A new year brings new challenges and new opportunities.

If you want to keep growing in your business in 2020, then you should make new year’s resolutions for your business as well and not just to yourself. Whether you run a small, medium or large scale business there is one fact which is common for all of them and that is, your business needs leads to survive and grow.

Because of the number of emerging technologies, consumer behavior continues to evolve. In the past lead generation was about finding prospects. These days buyers have more access to information, they’ve become so used to doing their own top-funnel research. So nowaday, lead generation is about leads finding you instead of you finding the leads. In the end, this means the tactics for lead generation have also evolved.

Stay with me as I am going to tell you 5 best B2B lead generation ideas in 2020.

1. Content Marketing

Research shows that about 70% of the internet users want to learn about products through content versus traditional advertisements.

B2B consumers are wiser than ever before and they are even more resourceful. Now they have everything they need at their fingertip to make any decisions. All you need to do is provide the right content and help them make the decision.

Q: How to create a good content strategy that will help you generate B2B leads?

A: By understanding the problems your buyer persona is experiencing. 

Now, if you still haven’t written your buyer persona I strongly recommend you to do that first. Giving a real face to your prospect, understanding his needs, worries and activities would give you the power to build strong content materials to grab his attention and solve his problems.

Unfortunately, people nowadays don’t have time to read through the whole page, so always try to republish the content in different formats to increase its visibility. By doing so will also give you the opportunity to test which format works the best with your audience.

There is one more thing you should remember that your content never gets done. Monitor your old content and update it with new CTA’s or paragraphs of texts. Not updating your content means missing out on a huge chance to get more leads.

When people arrive at your website via a search engine they expect quality content from you. That’s SEO’s prime rule. And the only way to provide quality content is by optimizing it. And there are many content optimization tools out there that’ll make sure that you always publish your best work.

The content marketing doesn’t always have to be in the form of blogging, it can be

• Ebooks
• Reports
• Webinars
• Infographics
• Videos
• Courses

2. Social Media Marketing

Many marketers think that social media is a platform for brand building and not for sales. Why would someone buy a product because of the posts or Tweets, right?

Nooo, wrong!.

The truth is social media is no longer just a platform to grow your brand and connect with your customers, it is definitely more than that. When done correctly you can actually use sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram for generating real leads to your business. And the cherry on the cake is social media lead generation is cost-effective and delivers promising results.

Social media makes the process of lead generation so much easier because the information you post can be shared readily. According to the survey, internet users are now spending an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social media channels.

Woah! that’s a lot. You must take advantage of this by finding your target audience and turning them into your new sales leads.

But how?

Choosing the Right Channel: Don’t make a mistake by trying to get leads from the wrong social media channel. This step is all about knowing your customers. The study shows that maximum leads for B2B marketers are generated from LinkedIn.

Source: bant.io

After picking the right channel here are some ideas for generating leads,

Generating Leads with LinkedIn

• Offer a free sample: With LinkedIn Premium find your qualified leads based on job role and other criteria and then contact them directly using InMail and offer a free sample of your product.
• Combine LinkedIn and Content Marketing: Offer some valuable information about your industry that professionals would love to see and generate leads in that process

Generating Ledas with Twitter

• Use Twitter cards: Use an eye-catching image, 140 characters of appealing copy for your twitter cards. Check the below lead generation example of twitter card.

Source: socialmediaexaminer

• Track Brand Mentions: Don’t ignore the brand mentions of your brand on Twitter. You can grab such an opportunity to interact with your potential customers and turn them into new leads.

Generating Leads with Facebook

Optimize your page like a website: Include everything from “find your solution” tab to the “sign-up” tab on your Facebook page.

Stop thinking these social media channels are just for posting or promoting and start leveraging these channels to get more leads to your business.

3. Paid Advertising

From the sales perspective, PPC advertising is always a better choice if you want to generate valuable leads within the shortest period of time which is obviously not possible with SEO or content marketing.

It’s important to keep close attention to the PPC campaign as this tool has the strongest potential to achieve your goals. Since it’s a paid advertising channel, it would be wise not to waste your investment and ensure that you get the results your PPC ads were meant to produce.

There are few things you can do to optimize your PPC campaigns like

Segmentation of your PPC campaign

Your competitors might be running PPC campaigns with similar keywords but you can still score points over them by segmenting your campaign.

Specific keywords might be relevant to a certain time of the year and you must change the bidding value accordingly.

For example, you are a clothing manufacturer and you sell your products to other companies that add their brand name to make the clothing unique.

So paying for just one ad group of “woman’s clothing”  would not give you the best performance.

But instead, you can segment your campaign into a sub-campaign as “shorts”, “tops” “sweaters”. And can place a bid for each specific product separating them by category.

This will ensure that your PPC campaigns are profitable and gets you highest ROI.

Schedule your ads based on the performance

Google AdWords has a feature that allows you to control your schedule with keywords. For B2B companies, it’s fairly unlikely that your potential lead would check for search terms related to your products or services on a Saturday night. That’s why you want to make sure you run your ads during business hours and of course the business hours of your target market.

Your content should match your PPC advertisement

If your potential lead is responding to your PPC ad because he obviously wants some more information about the product or services your ad was talking about. And he would hope after clicking on your ad, the landing page he would finally be taken to will provide the same information he needs.

That’s why you should always ensure that your landing page provides comprehensive information about the keyword or the topic you chose for your PPC ad. So combine your content marketing strategy with your PPC campaign for a better conversion rate.

The closer you get at providing the information your searchers want the faster you’ll be able to generate leads with PPC campaigns.

5. FOMO Marketing

Marketing is all about how individuals behave. When you know what makes your potential leads click, then it becomes much easier to create convincing stories. And one of the simplest ways to that is by using FOMO(fear of missing out) marketing.

For example, in sales FOMO can be used to make leads believe that they may lag behind their competitors if they don’t use your product or service.

You can generate FOMO by

• Using social proof: Social proof comes in various ways such as showing real-time sales numbers or the number of product users.
• Highlighting missed opportunities: If a customer felt the pain of missing out once, he’ll go to a greater extent to avoid the same pain next time. You can even take this opportunity to grab his email to inform him about the availability of the product.
• By giving exclusive offers: Everyone loves the thought of being offered something special and exclusively for him.

Experiment with multiple FOMO tactics to test what works and what doesn’t. But make sure you use these tactics carefully as your potential leads may spot the false offers immediately.

6. Cold Emails

Cold emails still remain one of the best ways to reach and generate leads. I mean, of course, one cold email is not going to give you instant results and big bucks but it can eventually build relationships that will ultimately lead to a lead.

Make sure your cold emails are targeted, one to one and personalized. Here’s a checklist that you must follow to make your cold email spam free,

• Mention who you are
• Use clear subject lines
• Include your business address
• Give them opt-out offer

Ensure that you follow the below formula to create an effective cold email campaign for lead generation,

• You’ll identify the problem that is extremely relevant to your prospect and supply the solution that will disappear their problems.
• Now with a catchy subject line (43-50 words) create a sense of urgency that will help you stand out in the inbox.
• Next address them with their names which means try to personalize your email from the beginning. This will also give a little human touch to your email.
• Pitch your best points at the start and keep it short and yeah don’t use images.
• Would you put a question to a close? Hey! of course, yes. It’s a trick to get your potential lead into further discussion.

Use this template carefully and it will produce excellent leads eventually.

Conclusion

Today marketers need to combine paid advertising, social media, content, email marketing, and SEO convert it into a repeatable process that automatically attracts, coverts and nurtures new business leads. And that term is called “marketing automation”.

Marketing automation is the solution to create a unified lead generation process for your business. It allows you to personalize your interactions with each lead based upon their personal information and current stage in the buyers journey.

Leverage marketing automation in 2020 by combining the above strategies and automate your entire lead generation process.