To remain in the market, any B2B company needs high-quality leads. However, you must have a plan that boosts and mechanizes lead creation to succeed. But how would one go about making this happen? Better yet, what can you do to increase the volume of leads generated by your campaigns of a high calibre?
Being a B2B marketer involves more than just raising awareness. You also have to forward quality leads to sales. If you’re not doing this, your inbound marketing campaigns must be improved. Lead generation is a top priority for marketers, according to HubSpot.
Thus, you ought to follow suit to keep your competitive advantage. Let’s examine lead generation and the most effective approaches.
One strategy used by B2B marketers to naturally attract potential clients to their company is lead generation. This is made up of different inbound marketing strategies that increase prospects’ exposure, awareness, and interest within a particular target demographic. Blog entries, SEO (search engine optimization), and social media posts are a few examples of lead-generation techniques.
Initiating the buyer’s journey, lead generation is meant to lead potential customers along the funnel and into the closing transaction. To feed leads into the sales funnel, lead generation efforts first capture leads by gathering their name and contact information (i.e., an email nurturing campaign).
Increasing sales and revenue as well as producing more qualified leads are the objectives.
lead generation for technology companies
The IT and technology sectors are expanding at a dizzying rate. Tech companies, in contrast to traditional organizations, are always improving their products and services to add new features and increase sales. If they perceive the potential for the future, they will even take chances. For instance, they frequently introduce brand-new business lines that didn’t even exist previously.
For this reason, technology organizations require effective SaaS marketing communication and flexible lead-generation strategies to raise awareness of their brand and its offerings.
A lead is a person who has expressed any kind of interest in your offering. However, this does not imply that they are prepared to buy. In the IT, IT, and SaaS sectors, generating targeted leads is most effective when you inform potential customers about the advantages of your offering in the hopes that they will become actual customers.
How thus do you know if your lead generation is effective?
It occurs when a potential customer sees your brand name as the initial solution to an issue that your product can address. They are then prepared to start a sales conversation with your business.
1. Establish goals
It’s important to consider your goals and desired outcomes before creating a lead-generating plan for your tech business.
Establishing them facilitates tracking results and coordinating your organization’s strategic objectives. To get everyone moving in the same direction, digital natives frequently employ the OKRs methodology. The reason it works so effectively is that each team is engaged by the straightforward, quick process.
It can be set, monitored, and, if necessary, reevaluated (quarterly). However, don’t be scared to modify the framework to suit your requirements. Learn from Spotify, which experienced hyper-growth and discovered that OKRs caused it to slow down.
The IT corporation decided to stop defining OKRs at the individual level and instead declare corporate priorities, letting teams determine how to reach those goals.
2. Identify and modify for your intended audience.
You must create a buyer persona (B2C) or ideal customer profile (B2B) in order to successfully generate leads. This easy-to-use lead generation method provides technology firms with more precise and tangible insights into the interests, challenges, and purchasing patterns of their B2B consumers.
Additionally, it helps tech companies entice customers to the point where they divulge their contact details, for example, through forms, in order to learn more about the offer. If you have more than one product to offer, you can develop distinct buyer personas. However, ensure that each one complements your brand.
Adapting to the ever-changing needs of clients poses the biggest difficulty for technology organizations today when it comes to lead generation. For this reason, it’s critical to regularly record consumer feedback.
3. Make direct calls to the most valuable prospects.
It’s still possible to cold call. If you’re selling to C-level and VP buyers, it’s an excellent lead-generation approach for technology and IT organizations.
Using sales intelligence tools such as Cognism, you may locate leads proactively.
Even while customers in the current world don’t require a sales representative to help them make decisions, you don’t want to rely just on the customer to locate your product and meet the requirements, do you?
To connect 9 out of 10 times, Cognism gives users access to a global business contact database that includes phone-verified mobile numbers.
So grab a phone and give our CEO prospecting scripts a try!
4. Boost value using intent data
Up to 87% of consumers start their product searches online, and they hardly ever feel the need to ask salespeople for guidance. To make an informed choice about their purchase, they try to obtain as much information as they can from a variety of sources.
With intent data, B2B technology companies can produce more quality leads. It assists in capturing prospects’ interest at the outset of their purchasing process. And before they discover who your rivals are!
Use sales intelligence tools, which offer data to help detect prospects’ buying signals, to create leads for software sales. It makes it possible to present your goods or services to the appropriate individual at the appropriate moment. and then direct their choice-making process.
Primarily, intent-driven account-based marketing helps you target a specific audience of customers. Instead of focusing on a broad audience, you may begin developing customized lead-generation tactics.
By the end of the year, over 70% of B2B marketers, according to Gartner, would be generating leads using third-party intent data. Thus, don’t think twice and contact Cognism or another sales intelligence business.
5. Short films can be used to clarify difficult data.
For startups and tech organizations, one of the key strategies for generating leads is to produce informative and valuable SEO content. Blogs are the most popular tool used by businesses to connect with potential customers.
However, experimentation is one of the cornerstones of lead generation for technology companies.
Furthermore, recent reports indicate that Google plans to display a greater number of short-form videos in search results for specific queries. For new software and IT companies, it’s a fantastic chance to build brand awareness.
Another reason tech companies should think about making short movies is that they’re a terrific method to communicate complex information in a simple manner.
Audio-visual product explainers are appealing to most individuals. For instance, 78% of users downloaded an app or piece of software in 2021 after watching a video. You may also make films that address the most frequently asked issues and highlight the advantages of your product.
6. Maintain a balance between content that is gated and ungated.
By producing gated content, IT companies may quickly generate leads. When you ask leads to “pay” for premium resources (like white papers and recorded webinars) using their contact information, you might think of gated content as a kind of transaction.
Make sure your visitors understand what’s behind the gate to guarantee the success of this sales tactic. People seek out content that conveys a worthwhile tale that is supported by research, visuals, or influencers, according to the 2021 Content Preferences Study. They have no problem sharing their contact information in return.
The merits and downsides of using gated vs. ungated material are a topic of discussion in marketing circles. While software firms can get some leads from gated material, ungated information increases brand awareness and trust.
Because of this, successful lead generation professionals in technology organizations apply Pareto’s law, which states that 80% of your success comes from 20% of your audience. They generate record-breaking money by producing 20% gated material and leaving the remaining content unlocked.
7. Get feedback from your clients about your merchandise.
Asking your satisfied, devoted clients to write a review is one of the best B2B lead-generating tactics available to technology companies.
When making a purchase, customers rely far more on the opinions of other customers than on those of businesses, much like we would with friends and family. Because of this, genuine, current customer evaluations can greatly aid in establishing your internet reputation.
Even if some reviews are generated naturally, you may use email marketing to reach out to already fully enrolled clients and encourage them with a promotion (like a discount or an Amazon gift card).
It is where potential customers may locate your business and evaluate it against other IT companies. Startups that compete with established tech corporations can particularly benefit from it.
Google your competition if you’re unsure which review sites to concentrate on. Check out the websites where they have reviews; you should visit them.
8. Provide complimentary samples or premium goods.
Technology and SaaS companies can also create leads by providing free trial access or limited-time free access to their product’s fundamental functionalities (freemium model). Both approaches enable potential clients to assess the capabilities of their offering and support them in making a choice.
When it comes to entrepreneurs seeking to market intangible goods or services like software, applications, games, and analytics, this is the finest lead generation method. It’s simpler to let prospects use this kind of goods rather than describing its special selling point.
Additionally, this tactic relieves sales teams of some of the strain and lessens the need for aggressive selling, which is excellent for small company software enterprises. Prospects receive genuine value but don’t
9. Organize webinars and online product demonstrations.
According to 42% of respondents in the 2021 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey Report, webinars are the best content format for converting and speeding up leads in the middle and end phases of the funnel.
If tech companies are unable to provide free trials to their users, they should employ such strategies instead. It offers valuable content that is easy to understand, readable, and frequently actionable for the user.
According to Cognism’s 2021 Revenue Report, webinars accounted for 30% of marketers’ budgets.
They discovered that using this style to communicate with clients and boost lead conversion rates works well. If you ask additional tech-savvy people to contribute, you can produce webinar content that is easily shared.
Attendance is the biggest issue technology companies have when using webinars as a lead-generating tactic. Check out the definitive guide to ultimate
10. Construct a funnel for content marketing.
Providing end users with great experiences is the simplest approach for software firms to generate leads. Providing sensible answers to typical customer issues raises lead conversion rates.
When it comes to generating inbound leads, concentrate on producing content for the awareness, consideration, and decision phases of the sales funnel.
When clients first learn about the problem, they search for white papers or professional guidance. Subsequently, they investigate potential remedies in an attempt to identify the root cause. Ultimately, the buyer selects a small number of possibilities and weighs the benefits and drawbacks of each before making a final choice.
This method of lead creation can help technology companies rise to the top of their respective industries. The goal is to provide information that is relevant, enlightening, transparent, and entertaining.
You may tailor your sales approach to your buyer’s expectations if you know where they are in the buying process. Conversion is made simpler as a result.
Important lessons learned
For technology companies to continue growing and competing in the market, lead creation requires special approaches.
Establishing and tracking appropriate objectives is the cornerstone of effective lead creation.
B2B technology firms may quickly create leads by using intent data and their ideal customer profiles.
Offering free trials and freemium versions of their products, together with client success stories on review sites, can help SaaS and software firms generate more leads.
In addition to creating landing pages that are optimized, IT businesses may create a content marketing funnel that aligns with the buyer’s journey and test out different tactics like webinars, short-form videos, direct demos, and gated content.
