B2B Demand generation is a surefire way to boost awareness about your product amongst your target audience. But mere product awareness cannot drive sales. Not even if it gets you leads.
What you need is a B2b demand generation approach that brings you a predictable pipeline of quality opportunities ready to make a purchase. Most marketing and sales teams struggle with this – over a third of marketers even say that prospecting and qualifying leads was their biggest challenge at their job.
This blog covers a few effective B2b demand generation approaches that help you successfully generate high-quality leads. Let’s get right into it.
Table of contents:
- Building out the ICP
- Lead Scoring
- Engaging in ICP marketing
- Improving Ad-Spend Returns Through Niche Targeting
- Streamlining Workflows with Software
1. Building out the ICP
Given only 10-15% of all the leads convert to paying customers, it makes sense to focus on lead generation efforts to avoid missing out on high-quality prospects. But targeting outreach to each of these prospects is tedious, not to mention time-consuming as well.
Instead, you can engage in lead characterization to narrow down your efforts from the get-go. To do this, you can start by mapping out your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Not sure about ICP meaning in marketing?
For those who aren’t aware, the ICP marketing term refers to the customer profile of a sales-qualified lead. It includes the demographic, firmographic, technographic, and behavioral attributes of an ideal buyer. Filtering the available leads based on these attributes can help you identify leads who will more likely convert to buyers. So, you can focus your outreach and win them over in no time.
2. Lead Scoring
If you subscribe to the ICP marketing definition, the next step after the B2b demand generation of the ICP is filtering out leads obtained from your demand capture efforts.
To do this, start by organizing your leads obtained from B2b demand generation approaches by location, demographic information, and behavioral data. Once that is done, reach out to your sales team to understand how they identify qualified sales leads. Additionally, reach out to your customers and understand their rationale behind making purchase decisions. Doing this will tell you the tell-tale signs of a buyer intending to make a purchase.
Now all you need to do is develop a scoring system and assign each attribute a score. So, if a lead has more attributes matching the ICP and higher engagement, they get a higher score, and so on. This reduces the time spent chasing suboptimal leads and helps you earn more conversions.
3. Engaging in ICP marketing
While targeted outreach is a great way to connect with leads who match your ICP, you can go a step further and directly market to them.
With data like buyer designation, company, country, intent, and more, you can understand the information your prospects may be looking for. Then you can create personalized marketing campaigns and share relevant content with leads matching your ICP. This will push some leads down the sales funnel, turning them into paying customers. But ICP marketing operations need not end there.
You can further segment leads that match your ICPs into smaller groups or accounts with matching characteristics. Then you can create hyper-personalized marketing campaigns for them. The benefits are two-fold. One, such hyper-personalized campaigns have better conversion rates. And two, since you use the same marketing content to target all the leads in an account, you lower the time spent personalizing marketing efforts for every lead.
4. Improve Ad-Spend Returns Through Niche Targeting
If your current B2b demand generation strategy includes advertising, you know that the ROIs on spending are often underwhelming. After all, only half of all ads posted by you ever get viewed. Fortunately, niche targeting can solve this issue and bring higher returns on ad-spend.
Social platforms like LinkedIn allow publishers to target ads to groups of people from a specific region or company name. Therefore, in theory, you could upload your target account list, filter accounts based on ad-targeting criteria, and let campaigns run. The result? Better ad viewership and a higher number of leads likely to take action based on it.
Google also allows you to run search ads for keywords. You can target keywords based on your niche and customer intent and point them to a relevant gated content source. Prospects finding your content through such search ads will be pre-qualified for intent and will even give up contact details to access the content. This becomes your list of qualified leads.
5. Streamlining Workflows with Software
As a B2B marketer, there is a good chance you’re dealing with a high volume of prospects every day. But if you’re employing manual methods to qualify leads, you’re most likely letting a few of them slip through the cracks.
Sure, you can simplify demand generation in multiple ways. But you can improve lead or account qualifying efficiency using different software as well. With the right software, you can figure out the best way to approach prospects, automate outreach workflows, and even see how prospects engage with your content. Bonus, this also helps you save valuable time.
Over to You
The above B2b demand generation strategies are bound to get you more sales-qualified leads. But that doesn’t mean you must implement them all at once. You can start by implementing one of the above approaches and check the number of sales-qualified leads it gets you. If you find that an approach is unsustainable and doesn’t work for your target audience, you can always alter your approach until you find one perfect for your company.
