However, most research studies do point to a few online strategies that have consistent success for B2B lead generation:

• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing (SEO)

With this data in mind, what specifically can you do within each of these 4 strategies to really nail your B2B lead generation in 2017? Here are some tips to help get the inbound juices flowing.

1. Email Marketing

A main contributor to the growing success rates in email marketing is marketing automation. Marketing automation tools sync up with your CRM to automatically send highly targeted and personalized emails to your website visitors in each stage of their Buyer’s Journey.

Marketing automation is the best way to deliver the most relevant content at the most opportune time to the most receptive audience…altogether building the most perfect storm in which to lead potential buyers to a conversion. In addition, marketing automation also helps to reduce time-consuming and redundant tasks and makes the entire email marketing process that much more efficient, which means your campaigns are up and running faster — further optimizing the overall spend on your marketing strategy.

In addition to email marketing, here’s a list of some of the other tasks that you can manage through marketing automation to aid in your B2B lead generation efforts:

• Email Marketing: anything from batch emails to workflow-triggered, lead-nuturing campaigns, to dynamic content and mobile optimization
• Lead Generation: this includes lead generation capacities, pay-per-click advertising, and online (webinars) and offline events (tradeshows) management
• Lead Management: automate list segmentation and management, which will help to ensure your generating leads are being followed up by the right people, at the right time
• Social Media Marketing: use the software to manage your profiles, manage your content, see how your content is being shared, and track and manage all of your social campaigns, including their results
• Content/Resource Management: most tools will help you to track and assign your content calendar topics, and manage your resources across tasks, budgets and campaigns

2. Social Media Marketing

One of the most obvious social platforms to enlist in B2B lead generation is LinkedIn. Not only is it the biggest social meeting ground for professionals, it’s also viewed as much more “sophisticated” than it’s Facebook or Twitter counterparts, thus implying more businesses with B2B relationships will be found on LinkedIn vs. any other social platform.

That said, for any social media marketing strategy to work, you have to have a strong and unique presence in order to stand out from the millions of other users competing for attention. Here’s how to start making progress:

• Build out your LinkedIn account: build out a professional and robust profile for your business account on LinkedIn, so that any B2B lead looking at your page will immediately understand who the business is and what they do
• Be active: connect with colleagues and join groups: connect with current colleagues, forer colleagues, business associates, and other industry professionals. Join groups that are relevant and that have members who could potentially become leads for your business.

In addition to LinkedIn, you can also nuture your other social media platforms to optimize the opportunity for lead generation there as well: link to your website from all social media accounts (ideally to well-designed landing pages with sign-up forms), use Calls-to-Action to promote your business, services or products, and allow newsletter or webinar signups directly from your Facebook for Business page.

As we mentioned above, diversification is key to a well-rounded B2B lead generation strategy, so make sure you’re firing on all fronts (and in this case, on all social media platforms).

3. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a pretty broad term, as so many different pieces contribute to “content”. So what are some of the most effective ways to generate valuable B2B leads through content marketing?

• Webinars: these are a great way to prove your value as an industry expert and attract an audience you may not have found otherwise. Webinars are a pretty cost-effective way to get your voice and your business name in front of a large audience, potentially capturing a lot of leads along the way.
• Free Trials: for those businesses in the SaaS industry, offering free trials (unlimited access for a set period of time) is an awesome way to get users to try your product or service for free. Ideally, once they use it, they’ll love it, and voila! They may just sign up for access to the paid version.
• Freemiums: Freemiums are like a free trial, except instead of full access for a limited period of time, they offer limited access for an unlimited period of time. This form of lead generation assumes that for the majority of users, it will become necessary to upgrade to the paid version in order to maximize the benefit the SaaS tool brings to the table. Generally, some major piece of functionality or benefit is not included in the Freemium, which acts as incentive for users to upgrade.
• Videos: YouTube has become the social platform of choice for most millennial users and has also become the world’s 2nd largest search engine, after Google. Video content in the form of tutorials, customer testimonials, demos, etc. are a surefire way to help in your B2B lead generation efforts.
• Blogging: You’re here, aren’t you? Blog posts, done properly, have the ability to show up in the search engine results more than any other content, which will help to bring in leads who are searching for keywords used in your posts.
• Research Reports/eBooks: Before any major purchase decision, I research the heck out of it. Any content or research or review that I can find on a product or service, I’ve read it. Publishing free research resports or eBooks for downloads are a great way to establish yourself as an industry expert, and to collect user information in the download process.

4. Search Engine Marketing

Search engines can still be the best original sources of lead generation for a lot of companies. Staying on top of your SEO and keeping an eye on your rankings will help you to continue to acquire the right traffic for your website, that may turn into qualified leads who are in the Consideration or Decision stage of the Buyer’s Journey.

Summary

In summary, we hope it’s obvious that there are many directions that B2B lead generation can take you, depending on your industry: the trick is to test out a number of strategies and find which has the most success for your business.  Only by experimenting will you truly be able to find out what works and what doesn’t, and hone in what practices drive the most leads to your sales and marketing team.