B2B marketing is absolutely fierce. It’s a never-ending race to generate, nurture and close leads. It’s also always evolving – and rapidly – so keeping your lead generation strategies up to date is critical.
As the landscape shifts, savvy marketers pivot early towards the latest and greatest tools and tricks.
Here are 4 ways you can keep your B2B lead generation on the cutting edge.
Watch Your Inbound
Inbound marketing has been the central focus for many B2B marketers for years now. It marked a huge paradigm shift, away from intrusive hard-sell tactics into exactly the opposite – putting yourself out there with excellent content and letting the customers find you.
Companies who got on board with it immediately back in 2005, when the phrase was coined, had (and still have) a huge advantage. The playing field was wide open and it wasn’t too hard to rocket straight to the top of the SERPs.
Look at Google’s results today, though. More to the point, look at your own page rankings. If you’re not already well established, it’s hard to get any kind of foothold these days. Every industry has its big heavy hitters, with SEO and copywriting staff, marketing budget and domain authority that smaller businesses simply can’t hope to match.
It’s not impossible to displace these giants on the front page of Google, but it takes in-depth SEO knowledge, top-notch copywriting skill and a highly relevant topic to focus your keywords around. Plus, tons of time investment.
This challenge is compounded by the fact that Google puts out way more updates than you think. In 2018, they put out a staggering 3,234 algorithm updates, and that’s only been increasing every year since. When there are 9 changes per day, each with the potential to shake up the SERP rankings you’ve worked so hard for, “uphill battle” is an understatement.
That’s not to say that inbound doesn’t work – it absolutely does, and will continue to. It’s just much harder today than it was 15 years ago when it emerged.
You’ll do yourself and your marketing impact a favor by being aware of how saturated the SEO game is these days. Consider broadening your scope a bit and looking to other, less time-intensive tactics as well.
Make Your Marketing Stand Out
The average consumer in the United States sees 5,000 ads per day. That’s probably pretty accurate for most consumers these days.
As a marketer, realize that people are sick of ads. Just because your ad is B2B doesn’t mean the person seeing it hasn’t also been hit with 4,999 other ads that day – they’re a B2C target too, after all.
We’re conditioned to tune ads out, reflexively and unconsciously ignoring banners, skipping pre-roll ads on YouTube, closing popups galore, and ignoring or deleting huge piles of marketing emails.
If you want your marketing to stand out in the crowd, it needs to be special.
Take some cues from B2C campaigns, and try injecting humor and fun into your ads. Get creative with it, and don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. You’ll never make great strides forward by staying static.
Multimedia Is Your Friend
One way to get your marketing to stand out even more is to make it move. Animated content consistently outperforms static images, especially on social media.
It might sound difficult – animation is a whole big kettle of fish after all. But it doesn’t need to be crazy complicated. Even a simple slideshow will likely outperform your static versions of the same images.
If you’re up for a slightly more involved production process, you can do a whole lot with just a little bit of animation added to your elements.
For example, if you have a sidebar on your blog with a form that asks people to subscribe, try animating the CTA of the form to wiggle a little every once in a while. It draws the eye without being disruptive, and brings readers’ attention to the subscription form.
You’ll see subtle animations all over corporate websites these days. In many cases, it’s simply elements fading and sliding in or out, or short GIFs of their product in use. These things are all fairly easy and rapid to create, and make your branding and marketing feel much more modern.
Reach Your Audience Proactively
Earlier, we talked about how difficult inbound is becoming, and how it was a huge paradigm shift.
With most B2B businesses leaning heavily on the slow burn of inbound, if you can proactively reach your target audience before they’ve been drawn in by the competition, you’re at a huge advantage.
That’s where email lead generation comes in. In a nutshell, it’s a lead driver than enables you to reach out to your target audience in great numbers with cold email campaigns. Think of it kind of like a gateway to your funnel – you dramatically scale the number of potential leads you’re reaching, and the number of leads entering your funnel will grow proportionately.
It’s a powerful tool that can pull your lead generation right to the cutting edge of marketing tactics. You can read more on the technical side of it in this article.
If you want to learn more about it and see it in action for yourself, we’re happy to show you. Just set up a time for us to give you a free, live 1:1 software demo.
