It’s no secret — B2B pipeline generation is a challenge. Finding the perfect potential customer can vex even the most experienced marketing or sales professionals. To help ease the pressure, here are some tried-and-true strategies to maximize your prospecting opportunities and deliver more qualified leads — and, ultimately, pipeline and revenue — for your business.
Before diving in, let’s first take a look at channels that are most impactful on your business pipeline:
- SEO: According to a study from Hubspot, SEO is the best avenue to drive B2B leads. Because well-structured sites can appear in a variety of product and content related searches, companies with excellent SEO can win more qualified and high-intent business at a low cost.
- Email: You know that email is one of the most powerful levers in your arsenal — in fact, according to Chief Marketer, it’s your BEST lever. With CTRs almost 50% higher in B2B email communication than B2C, it’s likely you’ve already activated this trusted channel in some capacity.
- Social: Channels like LinkedIn are increasingly becoming reliable sources for B2B lead generation. With the ability to segment targeted audiences by industry, job title, and more, companies can identify and target more cold prospects than ever before.
- Content: While well-indexed pages are critical for SEO success, content marketing is also key to building your site’s authority. In addition, content is an excellent way to establish a relationship with prospects. By providing quality content, your company will establish a rapport built on expertise with prospects.
While each channel is crucial for B2B lead generation, they must be paired with effective strategies in order to be activated most effectively.
Here are six key strategies and components for B2B pipeline generation:
1.) Include Smaller Conversion Points On Your Top Search Pages
As mentioned above, SEO is crucial to your brand’s success in converting pipeline from your digital traffic. With that in mind, adding smaller conversion points to high-traffic pages can work to engage prospects. Serving up content based on visitors’ known demographics is one way to engage visitors to progress further in their buying journey, ensuring that visitors are able to self-educate until they are ready to engage with a sales rep.
2.) Use the Right Sales Intelligence and Incorporate Insights into Your Engagements
Email cadences and outreach aren’t just for marketing teams anymore. By using the right combination of sales intelligence software (to identify prospects, verify data and outreach information, and more), salespeople will have the insights they need to launch highly customized email outreach themselves that generates pipeline.
3.) Create Content That Keeps Your Prospects Engaged
Content marketing is often the long game of sales lead generation. With a more top-of-funnel focus, it can be hard to invest in content when something like traditional sales-focused email marketing will generate results faster. That said, content marketing is crucial for building meaningful buyer relationships. So often, email is asking for time, a phone call, or even just space in a prospect’s inbox. Content marketing is all about providing value. When it comes to deciding what content to create, it’s proven that interactive content gets more engagement than static content (up to 50%). Interactive content also provides the ability to learn more about your prospects. What does interactive content look like? One example would be an interactive ROI calculator that helps prospects put a dollar value on the benefits they’d gain from using your product.
4.) Prioritize Third-Party Review Sites
According to Bill Tancer, the author of Everyone’s a Critic: Winning Customers in a Review-Driven World, almost 90% of all customers rely on reviews before making a purchase decision. Unbiased reviews are absolutely critical for your company’s success. Get started by building a company profile on the third-party review site of your choice and nurturing your current customer base for reviews. By serving as both a referral source and a lead generation source, third-party review sites are worth prioritizing.
5.) Nurture Your Current Prospects with CTA-Driven Content
Consider activating your content through an ongoing nurture program that shares your content on a regular cadence. Marketers are often so focused on generating new leads, it’s easy to forget to invest in those that have already converted. So give, give, give valuable content — but be sure to include a call-to-action (CTA). Including CTAs within each content piece is an easy way to keep that next step top-of-mind for your prospects. Bonus tip: include a CTA in your email signature. You never know what might prompt a conversion!
6.) Make Use of Engaging, Descriptive Video Content
It’s no surprise that video is absolutely critical to B2B pipeline generation. With 7 out of 10 B2B buyers watching a video at some point in their buyer journey, video is a key component. If you’re new to video, create a short demo video that outlines your product or platform for customers. Regardless of what you create, ensure it’s a value-add for the intended audience.
The final strategy is intangible: experiment often. While the previous strategies have been effective for many companies, additional levers will remain an important part of your B2B pipeline generation strategy. So test repeatedly — and meticulously track results — to find the best ways to reach prospects, build relationships, create more demand for your product, and see your company to success.
