Tag Archives: b2b lead capture

B2B Marketing Isn’t Boring. It’s Brilliant.

b2b isnt boring its brilliant

b2b isnt boring its brilliant

That B2B marketing is challenging doesn’t mean it must be boring. Yes, it takes a bit of thinking to get other businesses to notice your products. Furthermore, to give you that all-important call. However, you can still make B2B marketing fun. Not to mention fascinating and win over even more hearts and souls in the process.

Through their Marketing Solutions Blog, LinkedIn offers a few examples of brands applying various playful strategies. Therefore making B2B marketing entertaining and informing. The standout examples include;

Cisco

To demonstrate the power of 5G internet for businesses, Cisco recently developed a “Me+Moo” campaign that invites users to download an app that connects you to a real-life dairy cow wearing a sensor. This way, farmers can get live updates on their cow’s wellbeing.

It’s a simple marketing campaign. But the results were quite impressive. It attracted plenty of media coverage and won Cisco 11,000 new customers in just a month.

Upwork

In their recent “Hey World” advertising campaign, Upwork reaches out to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Elon Musk of Tesla to offer them the company’s freelancer-hiring services.

As a result, the attention-grabbing, 15-second ads garnered an impressive 10% increase in Upwork’s uptake among Fortune 500 companies.

Check out the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions blog to learn other playful tactics different brands have implemented recently to make B2B more fun. You may pick up a few tricks for your business.

The Secret to Crafting an Awesome Sales Pitch

The-Secret-to-Crafting-an-Awesome-Sales-Pitch

The-Secret-to-Crafting-an-Awesome-Sales-PitchTechnology is changing the way people interact with each other. Customers are more informed than they’ve ever been. Many are well researched on a company, its products, competitors, and reputation in the marketplace. This makes crafting a successful sales pitch rather difficult at times. Part of crafting a modern sales pitch is telling a story and using it to connect with potential customers. Use emotional intelligence to connect with customers.

Tell A Story

A good sales pitch tells a story. Remember a customer can get basic information about a product relatively easily. Customers want more than just facts, they want something they can relate to. A good story builds trust and creates an emotional reaction. The story itself doesn’t have to be complex. A hero overcoming adversity and succeeding despite difficulties is a classic story and one that works as a sales pitch.

Connect With Customers

People seek out a product or service because they have a problem that needs to be solved. Part of connecting with customers is framing the sales pitch as a solution for these issues. Focus on the positives a product can bring and show how it can remove negative issues. A good sales pitch presents a company as a problem solver.

Thanks to PureB2B for this great infographic.

The-Secret-to-Crafting-an-Awesome-Sales-Pitch_01The-Secret-to-Crafting-an-Awesome-Sales-Pitch_02a

Use LinkedIn to Increase Lead Generation Traffic to your Website

Use LinkedIn to Increase Lead Generation Traffic to your Website

Use LinkedIn to Increase Lead Generation Traffic to your WebsiteSome social media sites are better than others for garnering the traffic you want to attract. If your focus is on B2B, you’re likely to find that LinkedIn, the world’s biggest professional networking site will bring your website targeted traffic. With its 467 million users, LinkedIn drives more hits to corporate websites than any other social media platform.

Here are some tips to maximize LinkedIn’s potential:

Complete Your Profile

Your profile is a visual presentation of your business, so make sure it contains your company name and title. Add a professional headshot, so people know the face behind the name. To drive traffic to your site, include a link to it, along with links to individual blog posts. Like with all social media sites, relevant content is necessary to entice people to check out your site.

Know Your Target Audience

When you know exactly who your target audience is, you’ll know what groups they belong to, which content they read, when they’re most active, and how they communicate on LinkedIn. This will help you plan a LinkedIn strategy tailored just around them.

Share Relevant Content

Relevant content drives traffic. Create high-quality articles that your followers find appealing. Focus more on business-oriented articles, but don’t be afraid to create funny and light content as long as it still fits within LinkedIn’s professional environment.

Make and Join Groups

No member is an island on LinkedIn, not when you can join groups and take part in discussions. Use the search function to look for groups that fall within your industry. In case you don’t find one that fits your needs, go ahead and create it. It takes work to moderate a group, but at least you can tailor it to attract the kind of members you want. And when you’re the moderator people look up to you as an expert and are more likely to hire you.

Interact with Specific Individuals

You can post a link to an article on your newsfeed so that your whole network can see it, but people might miss it. To make sure you get the attention of your desired prospects, send a personalized message straight to their inbox. This move offers the additional benefit of making the recipient feel special for receiving a tailored text. It’s a good way to build strong relationships.

Utilize LinkedIn’s publishing platform

LinkedIn has its own publishing platform, which is similar to a  typical blogging platform except that it has the SEO leverage of LinkedIn powering it. So aside from producing original content for your site and sharing it on LinkedIn, also create exclusive content for LinkedIn at least once a week. It’s an excellent opportunity for you to be noticed by top-level executives within your network.

Follow LinkedIn Influencers

LinkedIn influencers are people who have a wide following and readership on LinkedIn. They can be high-profile executives, prominent entrepreneurs, news media figures, etc. When you leave smart comments that initiate helpful discussions on the content of these influencers, you and your company will enjoy greater visibility in a wider network. This is because the content delivered by these influencers has a large audience.

Nurture Relationships

Like any other social network, connections on LinkedIn thrive on good relationships. This means you need to continuously engage with your target audience. One way to do that is by asking questions, sharing interesting articles, telling stories, and giving advice. Sounds like hard work, but it’s worth it in the end.

Beyond these sound ideas, you can also look at other LinkedIn Tools that offer special features that can help you. LinkedIn is a reliable tool for reaching potential customers who you can steer to your website for the ultimate goal – closing the deal.

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11 Steps to QUICKLY Capture Qualified B2B Leads Online

Guest post contributor Chad Pollitt of Digital Relevance dives into how B2B’s can generate more leads online.

Unfortunately, many B2B companies that rely on a steady flow of leads to power business development are forced to use a mix of both purchased leads and organically captured inbound leads.the B2B Lead Capture Web

Many would like to stop purchasing lead lists, but can’t because their inbound efforts do not produce enough qualified leads to maintain the sales department. Purchased lead lists aren’t as desirable because of their cost, effectiveness and cold temperature. Most companies that find themselves in this situation do so because they rely on a blog and hope strategy rather than actively and aggressively earning media online.

Brands that have their ebooks, guides and other advanced content featured and linked to by prudent online media outlets can see a quick, meaningful and significant spike in captured qualified leads. The example outlined in this earned media case study provided an 80+ percent increase in lead capture versus the prior month – more than 800 incremental leads in just two weeks.

Below are 11 simple steps to quickly and naturally grow your lead list.

Research

In order to strike the marketplace with confidence some basic research is required. However, more research will likely lead to greater confidence. Research helps eliminate guess work.

1. Assessing the Audience – helps determine what a qualified lead looks like. Traits and online behaviors should be noted.

2. Assessing the Content – is research that allows marketers to determine what problems their defined audience has and what content will help solve them best. In other words, what content would be perceived as highly valuable to the target audience.

3. Assessing Online Media Outlets – is a critical step because it identifies where the qualified leads hangout online and what type of content is published there. The websites identified during this research will be targeted for a guest article submission or a story pitch. Creative After research is complete, the creative steps to the process can be deployed. From design work to content development, great creative goes a long way in helping a media pitch be successful.

4. Advanced Content Production – is the creation of a problem-solving asset that usually takes the form of an ebook, guide, whitepaper, report, etc. With research complete knowing exactly what problem to solve and content to write should be easy.

5. Landing Page Content Production – is all about the value proposition of the advanced content. It should be short, bold and impactful.

6. Promotional Content Production – yields a guest article to be published on an online media outlet with an appropriate link to the landing page. Every media outlet targeted should have its own unique article written. Not all media outlets will publish a guest article; however, of the ones that don’t, many will write their own articles and feature the advanced content. Promotion With creative finished, pitching online media outlets becomes a little easier. If the resulting advanced content is truly unique, a contribution to the marketplace and solves problems for the audience of the media outlet it’s much harder for them to say no.

7. Define the Pitch Angles – so there’s a clear plan when conducting outreach to the media. Understanding the value proposition of the advanced content and its significance to the outlet’s audience should keystone the plan.

8. Editorial Outreach – is tough, but over time a marketer can develop a rich network full of journalists and editors to contact. For help getting started, use these delicious PR pitch tips from Ashley Halberstadt.

9. Social Media Influencer Outreach – can massively expose advanced content, too. Influencers have large followings and typically run a blog. One tweet or link from them can produce a cascade of target audience eyeballs. Conversion The conversion aspect of this list doesn’t necessarily have to occur after promotion. Landing pages and testing programs can begin production after the advanced content is created.

10. Design, Slice and Integrate Landing Page – this landing page will serve as the collection point for new leads driven by the earned media. Make sure to include appropriate form fields to assist in future nurturing, segmentation, scoring and qualification. Also, use a unique landing page tracking URL for each media outlet covering the advanced content.

11. Deploy appropriate A/B Versions of Landing Page – this step is optional. However, testing is highly advised. Testing different variation of the landing page can help increase conversion rates over time.

b2b-leads-conversions-chart-cp

The above image shows the impact of earned media campaigns deployed every four weeks on lead acquisition. Campaign stacking can quickly capture many more leads than most company websites alone. By doing so, a company can rid themselves of the expense and heartache of purchasing cold, multi-owned lead lists. The earned media techniques described above allow companies to actively and prudently promote their content online, as opposed to using the blog and hope strategy.

For more comprehensive help deploying the strategy above download The Inbound Marketer’s Guide to Earned Media.