Generating leads is a daily struggle for marketers,
especially in B2B companies. A lot of the time, it can feel like an uphill
battle as you try to entice business-minded visitors to come to your website
and submit form fills to become leads.
A healthy flow of leads gives B2B organizations a steady
pipeline of prospects to work into customers, and is critical for growth. Yet,
for all too many marketers, generating leads is about as smooth and painless as
a root canal without the Novocain.
Whether your business is just starting out and trying to
gain some traction, or if you’re looking to increase your leads even more, here
are a few B2B lead generation ideas you may want to consider:
#1: Look for Roadblocks in Your Lead Generation
There are a lot of reasons that businesses might not be
getting leads from their inbound marketing efforts. One of the biggest is that
companies will shoot themselves in the foot by accidentally placing obstacles
between visitors and the form fills that will turn those visitors into leads.
Examples of obstacles that can keep visitors from converting
to leads include, but aren’t limited to:
Overly Complicated Forms. Having a lot of form fields can be
great for getting really granular with your leads, but too many form fields
discourage visitors from filling them out. Try keeping form fields down to the
minimum necessary information you need about a lead. If you have the ability,
try using smart form fields that change for repeat visitors; you’ll get valuable
data without having to present first-time visitors with an overly-complicated
form.
Lack of Content or Offers Tied to Forms. Nobody’s going to
convert to a lead if you don’t give them a reason to fill out the form in the
first place. Having a variety of content offers that are worth filling out a
form for is critical to lead generation.
Bad Landing Pages. Articles by HubSpot highlight the
importance of following basic best practices for landing page design, and their
impact. According to statistics cited by HubSpot, clutter on a Landing Page
that adds “a one-second delay in page-load time results in 11% fewer page
views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% loss in conversions.”
No Navigation to Landing Pages. You could have the best
offers and the best landing pages in the world, and it won’t matter in the
least if visitors can’t reach them in the first place. There should be
navigation elements, links, and CTAs strategically placed throughout the
website to guide visitors to your landing pages.
Checking for, and then eliminating, these common obstacles
to converting visitors into leads can do a lot to boost your lead generation,
particularly if you’re already getting a lot of visitors to your site.
#2: Try Using Video Content!
Creating videos for your website content can be tough, but
it's a great way to differentiate yourself from the competition.Some people
prefer to read, others prefer to watch. Here at Bluleadz, we’ve had a lot of
success with video-based marketing and blogs. One of our video blogs, Using
Video Marketing for “Boring” Businesses, generated 14 form submissions and 4
new contacts within two weeks of launch, and will continue to generate new
leads for as long as Bluleadz has a blog.
Some leads in the B2B space respond better to video-based
content than they would to text alone. With video content, your business has a
chance to share its culture with visitors, and tell a story that separates your
company from the competition.
An example of a successful video blog featured in an article
on HubSpot is a series of help videos by Wistia, the video hosting and
analytics company. According to statistics cited by HubSpot, these videos
generated “15.5k video plays and 3,946 leads.”
Part of what helped these videos to be so successful is that
they’re designed to do more than just be lead generation tools—they’re designed
to help Wistia’s customers solve problems and get started with their own video
content.
Just how clean is your data? Identify where your data requires attention, allowing you to choose which areas to improve.
While video content is a great differentiator, be sure to
back it up with some text on the page so search engines will know what the
subject of the video is.Get Free Email Append Test from AverickMedia
#3: Get Quizzical!
Quizzes can be a great way to show off your company's
expertise, or even to further qualify a lead.Another tactic featured on the
HubSpot blog is the use of quizzes to engage visitors and generate leads.
Creating a few short tests/quizzes about a subject that your company
specializes in can be a great way to not only grab a website visitor’s
attention, but to show off how much your company knows.
Aside from designing quizzes to test visitor knowledge, you
can build quizzes that can help pre-qualify leads or get them to submit extra
information about their needs and goals. In the HubSpot article mentioned
earlier, Eastern International College designed a quiz that helped prospective
students choose their major.
The EIC quiz helped the college generate over 1,000 leads.
However, as the article reminds us, “if using the quiz for lead collection, be
sure to inform the quiz taker (on the contact information form page) that there
may be contact from your office if they submit their information.”
There are a lot of things that B2B companies can do to
increase their lead generation. This list, while it has some solid ideas almost
any company can use, barely scratches the surface of what you could do to build
leads.
Article From: http://www.bluleadz.com/blog
