A lead may not always be a good lead at the beginning of the B2B journey. To convert leads into good leads and finally into sales, B2B marketers must focus on building trust and developing a strong relationship with the prospect. This requires a data-backed, personalized strategy.
Let us see a 3 step lead generation strategy that can help marketers convert leads into business in less time.
Step 1: Create the Ideal Customer Profile-
The first thing that every marketer must do is to create ideal customer profile (ICP). This is a critical part of every lead generation campaign. Ideal customer profile is the list of attributes that your buyers have in common in any specific buying group. You can define the buying group characteristics as per the data such as age, gender, geographical region, job, role, designation, company etc.
Apart from the above basic characteristics, you can also define the ICP based on the digital footprints of the buyers within the buyers groups, the type of content they are downloading or consuming etc. All this data can help you to create an ideal customer profile.
Step 2: Use intent data-
Do not stop at just any data. Use intent data to make sure that you have all the reliable and insightful information about your prospect. You can use intent data to create ideal customer profile to get the most accurate information about your prospect.
Use intent data to understand the customer and his business challenges. With intent data you can be very well aware of his buying intentions and inclinations and then plan a strategy that offers solutions that are aligned with his needs.
Step3: Enhance personalization-
This is a time and age of personalization and your sales and marketing cannot be successful if you do not use personalization as a part of your strategy. It is the most important element of B2B as you are selling to leads who are people at the end of the day.
Every buyer or buyer group has its own unique characteristics and so it also has its unique needs and challenges. Personalization can help you strike a chord with the audience and thus win over more leads.
Conclusion-
B2B or Business to Business is all about Human to Human today! The lines between B2B and B2C have blurred as but both businesses essentially cater to humans. The strategies therefore must involve personalization with a strong emphasis on data and its quality. Ignoring intent data will not help B2B marketers in any way. In fact, it can only help enhance personalization and also help in creating the ideal customer profile.