate and decreased ROI?
Increasing B2B data decay, or purchasing non-compliant data lists are some of the common culprits. But if we’re talking about leads who are the right fit and just haven’t taken that extra step to open or engage with your emails, meaningful personalization is a valuable fix.
When generating lead lists, ensure the contacts are accurately segmented, to help your team identify who to target, when to target them, and with what content or messaging.
A strategic way to boost your email marketing results is to work with a verified, credible B2B email marketing lead generation partner like ViB.
With ViB Emails, you can easily resend any email you have to precisely targeted accounts, as part of your ABM email strategy.
See the 10 B2B data providers we trust
10: Collect deal intelligence
Finally, let’s talk about successful lead generation techniques through the middle to bottom of the funnel, because that’s where many teams struggle with retaining and converting leads too.
In the complex world of tech sales, understanding your buyers is key. But answers to the most common questions your reps need are often hard or almost impossible to get:
- Do your prospects have a purchase timeline?
- What are their specific needs?
- Do they have a budget?
Deal intelligence becomes your secret weapon to connect with prospects and boost your chances of closing the deal.
Whichever sales intelligence tool or B2B intent data providers you use, remember that credible sources are a must. Prioritize sources that use first or zero-party data for the most accurate and reliable intel on your prospects.
Take ViB Deal Intent, for example. With ViB as a trusted mediator, you directly gather valuable deal intelligence from each prospect. And the best part? They’ve given consent to be contacted!
This way, you can equip your sales teams with the right prospect info to make tailored pitches and ace those sales conversations.
What do all these ideas look like in action?
It’s easy to read each of these ideas and think, “These are great, in theory.” You may be short on time and resources making these ideas seem like more work than their worth.
Partnering with a premier B2B lead generation agency is an easy way to ensure you’re reaching your KPIs (key performance indicators), staying under budget, and capturing qualified sales leads.
Let’s look at an example.
AtScale is a software company that accelerates the flow of data-driven insights. They recently partnered with ViB with the goal of increasing the engagement of their evergreen content and improving their webinar attendance.
The AtScale team leveraged ViB’s email marketing services to deliver targeted branded messages, such as to promote their upcoming events. The nurtured prospects fully anticipated a follow-up call, and many converted into meetings.
The result?
519 net new qualified leads, including a challenging-to-capture prospect.
With ViB Emails, generate hundreds of qualified leads consistently, just like AtScale.
Put these lead generation ideas to work today
Finding a top lead generation company to work with has the potential to offer dramatic results that save you time and fit within your budget. If you’re looking for tailored solutions that will help identify gaps in your lead generation strategy, reach out to one of our team members to get started today!
Growth just got a whole lot easier. 🚀
