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One of the most important aspects of demand generation is generating leads and turning them into potential customers. However, it is challenging to generate high-quality leads and audience segmentation makes it simple. It helps marketers to tailor the best outreach messages that help in adding quality leads to the sales pipeline.

Let us understand how segmenting a B2B audience can help optimize your marketing efforts for effective demand generation.

Know your platforms – When planning a marketing campaign, evaluate the channels that are effective and where your target audience is consuming more information. It will help you segment your audience on the basis of channels where your audience is interacting more. This way can help you distribute more content.

Understanding the Customer’s Needs – Not all buyers are at the same stage of the sales funnel so it’s important to be in tune with them at every stage. Through personalized promotion, you can attract your target audience which eventually helps you to generate more leads. Once you’ve generated those leads you can observe their needs and interests that will help you to segment them and provide the content based on their needs.

Creating Relevant Content – once you segment your audience, you can create customized content on the basis of the needs of your audience. Content is useful when it reaches the right audience and when they need it the most. So segmentation helps you to align your content according to the buyers’’ journey that helps in nurturing them effectively.

Generating High-Quality Leads – Segmentation helps marketers to nurture the audience at each stage of the funnel by proving them best content at the best time which leads to converting them into potential buyers.

Conclusion

Segmenting a B2B audience helps marketers to understand the audience and their needs. It’s the best way that helps marketers to get familiar with the audience by providing personalized messaging to the audience. With segmentation, organizations can win the trust of their audience by understanding their needs and interests.

Offering value to your prospects is the first step in attracting them into the sales funnel. If marketers focus on creating solutions that can solve the business challenges of their prospective customers it would probably be the best value addition. This can significantly reduce the overall lead generation challenges too.

Here are some ways in which you can reduce your lead generation challenges and create solid lead magnets through the following techniques.

Share knowledge

In today’s tough competitive market, establishing a rapport with prospective clients is critical for successful lead generation and conversion. Sharing insights and knowledge that is helpful for the prospect is a significant activity or strategy for B2b marketers. Share the best knowledge assets, content assets and insights with the clients to attract them into the funnel.

Be solution-oriented and not sale oriented

Understanding your customer’s needs is an important step in demand generation and lead generation. Once you understand the needs and challenges of the client, it is easy to know what solutions to offer him and when. Be more solution-oriented than sale-oriented. Offer customized solutions to clients that can enhance his business in more ways than one.

Combine offline and online outreach

Just like marketing mix, combining the type of outreach is a good way to attract bigger and a wider audience to increase the probability of sales. Combine offline and online sales outreach or lead generation outreach campaigns. For instance you can combine email marketing, webinars and trade conferences. You can either run such campaigns back to back or in parallel, depending upon the audience.  Also don’t forget to tap into the potential of content syndication. It is one of the best ways to introduce your brand, create brand awareness and increase your reach and engagement.

Conclusion-

Identify the exact lead problems and what kind of lead magnets you need to create in order to attract all the good leads into the funnel. You need to prove your worth as a solution-provider and a problem-solver more than making sales your ultimate goal! People are looking for new and innovative solutions in this landscape of digital marketing and showing empathy thorough personalized communication is the key to success.  

For B2B lead generation to work smoothly, one needs to have a solid strategy in place. However, a solid strategy or plan is not always about things to be included in the plan, it is also about things that need to be avoided for better results. B2B lead conversion can become successful if marketers are vigilant and can avoid certain mistakes in the sales cycle.

Let us see some mistakes that every marketer must avoid if he wants to achieve the desired sales results.

Holding on to wrong leads-

Retargeting leads is a good practice but marketers can’t possibly revive every dead lead. There are some leads that you have to let go of. Holding on to impossible leads is a waste of time because it will not give you any returns. Knowing which leads to retarget or hold on to and which leads to let go of is important for increasing ROI. So holding on to any lead that has lost its value in time and is now no longer aligned with your new business goals is a mistake many marketers make which eventually delays the sales cycle.

Lack of action-

One of the biggest mistakes marketers could possibly make is lack of action when they actually have a good lead in front of them. One must not fail to recognize a good lead. Creating demand is an important action and one should be equipped with action-oriented strategies to convert good leads. Once you recognize good leads you must have a plan ready to delight and engage the lead. This will lead to faster conversions. But if you have no action-oriented plan then the possibility of losing the lead can be high.

Missing out on personalization-

Lack of personalization can be a blunder in today’s time. The first priority in messaging and content should be to personalize it in every possible way. If you want to build strong relationships and win loyal customers, there is no substitute to personalization.

Conclusion-

Lack of action and holding on to leads that no longer carry the same value could be big mistakes that can cost a lot to a company. In addition, make sure you understand the customer and his needs very well before planning a strategy. Lack of personalization could also cost a lot to the company.  

It always helps to plan ahead when it comes to creating new business goals and objectives for the coming year. Probably this is the time to start preparing for 2023 as it can help B2B marketers to stay ahead of the game in this dynamic market.

Finding good leads has always been the ultimate objective of every B2B marketer. However, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the complexities of lead generation and demand generation. So what can marketers focus on in the coming year? Let us look at some of the B2B techniques that B2B companies must try in 2023.

Trade shows-

It is time to return to in-person events. It’s a come-back of sorts for trade-shows, events and conferences and marketers should take full advantage of this face-of-face, in-person meet-ups. Though we all had gotten used to the absence of conferences in the past, with the return of trade-shows, it is indeed a good thing for attracting leads and converting them into business.

Trade shows can be expensive and the ROI may not be as expected each time. However, it is still worth the investment. It allows marketers to network in-person and build strong relationships with customers and potential prospects.

Social media marketing-

Social media is one of the many powerful tools that marketers must use to increase their chances at lead generation, conversion and demand generation. LinkedIn is undoubtedly one of the best platforms but one must try other platforms as well. The increasing use of social media is a sign that companies must continue using social media platforms in 2023.

You can create brand credibility through social as follows-

• Create outstanding content
• Publish content at the right time
• Choose the right social media platforms
• Observe what competitors are doing
• Stay aware of the latest trends
• Make sure to update the audience about new content assets
• Share insights from time to time

Content marketing-

Content continues to be one of the best ways to attract, delight and convert leads into business. However it all depends on what type of content is being generated and what is the purpose. Each business is unique and hence the purpose of content may vary from business to business. It is therefore necessary to understand the real purpose of content for your business.

Once you identify the purpose you must rope in the right resources to create great content. Publishing and marketing content on the right social media channels is also one of the important things to do for lead conversions.

Conclusion-

Some trends tend to change while others continue to reign year after year. In a dynamic market like B2B, marketers are enthusiastic about adopting new techniques. However, the best strategy and trend is always the one that suits your business the most.

The truth about demand generation is that you need to build solid relationships and strong connections for it to work. The question B2B marketers need to ask themselves is how equipped or ready are they to build powerful relationships in order to make demand generation work for their business?

As businesses are becoming more and more personal, the need to establish a personal connection and personalized communication is increasing by the day. Many prospects expect personalized attention and messaging from vendors that are based on very specific needs. This is exactly what marketers need to focus on if they want demand generation to be successful.

Here are a few things that you can do to be a good demand generation markter-

Don’t rush into it-

Increasing demand through personalization and facilitating relationships should be at the core of your sales and marketing strategies. In order to achieve conversion results, marketers must take a step-by-step approach to demand generation. When it comes to relationship building, it’s indeed a work of patience. Do not rush into it to make it work because it needs to be handled carefully and needs to be built slowly. Prospects can sense if you rush in and that can impact your credibility and trust. 

Nurturing after conversions-

Organizations should always be a step ahead when it comes to building and maintaining relationships. Conversion is the first and not the last step in lead generation or demand generation. There’s more work to be done after a lead gets converted. It is this juncture that you need to invest more time and energy in fulfilling the promises you made at the time of contacting and converting leads. Hence there comes nurturing even after the leads get converted and this goes a long way in sustaining relationships in Sales.

Focus on leads that didn’t convert-

Don’t forget retargeting or trying again with leads that did not convert in the first go. It may take a little more work for some leads as all leads aren’t the same. As each business is unique so are some of the leads that may not get converted in the first step or stage. Don’t lose the leads forever but try reaching out with a different strategy the next time you contact the lead. It may surprisingly work the second time.

Conclusion-

Demand generation is a complex and time-consuming process. It can take a lot of efforts and different techniques to attract leads and get them converted into business. Marketers need to be in touch with the latest trends and be aware of what works for their business the best.

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.

ABM is the new-age solution for many B2B challenges today. It undoubtedly has offered the much needed relief to B2B markers in terms of focus, high value leads and the results that can actually drive revenue. It’s time to supercharge your ABM initiatives and enhance your business growth.

Here are some simple steps to streamline and boost your ABM initiatives-

Shift your focus –

Choosing the right account or to be able to sense that a particular lead is a good lead is not exactly rocket science. If B2B marketers pay close attention to details they can easily differentiate between good leads and bad leads. Similarly, once you are able to identify the high value accounts that are most likely to convert into business, you should shift your focus to these accounts rather than chasing other leads that may or may not convert.

Every lead is different and it may not want to engage with you. So shifting your focus to those prospects or accounts that are not just looking for similar services but have shown some interest in your services can put you in the right direction. This can save you a lot of time, efforts and money.

Who, why and how of ABM goals-

This may not seem like one of the most obvious ways to optimize ABM, but it all boils down to knowledge. Team’s knowledge about ABM, awareness about ABM within the organization and amid all those who will be directly or indirectly connected and impacted by ABM performance is necessary. What does this mean? It simply means that each one of the team members must be aware of many aspects such as the following-

• What is the role of ABM in the revenue cycle
• Who are the stake holders and their roles in ABM initiatives
• What are the ABM initiatives
• What are the campaign ideas and what is the implementation plan
• What is the approach towards each ABM account and why
• What are the expected results and who will be accountable the most
• What are the existing sales and marketing strategies
• Are the ABM goals aligned with the existing sales and marketing strategies

The alignment factor-

Probably one of the most important factors that you need to evaluate before you even embark on the ABM journey is whether or not there exists alignment between your sales and marketing teams.  Alignment ‘cannot be an issue’ if you are planning to implement ABM. So the number one question that you need to ask is about alignment. Make sure both sales and marketing teams are clear on the goals and are on the same page.

Conclusion-

When it comes to ABM it isn’t only about leads. ABM entails having a certain approach and a specific mindset that can identify these high value accounts and also be able to nurture them. It is also about having the right strategies to optimize these high value accounts so that you get the desired results. 

Today, without leads one cannot actually run a successful business. In spite of having all the resources lined up, having interesting products or spectacular services, if you do not have the right leads you cannot have a business running successfully. This is why lead generation is one of the most vital elements of any enterprise.

So how does one streamline this ultra-important sales and marketing technique to get in all those good leads and convert them into tangible sales numbers and revenue?

Here are some simple lessons to help you with lead generation-

Lesson #1 Know which leads are for your business

The most important lesson in lead generation is to know what kinds of leads you would need to make them work for you! Naturally, the first step is to know your own business goals and objectives so that you know what kind of leads will make a difference to your business. Each lead is unique and will come with its own needs. So be prepared to nurture and cater to each and every good lead before you can convert it into business.

Lesson # 2 Tread on new paths

Tread and explore new audiences to widen your reach! This is another lesson that every lead generation practitioner must adopt. We often stick to the same audience for years and rarely think that there could be an even bigger and more powerful target audience beyond our niche audience. This can take a bit of research, being active on social media and leveraging the power of other marketing techniques such as content syndication. But once you implement these things, you will see that you can pull in crowds from different markets and you can find more leads who would be interested in your services.

Lesson# 3 Know your audience well

The third and the most important lessons of all is never, ever under estimate the power of knowing your audience well. It is the most important aspect of lead generation.  This will enable personalization and help build strong relationships with your clients. Being fully aware of the needs of your target audience is a sure shot way to converting leads. Take help of authentic data and intent data to make sure you know whom you are talking to and align your messages accordingly.

Conclusion-

Even in 2022, lead generation continues to be one of the most challenging aspects of B2B. Exploring new techniques can help marketers get more leads and shorten the sales cycle. But before that, adopting some simple and basic steps like the ones mentioned in this blog can help you to keep converting leads consistently and in any given market situation.

Check out our lead generation services here Lead Generation 

Having more leads isn’t always a good thing if those leads aren’t good leads! One of the most crucial things in B2B lead generation is to be able to tell a good lead from a bad lead. This is important because if you can distinguish between good and bad leads, it can save you a lot of time, efforts and costs.

So what are the advantages of identifying good leads?

• Utilize the time and efforts of resources in the right direction
• You can invest time in nurturing the good leads with good results
• It’s easier to convert good leads into business quickly
• You can shorten the sales cycle
• Utilize data to decide the strategy ahead
• You can achieve good and expected ROI as per your plan

How to tell the difference between good leads and bad leads?

Good leads are more prepared to buy from you or they at least have shown some interest in your services. If a prospect has downloaded a content asset and is further interested in contacting you, it could be a good lead. On the other hand if a prospect has only visited your website or only downloaded the content asset but hasn’t taken any further action or isn’t responding to your communication, it may be a bad lead.

Having more leads isn’t always the best thing to happen if the leads aren’t good leads or even worse, if the leads are bad leads. Getting those quality leads into the funnel is one of the biggest challenges of lead generation. If you get bad leads into the funnel, then you may end up spending millions of dollars on bad leads and waste your time and efforts in nurturing them with no results.

Here are some ways to get those good leads into the funnel-

Focus on the buyer persona-

You have to generate good leads and the first step is to know the prospect very well. You must create the ideal customer profile and focus on the buyer personas. This will help you to create the right messaging for your leads. If you send the right offers and messages to leads, you are actually generating good leads. If you offer them what they are looking for, you can then generate interest and these leads will then respond to you thus becoming the good leads.

Nurture leads-

Nurturing them with the right content assets and messaging is an important step in creating good leads and driving those leads into the sales funnel.

Nurture them with email marketing and initiate response to generate good leads. Generate demand for the leads which are not able to take a decision on their own. These leads need hand-holding and some help in identifying the best solutions for their challenges. Be their guide, advisor and problem solver.

The MQL factor-

MQLs or Marketing Qualified Leads are already qualified to be in the funnel and these are most definitely the good leads that are ready to be Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). MQLs need nurturing and even though they are likely to buy from you, eventually they may or may not. Hence one must also focus on SQLs as they are most likely to convert into business.

Conclusion-

It is not very difficult to tell the good leads from the bad ones and if you use the above techniques it will reduce your lead generation challenges. You can also assign values to leads; segment the audience, implement lead scoring to create more possibilities of lead conversion.

In today’s digitized world, buyers have multiple options to choose from when it comes to finding solutions and selecting vendors. They are ready to move on if they do not get the perfect solution to their problems and they also rely on their own research to reach a buying decision. In such a scenario, B2B marketers need to up their lead generation and demand generation game and make it more buyer-driven.

Orchestrating your multi-channel hustle could be a way to get those leads into the funnel. You can ramp up your ABM strategies, focusing on content syndication to amplify your chances to be a known brand to the niche` audience and other things could also pave way to more leads and conversions in B2B. But nothing will work at its best if it’s not buyer-driven.

Your leads are your customers who decide the fate of your business. So as a B2B marketer, aligning your solutions with customer needs and making all your marketing efforts buyer-driven can help you to create more sustainable results with long term benefits.

So how does one create buyer-driven strategies?

Data is the one thing that can help you to adopt a buyer-driven strategic approach for better results. Poor quality leads is the result of poor quality data!

Duplicate data, invalid formatting, lack of email validation, siloed data are some of the common factors that can affect lead generation and demand generation. Lead data management is the need of the time.

Data can help you to understand the prospect and his needs, where he comes from, what are his core pain-points and what kind of a solution he is looking for. Without this clarity it is difficult to feed good leads into the funnel.

With good and verified data it is easy for marketers to segment the leads. You can even implement BANT more effectively and categorize leads as per their budget, authority, need and timing. This is an important step in lead qualification.

Data can also help enhancing the quality of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL). If you hand over the right MQLs to the sales team, they can qualify to be the type of SQLs that can convert quickly into business. This has an impact over the sales cycle and over revenue generation.

Quality of data is the precursor on which you can build your successful lead generation and accelerate sales and revenue.

Conclusion-

Data verification, data management and data optimization are the three pillars of successful lead generation and demand generation in today’s crowded and digitized world. Better leads will make your customers happy and you can develop long term business relationships with them. In short, data can help you to create sustainable lead generation business which can ease the challenges of B2B marketers.