Guest post by Robert Jordan.
B2B lead generation tools help marketers more effectively develop new prospective sales opportunities. They can help generate a bigger and better lead pipeline across any business and industry. Here’s why and how, as a marketer, you may want to integrate new lead generation tools and processes into your B2B lead generation strategy and campaigns.
- CRM: Customer relationship management (CRM) software is at the core of B2B lead generation. As the market intensifies and competitors try to acquire each other’s clients, optimizing the end-to-end customer experience and maintaining strong customer relationships has become more vital than ever. CRM helps with cross-functional alignment when you are coordinating different teams like the sales, marketing, and customer support, and also to keep the customer’s points of contacts organized.
- Sales Automation: A sales automation tool helps with the lead generation process as well as moving sales prospects through the sales funnel. It can automate different sales processes like task assignments, email sequencing, and follow-up appointments. The tool can help with automating email campaigns and setting important reminders.
HubSpot helps in this realm with HubSpot sales. It saves time while helping to generate new leads through the use of templates and tools for follow-up and outreach. This makes your interactions with prospective customers more efficient. Alternative tools like Zoho and Salesforce are also worth evaluating.
- Linking to your calendar: Enable your prospects to select their own timeslot to book an appointment with you to learn more about your product or service. Just send a link to your calendar in an online calendar tool like Calendly, SimplyBook.me or vCita. This is convenient for prospects and helps you manage your time.
- Q&A websites: This is another place to find potential leads. If your business offers a specialized service or product, you can search for people asking questions about the problems your product or service solves on LinkedIn groups and Quora. Sharing your knowledge may help in attracting qualified leads to your business.
- Valuable content: Offer something of value to your sales prospects before expecting something in return (other than their basic contact information). At the top of the funnel, offer a white paper, ebook, checklist, or a free industry guide. At mid-funnel, invite prospects to register for a webinar or a free trial. Sharing your expertise builds trust and credibility.
- Mapping tools: You can use Google maps for identifying the new prospects within specific parameters. There are also standalone options and tools that integrate with specific CRMs.
- Remarketing: When prospects land on your website but leave with taking any conversion action, you can keep your brand in front of them using retargeting ads. Seeing your ads on other websites they visit keeps your brand top-of-mind when they are ready to seek more information.
Other lead generation tools include:
- Extole: Word-of-mouth referrals are of the most powerful lead generation tools. An advocacy marketing platform can help turn customers into brand advocates helping you generate more leads.
- Referralcandy: The tool encourages customers in generating sales and leads by offering discounts for new business. Designed for ecommerce sites, it lets you customize your referral program and analyze performance data.
- Zapier: Though it isn’t, strictly speaking, a lead generation tool, Zapier helps by enabling you to connect different cloud-based tools. For example, when a potential customer submits a landing page form, Zapier integration can add their information directly into your email, marketing automation, CRM, and / or other systems, creating a company and individual record. It eliminates the need to re-enter data, saving time for your sales and marketing teams.
- WPForms: This is another tool to generate more leads. Find out what your website visitors are looking for by using polls or surveys. Integrate the drag-and-drop forms with different lead capture tools. Picreel offers similar features but optimizes the display of pop-up forms and offers.
- AdEspresso: An optimization tool for Instagram, Facebook, and Google Ads, AdEspresso enables you to create and test multiple ad variants with a few clicks, and run different ads for various audiences.
- LeadForensics: This tool captures information and provides insights about website visitors who don’t complete any conversion action. This includes visitors company name, how often they visited the website, which services or products they viewed, which offers they clicked on, and more. It provides you with intelligence about your website visitors and even offers a lead scoring feature to help you identify the highest-potential visitors.
- Unbounce: A landing page design and creation tool, Similar to InstaPage, Unbounce offers several features to help increase conversion rates. The landing page builder includes templates and tools to help you develop highly engaging landing pages. This software also lets you create pop-ups and sticky bars on your website to increase the level of engagement.
- LeadGen App: A lead capture form builder for creating contact forms, registration forms, customer feedback form, and sign- up forms. LeadGen App helps to create enticing forms as that reflect your business brand identity. It is built for people who have no coding skills and want to create a form in less time. It is also for digital marketers who need a performance-oriented form-builder tool.
Conclusion
The biggest challenge faced by most B2B marketers is generating a sufficient number of high-quality leads. Success requires understanding your prospective customers, creating content that addresses their pain points, and having processes in place to capture and nurture leads. The right lead generation tools can help you more effectively turn visitors into prospects, prospects into customers, and customers into brand advocates.
