B2B and B2C Lead Generation: How to Generate Value from Your Contacts
Lead generationis a set of marketing techniques that uses tools and channels to acquire new contacts and generate value within a B2B and B2C company.
In this article we discover what lead generation and a lead are, how to do lead generation and how to acquire, through marketing strategies, contacts for B2B and B2C.
Lead Generation: what is it?
Lead generationis a set of marketing strategies that allows you to acquire and generate a list of contacts and therefore potential B2B and B2C customers interested in products and services offered by a company.
Although the marketing strategies for B2B and B2C lead generation to be implemented are the same, it is good to clarify the difference between B2B and B2C.
In B2B the customer is a company that attracted by a marketing campaign could purchase a product or service to generate value in terms of company profit.
In B2C instead it is a user who could become a potential customer and purchase a product or service to satisfy a personal need.
What is a lead?
The lead is a person or company that has shown interest in a company or its products and services. Interest is expressed through a social connection, sending data and personal contacts such as an email address or telephone number.
In addition to knowing the meaning of lead, in order to do lead generation it is important to know the difference between cold leads and hot leads.
The cold lead is a contact that has been acquired but has not yet started a purchasing process, therefore to cultivate their interest you need to send newsletters and promotional messages.
The hot leadis a contact that has been acquired and is about to complete the conversion but abandons the cart. In this case, to retain the lost customer you need to activate a remarketing strategy to push them to complete the purchase.
How to do Lead generation?
First of all, a company, let’s take as an example Phamm Engineering, who wants to do lead generation and implement various strategies, which we will discuss later, must have a clear target audience to reach and have a good positioning on search engines.
Once this is established, a company that wants to do lead generation can define the lead magnet and then the lead nurturing, let’s see what they consist of.
Lead magnet is a free content or incentive that attracts the interest of one or more users and encourages them to leave their contact.
The content that attracts the potential customer is the reason why a user should choose you rather than another company.
It can be of an educational, in-depth or resolution type for some of the user’s problems. An example are ebooks, PDFs, podcasts, videos, webinars, courses, as well as Virtual Tour 3D 360.
Acquiring contacts is not enough, to ensure that they remain within your network you need to nurture their interest.
In this regard we mention Lead nurturing, relating to the marketing activities that a company adopts to consolidate the relationship with potential customers through different channels, such as email marketing and social networks, which aim at customer conversion.
We have just seen in general terms how to do lead generation and which concepts are exploited in lead generation. But it is time to mention the lead generation funnel and discover which strategies and channels to use to acquire leads in B2B and B2C.
Lead Generation Funnel for B2B and B2C
How do you get to the final purchase and what are the phases within the funnel that convert a user into a customer who generates value within a company?
In both cases, B2B and B2C, the funnel can be summarized in 3 phases:
- Discovery and awareness of the brand: is the initial part of the funnel. The user does not yet know the company, he could be interested in what it has to offer, for example electromedical devices, but does not have a conscious interest. In fact, all the actions of a company are aimed at brand awareness, that is, the diffusion of knowledge of the brand towards a target audience.
- Interest: is the intermediate part of the funnel in which the user has expressed their interest, for Fan Filter Units, informs and interacts with the company. In this phase, the actions to be taken are related to keeping the user active, creating involvement, building a relationship based on trust and showing your authority in a specific sector.
- Conversion: is the final phase of the lead generation funnel. Here, users, involved by your company and interested in the product or service offered, have become leads.
Strategies and tools to acquire leads in B2B and B2C
To generate leads and acquire new contacts in B2B and B2C, you need to implement some marketing strategies and make use of some of the tools they include.
Whatever the final objective of a company, acquiring leads is a fundamental step to generate value and therefore profit.
Content marketing
Produce content to attract customers and stimulate their interest. The fundamental basis from which to start is the site, the business card of every company. In addition to aesthetics, you must offer users, who land on your site, a valid user experience that can lead them to perform actions with simplicity.
In this sense, to ensure that the user arrives on your site, it is essential to have a good SEO positioning within the search engine and to exploit strategies of SEO Copywriting, to give the right visibility to the site and the contents created for the corporate blog of a men’s detergents company.
In addition to indexing on search engines, content marketing and the creation of valuable content, such as informative articles within the blog, allows you to gain authority and therefore increase the value of the contacts acquired.
Social media marketing
Communicating on social media is an essential aspect for a company and so is having a company page that promotes the authority of the brand.
Acquiring leads through social networks can happen both naturally and through advertising.
On Instagram in a B2C context, companies can create contests on Instagram and push their followers to tag friends, potential leads, and get the reward, or add CTAs in stories that can link to a form to fill out.
Alternatively, you can create an ADS lead generation campaign on Facebook that aims to obtain contacts through which the user can enter information in pre-filled forms.
In the case of B2B, for example, a social network to focus on is Linkendin to inform and entertain through the dissemination of market trends, business news or by disseminating the value and the company mission.
Email marketing
In this case, a first contact has taken place and the user is aware of the existence of your company.
Attracted by a marketing campaign, he decided to leave his email (cold lead) but has not yet taken any subsequent action.
Therefore, it is advisable to nurture his interest by sending newsletters or DEMs with promotions that can stimulate him to take action.
In this case, writing stimulating content that reflects the user’s need and contains a persuasive CTA can hold him until the last line and induce him to convert.
Marketing Automation
The actions to be carried out for lead generation are multiple as well as complex and can often require the use of time and numerous resources.
Many of these processes can be automated through the use of tools that can facilitate the performance of contact acquisition activities.
Activities that can be automated are, for example: lead acquisition, lead qualification, lead email address generation, reporting and analysis, and contact management until conversion.
Finally, some tools to adopt within the marketing strategies just listed can be:
- contact form for requesting information
- paid advertising on Google Ads and Facebook Ads
- landing page with CTA persuasive
- social networks
- SEO optimized website
- registration form to receive newsletters
- opt-in to download guides and ebooks
Effective lead generation campaign: the steps to take
Once we have learned the strategies and tools for lead generation, we can create an effective campaign using this diagram as an example.
- Objective definition based on the value you want to generate for your company through contact acquisition. For example, how many leads to acquire in a given period of time, what to get from the leads obtained?
- Analysis of the target audience, you need to be clear about who your Buyer Persona is and how you can solve their problem based on the service or product through your solution.
- Channels and tools to use to best define the marketing strategy to acquire contacts.
- Daily actionsto be carried out through the tools defined in the previous step
- Setting a planned budget for the campaign that can be focused on content creation or advertising.
- Measurement tools to analyze the progress of the campaign and the results obtained.
Conclusion
To summarize, in this article we have talked in general about Lead Generation, what it is and how to do it, what a lead is and the difference between cold leads and hot leads.
Finally, we have seen which strategies to adopt and how to organize a lead generation campaign to acquire new contacts and generate value within a company.
