A marketing lead is someone who has demonstrated an interest in your products or services. In short, they’re potential customers.
Lead generation is crucial for successful growth, a goal many organizations have but find difficult to achieve. It’s important to remember that B2B lead generation is different from B2C lead generation.
In B2B demand generation, we are targeting other businesses that are in the market for an enterprise solution. With B2C lead generation, we’re talking about individual consumers. This means that the strategies, though similar, are going to look a little different between the two.
Here, we identify three main differences between them.
- Content Style. For example, the content produced as part of a B2B lead generation strategy will most likely be more informative and formal than with B2C lead generation.
- Sales Length. The sales themselves will tend to be larger and take longer to complete in B2B transactions, impacting lead generation strategies.
- Market Size. B2B lead generation also tends to focus on a narrower market consisting of business owners or leaders within businesses.
In B2B, it’s about making sure that potential customers are aware of your solution and how it can solve their business problems. For B2C, the best practice is to use entertaining, informal content to reach as wide a target audience as possible.
Identifying these potential customers and generating leads on your own can be a difficult task. That’s why many businesses turn to lead generation tools or platforms to help them with online lead generation. Here’s a list of some of the top tools for B2B lead generation:
These B2B lead generation tools each serve specific functions and can be used in conjunction with one another to build a robust lead generation strategy. Of all lead generation companies out there, one of the companies that stands out is ViB.
ViB’s positive reviews and successful case studies on their site demonstrate that they can provide hassle-free lead generation and increased sales and truly deliver on their commitments.
The practice of lead generation focuses on identifying, attracting, nurturing, and converting these prospective customers into repeat customers.
Lead generation strategies
If lead generation is a priority, there are many different lead generation strategies out there that can be effective. Here’s a list of them:
- Request referrals from your best customers
- Create nurture email campaign
- Create compelling Social Media Content
- Invest in your blog
- Attend Online Events
This is only a small sample of the many different kinds of strategies lead generation companies use to help bring your brand to the attention of potential customers. One important concept to understand when it comes to lead generation is free leads.
What are free leads? They are what they sound like, potential customers who have become aware of your offering without you having to pay any money to reach them.
One example of this is using an email marketing campaign to reach out to former customers. The email campaign would not cost any additional marketing capital and could generate a lot of free leads.
When you look at any list of lead generation strategies, you probably are quickly overwhelmed with all the different activities you could or should be doing. That’s why many professionals turn to some form of lead generation software to help introduce some automation into the process.
What is lead gen software?
Lead gen software connects your sales and marketing apps to automatically generate leads and route them to the proper teams.
ViB makes it easy to generate leads through its appointment setting program, which allows you to find your audience and reach out to them through a scheduled meeting. Using our platform, some of our customers have seen an 80% conversion rate from lead to opportunity.
Learn how Paula achieved a 60% conversion rate from lead to opportunity
Best sales lead generation tools
Lead generation tools in digital marketing are important because it helps to maximize your customer base and increase sales. Ultimately it will bring in greater revenue and profits, allowing the business to grow.
ViB is an excellent demand generation agency and offers lead generation services. Let’s take a look at a case study. Ermetic is a startup and has a small global sales team. They were looking for help and quickly partnered with ViB. Our solution rapidly provided them with double the meetings their small sales team was able to generate.
50% of all appointments scheduled were converted to opportunities. The average opportunity size was for $100,000, which was 20% higher than any other opportunity source. The client was impressed with the easy-to-use features and great customer service ViB provided.
How to generate leads
We’ve discussed some general lead generation strategies. Now, we’ll go a little deeper in terms of how to generate leads.
Leads can be generated in several ways. One of them is to use SEO and online marketing content to try to rank higher in search results. That way, when a potential customer runs into an issue you can solve, they’ll be able to find you faster and easier.
Another way is to utilize one of the best lead generation tools available, ViB. Our platform allows you to quickly and easily reach out to our audience of over 200 million potential customers with your message. Then, we also facilitate the entire appointment scheduling process so that you can have meetings with leads faster and start them on the conversion process earlier.
If you’re still wondering how to generate B2B leads, you could also look to other B2B lead generation tools. We’ve listed ten below.
- HubSpot
- Albacross
- Discoverly
- WisePops
- Lusha
- Referral Candy
- Jotform
- Driftrock
- Intercom
- Hello Bar
HubSpot is a CRM and helps with things like SEO optimization, Jotform is a form-building application, and Hello Bar is a tool for putting an announcement banner at the top of your site. All of these can be useful. How effective they’ll be for you depends largely on your own goals and overall strategy for lead generation and marketing.
Also, if you are a B2B startup that’s somewhat strapped for cash, you could look into some of the best free lead generation tools. These are no-cost pieces of software that can help you achieve some of the goals for a lead generation we’ve been discussing.
For example, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a free Chrome browser extension that can give you added insights into people you are emailing. Email Finder is a software that includes a free plan where you can discover up to 50 emails by putting in your search criteria. It should be noted, however, that the quality of leads you get from a free lead generation tool cannot be guaranteed.
Lead generation tools for B2B
Let’s continue our discussion of lead generation tools by taking a look at a few lead generation examples from the lead generation tools list above. Albacross helps you gather data so that you can use powerful insights to build your demand generation strategy and get a higher conversion rate.
Discoverly helps you identify leads by scanning social media profiles to see who matches the ideal criteria for a potential customer of your products and services. WisePops, on the other hand, is a tool for creating beautiful and effective popups, banners, and bars on your website.
As you can see, each of these tools serves a different purpose, but all are focused on a single goal: better lead generation, accelerated conversions, and more sales. In the end, without leads, you have no one to sell to.
Lead generation sites
All of the tools we have discussed are cloud-based and have informative sites that can help you learn more about lead generation. For example, HubSpot has a wealth of free information to help you learn more about a variety of marketing subjects, including lead generation and tools used for lead generation. These lead generation sites can also tell you more about the services and features provided by these lead generation companies.
Here’s a list of three of the best lead generation sites:
- HubSpot
- Albacross
- Email Finder
Best lead generation companies
The best lead generation companies provide practical tools that actually help you achieve objectives. In the case of lead generation, the companies should provide high-quality leads that have a and should lead to higher sales.
ViB has a strong system for delivering just these results and has a collection of case studies to prove it. While there are several choices for lead generation companies for small businesses as well as enterprise scale; ViB has proved to be successful for both use cases.
