5 Tips for B2B-marketers to Boost your Qualified Sales Leads

In many businesses, personal contact remains the key to sales success. This means that as a marketer you pursue a different goal than online sales: you ensure that the agendas of your sales colleagues remain full of meetings with high quality leads. Does this mean you have no business in the digital domain? Certainly you do! Digital lead generation can be very lucrative for you. Looking for inspiration? In this blog we provide several tips based on the customer journey of an imagined “all-in-one coffee concept” business.

Awareness: generate traffic

Your first goal is to generate traffic to your website. You want potential customers to know that you exist and that you have a solution for their needs. Today there are many ways to attract visitors to your website. To determine the right channels for you, it is important to have a good understanding of your target group. Ask yourself: “On which platforms is my target audience active?” and “What is my target audience looking for?” And also try to fill in the dots in the following sentence: “No one else would read …, but my target group would!” This may provide very specific sources to generate traffic from. Decide on an approach that you think best suits your target group and above all – start. You’ll only find out what works by trying out different strategies. This could be posting a social post (organic or advertised), setting up a SEA campaign or in a collaboration with third-party bloggers. In our example, the coffee supplier starts a SEA campaign and advertises on a specific blog that compares coffee service providers.

Interest: engage & subscribe

You have now attracted attention and the first visitors are arriving on your website. Now you can start to monitor their actions, such as which pages they visit and what they clicked on, using your Web Analytics tool, marketing automation program and/or Customer Data Platform.

Value first: ungated content

Visitors take little time to judge if they like the content of your landing page. They tend to quickly browse through the content you offer. Therefore, it is essential to keep your content accessible, to-the-point and ungated. Also stick to the principle “Value first”. Do not hide all information as gated content; but make sure you provide valuable information. If you want customers to spend their time with you, you must offer something valuable first, such as a blog about the different coffee beans or a video about “how to make the best cappuccino at the office”.

Subscribe: gated content

Of course, in addition to ungated content, you also provide gated content. Often this content is even more specific than your ungated content. Examples include a white paper, research results or a training video. In exchange for this information, you first ask your potential customer for some personal details, and above all: their email address.

Consideration: lead nurturing

Congratulations, your anonymous visitor has become a lead! In addition to the website behavior data, you now also have an e-mail and name of your visitor. Do you have a CRM solution? Make sure that it’s integrated with your marketing automation solution to verify if sales already was in contact with this lead before.

At this point you can start to nurture this specific lead towards scheduling a meeting. Based on the behavior data from the website, information from submitted forms and CRM data you can assign a lead-score. This score indicates how likely the lead is to convert. By using marketing automation you can send personalized email campaigns based on the leads interests and needs. For example, did the lead use the “coffee machine selection tool” and which machine was the leads preferred choice? In your follow-up email, explain more about this specific machine and the optional services, what the benefits are, etc.

Call to action: schedule meeting

Through the interactions with your lead during the lead nurturing campaigns, you know more and more about your lead. Now it’s time for the lead to schedule an appointment to discuss the all-in-one service concept and taste the coffee. It is therefore important to always show a clear call-to-action “Schedule meeting” in your lead nurturing campaign content.

Conversion: schedule meetings

As stated: your goal is to schedule meetings with (high) quality leads for sales. This can be done using an online scheduling tool, but also via a simple “call-me-back” form on a landing page. It is especially important in this phase to make the call-to-action. Marketing automation makes it possible to use AI-predictions to determine which channel converts best to schedule a meeting. In your campaign you can create different paths and have the AI select the best converting option for a specific lead. For instance, an email, a pop-up on your website or a direct forward to sales. This way you ensure that your communication matches the leads personal preference.

Excite

You’ve now scheduled a meeting with your lead. Can you now kick-back and relax as a marketer? Yes, but there are more actions you can take to generate higher qualified leads. If relevant, you can already provide the potential customer with information through a specific campaign in the run-up to the meeting. This can be, for example, a leaflet about the different service levels of the coffee concept, an agenda for the meeting or an inspiring testimonial video. Don’t forget the possibility to ask a few questions to the potential customer prior to the meeting. In our example, it can be useful to know how many employees the company has, and whether they already have a coffee service provider – and if so, which one. In this way, your sales colleague will be even better prepared for the meeting, and you will make yourself a very popular marketer.

We hope that we offered some inspiration on how you can contribute to the sales pipeline and conversion at your company; also without a commerce platform. Would you like to have a more in-depth discussion? Send us an email and let’s talk!

Email: eefje.van.gorkom@acorel.nl or neil.duijster@acorel.nl