Lead Generation Guide: Basics of Lead Gen

Lead generation isn’t without its challenges. Learning what those are and overcoming them can mean the difference between business won or lost. Here are nine B2B lead generation challenges you may face:

Challenge #1: Finding a strategy that works

According to RAIN Group the number one challenge that companies face when it comes to lead generation is finding a strategy or plan that will actually get people’s attention. As mentioned above, if it were easy everyone would do it, but it’s more than just doing it, it needs to be methodical and done in a way that’s effective.

Challenge #2: Getting the right people

Once you’ve figured out a strategy or an offer that will grab people’s attention, you need to make sure your content is in front of not only enough people but the right people. If your business provides a service that’s specific to an area and your lead gen strategies are being shown to people who live 1,000 miles away and will likely never be able to use your service, are they the “right” people? Probably not. Don’t waste the time and money having your content in front of them. Once you’ve identified the right people, you need to make sure there are enough of them exposed to your message. A critical mass of people will likely increase your chances of converting a prospect into a qualified lead, into a customer. 

Challenge #3: Measuring and documenting success

So, you’ve got the right strategy, the right people and enough of them, you’re all done! But wait… how do you know if your efforts were successful? You can’t just throw something at the wall and hope it sticks. Measuring your efforts is important to know if they’re working and if they’re not, it gives you insight into the process and allows you to course-correct if needed. If your strategy is working, great! Write it down. Document it. You can apply your learnings to future strategies and won’t have to reinvent the wheel when that time comes. 

Challenge #4: Responding to inquiries

You got a lead! Now what? Someone filled out a form, downloaded an offer, or responded somehow to an offer or lead gen strategy you have out there, now you can’t just leave them hanging. If you’re going to go through the time and investment of coming up with a strategy, finding the right audience, tracking your efforts, you have to follow through and follow up, appropriately. Make sure you have an infrastructure in place to respond to inquiries in a timely manner, as well as track and manage those leads. Time is of the essence. If you don’t respond quickly enough, you’ll no longer be top of mind and people may have already lost interest when you finally do get around to responding.

Challenge #5: Funding lead gen activities

Maybe none of these sound too challenging to you and you already have really great ideas and strategies, but… who’s going to manage all of this? Where’s the budget coming from for the infrastructure or software that needs to be implemented? How will you fund all of these activities? All valid questions. Lead generation takes consistent time and resources, and those things aren’t usually free. But like most things in life, anything worth doing is worth doing well. This is one of those short term pain for long term gain situations. It might be a more manual process in the beginning. Perhaps you won’t have the budget right away to use lead gen software. Maybe you have to start small, but you at least have to start.

Challenge #6: Providing relevant content

“What do I get out of it?” “What’s in it for me?” These are the questions people are asking when they’re looking at your content. You can’t just pump-out self-promoting content week after week. The offers and content you’re putting out there need to be relevant and of value to the reader. Keep that in mind when you’re crafting your message. If you’re only creating offers that are self-serving and your readers aren’t getting anything out it, they’ll stop coming back. 

Challenge #7: Putting a plan in place

Even if everyone agrees on the strategy and plan, it can be a challenge to actually implement it. Having a point person who’s tasked with ensuring the plan is implemented and launched can help ensure things are on track. Set deadlines for yourself and the team to see this thing through to fruition. 

Challenge #8: Staffing the right people

It’s great to have lead gen processes and plans in place, but they’re only as good as the people working on them. Ensuring you or members of the team have the right skills/knowledge when it comes to generating leads, is important. Set your efforts up for success by equipping people with the skills they need to do the job well, hire the right people or partner with someone who can help. 

Challenge #9: Agreeing internally on tactics

You might find that you’re able to come up with several strategies and tactics to undertake but struggle internally to come to an agreement on which one to move forward with. As noted above, there are plenty of challenges to face when it comes to lead generation. Don’t let internal disagreement be one of them! If you need to test several tactics to appease team members, do it. In this case, trying something or a few somethings is better than trying nothing at all. 

Read how to use marketing automation to outsource lead gen.

While lead generation isn’t without its challenges, the benefits easily make up for them. So, what can you expect to get out of your lead generation efforts? While this isn’t an exhaustive list, it definitely showcases some of the main benefits of lead generation: 

Generate Awareness

How well known is your brand? Taking it a step further, how well known is in its target markets? Brand awareness is a measure of that. Lead gen educates and informs your audience about your products or services, which helps generate awareness about you and your brand. 

Increase Sales and Profit Ratio 

Over 55% of B2B marketers spend more than half of their marketing budget on lead generation. Lead generation programs can result in more sales by converting leads into actual customers. The biggest benefit of increasing your leads is increasing sales of your products or services. 

Target Desired Customers 

Lead gen allows you to be more intentional in who you’re targeting and who’s getting your message. You can target your desired customer via a number of channels and by different demographics.  

Benefits both Buyer and Seller 

Your buyer is able to compare and research different products or services, thus increasing their ability to get the best deal and the best quality. As the seller, you’re not left wondering if this potential customer is interested because they’ve already done something that shows some level of interest by downloading an offer or filling out a form. It prevents you from using precious time and resources on people who aren’t in your target audience. 

Important Prospect Information is Collected

From prospect preferences, needs, contact information, you’re able to collect important information you can use to customize the prospect’s journey and personalize their experience. This allows you to tailor your product or service messaging to them and increase your chances of gaining them as a customer. 

Cheaper than other Advertisements 

Lead generation can provide cost and time savings by being more targeted and only connecting with prospects who have shown some sort of interest in your business. Advertising isn’t cheap, but it’s often a necessity for business. That said, you want to be mindful of where your dollars are being spent. It’s important to try and find the most cost-effective strategies that will produce the best results. 

Assuming you already have a lead gen process in place or are considering implementing one, it’s important to know what upcoming trends you can expect to see in the industry. Here are a few things on the horizon to be on the lookout for or consider incorporating into your lead gen plan: Capitalizing on behavioral intelligence, more sophisticated email marketing, increased segmentation and personalization, page-level targeting, widespread adoption of account-based marketing (ABM), conversational marketing, influencer partnerships, video marketing, and voice search.

Capitalizing on Behavioral Intelligence

More marketers, especially B2B marketers are beginning to optimize their sites using behavioral intelligence. Think mapping: Heating mapping, click mapping, attention mapping, and scroll mapping. And while we know the value of behavioral insights, it has been largely underutilized up until now. Check out these great B2B examples.

More Sophisticated Email Marketing

An oldie, but goodie. Email marketing has been around for decades and is still a useful tool to have in your toolbox. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it might come to mind, but you shouldn’t just rely on old email tactics to get you the results you’re looking for. More audience segmentation typically means more opens (nearly 15% more) and more clicks (nearly 60%)! 

Increased Segmentation and Personalization

As we talked about above, it’s important to personalize your content and target the right audience and personas. Buyers don’t want to feel like they’re just a name in a database. Buyer expectations are at an all-time high and if you’re not willing to give them the customized experience and attention they’ve come to expect, someone else will. 

Page-Level Targeting

Are you sensing a theme? Customization, personalization, targeted approaches. Gone are the days of just casting a wide net and hoping you get some qualified leads. While some of your pages will appeal to a broad audience across segments, some should be more narrowly targeted at specific audiences. This doesn’t have to be a manual process. There is marketing automation software available that you should be taking advantage of in targeting your audience. This goes beyond just campaigns, but also specific funnels and pages in your site. We’ll talk more about the software available below. 

Widespread Adoption of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

What’s ABM, you ask? It’s a strategy for growth by focusing on the best-fit prospects and customers. Basically, it’s about quality, not quantity. If you’re looking at casting that wide net mentioned above, inbound marketing is effective. ABM is different though. It looks to identify your top targets and then market to them individually or by company.

Engaging in Conversational Marketing

Chatbot popularity is on the rise. Did you know that responding to a new lead within 5 minutes is critical? After that, you’re likely to see a 10x decrease in getting in touch with that lead. 10 TIMES! Enter, chatbots. Chatbots can help connect prospects with the sales team immediately. Don’t just take our word for it. 67% of companies believe that in the next five years that chatbots will outperform apps. 

Influencer Partnerships

Influencer marketing is growing but think beyond just Instagram stars. Businesses are partnering with relevant influencers to try and extend their reach. These types of partnerships allow businesses to get an authentic voice in front of communities that are passionate about their product or service. 

Video Marketing

Looking for the trend that’s dominating? Video is it. Webcasts, webinars, demos, live streams, or short, informational videos. There’s no escaping it. Video marketers generate 66% more qualified leads per year. Now that’s a lead gen secret worth sharing. An increasing number of businesses are using video. It’s a trend that’s only expected to increase for the coming year. Did you know the average internet user spends 88% more time on a site that contains video? Incorporating video can help improve your website’s ranking on SERPs (search engine result pages). 

Voice Search

How can you take advantage of the voice search trend? Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Siri have all made voice search a popular method. While it’s a relatively new search medium, it’s not one to be ignored. To get the most out of the search tool, make your content more conversational by including conversational keyword phrases that match your audience’s language.

We’ve covered a lot. From what lead gen is to the challenges it can pose and what the future holds for it. It might seem like a daunting task, especially if you haven’t done it before, but it doesn’t have to be as manual or time-intensive as you might think. There are tools out there to help you with your lead gen efforts. Lead generation software is one of them. It automates the process of attracting leads online and compiling information about them. Most can even integrate with your CRM. Using lead gen software can help generate more leads, close sales faster, eliminate busywork, manage leads, and increase accuracy. 

We’ve covered a lot. From what lead gen is to the challenges it can pose and what the future holds for it. It might seem like a daunting task, especially if you haven’t done it before, but it doesn’t have to be as manual or time-intensive as you might think. There are tools out there to help you with your lead gen efforts. Lead generation software is one of them. It automates the process of attracting leads online and compiling information about them. Most can even integrate with your CRM.

But how can using lead gen software help you and your business? Lead generation software can help you: 

Generate More Leads

A good lead generation software tool will help attract more users to your website. Some tactics include paid search advertising and organic search engine optimization.

Generate Better Leads

One of the biggest challenges that businesses of any size face is generating high-quality leads. With lead gen software, you can target your ideal customers, which will hopefully help reduce the number of unqualified leads coming through. 

Close the Sale Faster

Looking to accelerate your sales process? Lead generation software can help to automate the process of generating, segmenting and following up on leads. This allows sales to focus on selling and create a faster sales process. 

Manage Leads Better

Having “too many leads” is a good problem to have, but the more you have the harder it can be to keep track of them. And following up with those leads at the right time is critical. Utilizing lead gen software can help keep you on track and reduces mistakes. It can alert you when you get new leads, allows you to send automated emails, and can serve as a reminder tool when it’s time to reach out to your leads. 

Increase Accuracy and Reduce Busywork

Leads are people and people change. They change locations, phone numbers, or companies. Keeping track of your leads’ ever-changing information can be quite the chore. Using lead gen software can help, so that your lead information is more accurate and your team doesn’t need to spend as much time inputting data and more time actually out selling. 

Feeling like you have a better understanding of lead gen now? Great! But we’ve only scratched the surface of lead generation and how it can help your business. Stay tuned for the second part of our lead gen series to get a more in-depth look at lead gen tools, techniques, and tips.