Streamline Your b2b Lead Generation Sales Funnel

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(exhales and hisses) - There is no better feeling as a marketing manager or business owner than logging on in the morning and seeing that more leads have come in than your sales team know how to process and not just high volume of leads but the right sort of leads as well. So today I'm gonna be showing you the six best ways to generate inbound leads as a B2B company. We know these work so I'm gonna show you them in action and we've won a tonne of awards for this stuff. But anyway, let's start with you. Quick question, where do you go when you need to find a new supplier or if you need to solve a tricky problem? Google. Obviously. News flash, you're not the only person. People go to Google when they need to find something and that's why you need to be found. That's why your B2B website needs to be ranking prominently on Google and that's why SEO can be so profitable for B2B companies. But there's a few different ways that you can use SEO to get inbound leads. Let's go through them. Way number one is to firstly workout if your target audience is using industry specific terms. If they are, you can laser target them. Let me give you an example. One of our clients sells a relatively niche product. It's visit the management software. So this is software that manages people who come in and go out of a building. Now, our ninjas spotted that this client's customers were searching for some really specific stuff. Stuff like visitor management software for hospitals and visitor management software for schools. Yay, great find ninjas. The problem was though, that some of these phrases had really low search volumes, sometimes as low as 30 searches per month. Our clients' competitors weren't even bothering with some of these searches. They were just too small for them to care about, but we ninjas, we spotted money. These phrases had high commercial intent ie. either people searching for them wanted to buy and wanted to buy right now. Companies were bidding 14 to 17 pounds per click. That's around $20. So whilst their competitors were fighting it out over really high volume, but very general and untargeted search terms we slid under the radar, built our content for these terms and got the rankings that we wanted. And even though the search volumes were low because of the quality of this traffic we built a 2.7 million pound pipeline for them for an investment of around 74,000 pounds. That's 36 times ROI, and it came from being very specific about who we wanted to target, prioritising quality over quantity. Keep that thought, we'll come back to it later. Your action then. If you are selling to specific industries or markets, consider building pages on your website about how you serve those industries and get them ranked for those industry terms. If you're a commercial cleaning company, for example get ranked for commercial cleaning company for factories. Now, whilst the search volume might be really low for some of these phrases, the quality of the traffic will be really high and it'll be much easier to get ranking for these terms. You can also then run ads on Google or LinkedIn, driving people to these pages, knowing that the content on them is so targeted. You're gonna get a much higher conversion rate than if you're just sending people to generic pages. B2B lead gen strategy using SEO number two is to bludgeon your competitors with massive amounts of content to make sure that you rank for really competitive commercial terms. Here's a not so secret secret. Most B2B companies have nowhere near enough information on the pages on their website for them to stand a chance of ranking. When they don't rank, they don't get leads. But wait, Tim, John Mueller from Google said word count is not a ranking factor. Sure, word count on its own is not a ranking factor. So don't just stuff your pages with mountains of rubbish. However, quality is a ranking factor. For example, let's say that you're gonna buy some event booking software. Which of these pages is more useful to you? This is page A loads of information, demos, clients, support all that good stuff. Or page B. Yeah, not much there. Now of course it won't surprise you that page A outranks page B because it's got loads more information but it'll also out converts page B because it's got all the answers to the customer's questions. It's got the objection handling stuff, the credibility triggers that we've talked about in other videos and we've used this exact strategy to help another one of our B2B clients rank position one on Google for 138 different keywords. Aw, yeah. We've got some position twos, but we're working on them. By building these pages out with more content on them than the competitors, it gives us a much better chance of ranking as well as converting more of the traffic that they get to these pages into leads. We also built out a huge blog for them and we got them featured in loads of industry publications for links which we'll come back to you later. So your action, review the pages on your website that sell your thing, whatever your thing is do they answer all of the questions that someone might have about you? Do they show your thing in action? Do they explain who might benefit from your thing and how? If not, you know what to do. Before we go on, I want to tell you a little B2B marketing story. In 2013, I sat in a dark cramped office in Bristol with a miserable business consultant in a cheap suit who told me that no one will ever trust a company called Exposure Ninja. And that was before we started putting these shinobis everywhere. That consultant held the common but mistaken belief that in order to be credible, you must be boring. No, there are loads of ways to build credibility: demonstrate your expertise, build a large audience. You can build credibility through great design. Build credibility through your personality if you've got any. Being boring is not a selling point. Just because you might be selling to a person on behalf of a company doesn't mean that you need to be boring. In fact, I can prove it. How? Well, because some of the world's largest companies have asked Exposure Ninja for our digital marketing help through our world famous free website and marketing review. They've gone to explosionengine.com/review and filled in a form so that we can help them generate more leads and sales through their website, completely free of charge. You should probably do that too right now. B2B inbound lead marketing strategy number three is to build a huge pipeline through targeted top of funnel content. It's very rare that a high growth B2B digital marketing campaign we run won't include some top of funnel content and here's why. With a fixed pool of potential customers that are ready to buy at any time, B2B marketers usually want to get people at all stages of the buyer journey onto their website. This allows them to, of course, pick up the visitors that are right at the bottom of the funnel, who are ready to make a purchase now, but it also allows them to shape the decisions of the people further up the funnel so that they can eventually turn into customers later on. Let me give you an example. We work with a well known client that sells accreditation. There was a big change coming to their market where this new accreditation was gonna be rolled out. The bad news was that this was gonna open them up to more competitors than they'd ever faced before. Fortunately, though, we decided to use this new accreditation as an opportunity. We built and ranked pages on the client's website optimised for the new accreditation. This allowed us to pick up the really bottom of funnel traffic and get them to convert on our client's website instead. But we also identified that loads of people in this space were asking questions about this new accreditation, how is it gonna work, who's it for? So as well as targeting bottom of funnel traffic we built out top of funnel content, our mid funnel content, also targeting these phrases driving the traffic to our client's site. We dominated Google for search terms around this new accreditation, and it led to a massive increase in non-branded traffic for the client. Now of course, each of these different funnel stages is going to need a different call to action on your website but we'll come back to that later on. Your action, watch the Content Marketing Playbook video that shows you how to do this. We'll link it to you at the end. B2B inbound lead strategy for getting more leads through digital marketing number four is to get your company featured in industry publications. This is amazing for thought leadership but it's also a fantastic way of getting links which helps your SEO. Now here's the totally dead three step strategy that most businesses use to try and get coverage in industry publications. Step one, make a press release about the most boring thing that you can find. Bob got promoted to director but sad times the offside rear bearing on Andrea's car seized up. Step two, send out the press release once and then again. Step three, give up, naturally. I think we can do better. If you wanna get coverage for your B2B company it's a good idea to start off with something to say. For a B2B client of ours we conducted a survey of some of their customers about the impact of COVID on their business. We worked with them to put this massive piece of work together and start promoting it across the industry. This type of industry specific data is really interesting to others in their industry. So when we started reaching out to industry publications we got a lot of traction with this but because this was genuinely interesting information it also started picking up links from further afield, including from Deloitte. Links like this can be huge for website's authority and credibility, and over time can really help ranking. So your action then, think through what information or knowledge do you have, which the publications that your target audience reads might find interesting? You can then reach out to them, pitch this and when you get featured, you're getting in front of your target audience. A little bit of thought leadership never did anybody any harm. B2B marketing inbound lead generation strategy number five squeeze the email marketing juice. With B2B sales cycles typically taking much longer than B2C, you might need to keep a customer warm for weeks, months, even years before they're ready to buy. We had someone become a client of Exposure Ninja six years after they first found us. They were reading our blogs, watching our videos, listening to our podcast every week for ix years before they were ready. Setting up automations in your email marketing system can be a great way of keeping these prospects warm on autopilot so you don't have to manually keep sending them stuff. So here's how we do it at Exposure Ninja. When a new lead comes in, we'll send them a series of carefully crafted emails designed to keep them warm and introduce them to Exposure Ninja. Once they move into the next pipeline stage we'll stop this first sequence and we'll start the second sequence because the lead is warmer we'll send them stuff like case studies and testimonials. Once we've sent them a proposal, we'll stop this second sequence and we'll begin an automatic proposal follow up sequence and so on and so on. So not only does this make sure that nobody ever forgets the follow up with the lead but it also means that your sales team can process far more leads than if they were doing all of this stuff manually every time. So your action is to map out your sales funnel and design email automations that can be triggered as prospects go from stage to stage. You're gonna create your emails based on how far through the process your audience is, the sorts of questions and information that they're going to need at each stage. And by the way, if you want help with this this is exactly the sort of stuff that we do for clients. So you can drop us a message through exposureninja.com B2B inbound lead generation marketing strategy number six is tune your website for conversions. Above anything else, your website is your primary marketing asset and more than anything defines the success or failure of your B2B lead generation because it's where most if not all of your leads are gonna come through. So what makes an effective B2B website? Any effective B2B website needs to hit your target audience right between the eyes. Remember, in B2B, it's all about quality over quantity. So when your perfect customer lands on your site they need to be sufficiently motivated to take action. For example, we've worked with software company Clear Review working with them since before they were founded all the way through to a multi eight figure exit and you'll notice their website hits their target audience right between the eyes. They're selling performance management software to HR professionals and the headline, Improve productivity. Engage employees. This is exactly what their target customer really cares about, so there's no way that they can ignore this. Above the fold, this website tells you exactly what it is it tells you exactly what it does. These little snippets here are also designed to resonate with the target audience. Their target audience is gonna recognise at least one or two of these right between the eyes. Another company that does a great job of this is Salesforce. Now, whilst this landing page is kind of ugly and old school one thing it does really well is match the target audience of this page, entrepreneurs, with the language and the benefits that it talks about. Notice how this page is talking about sustainable growth, boosting sales, and accelerating your growth. That's because that's what entrepreneurial folk typically get excited about. Meanwhile, the language and the tone of their offering for service teams is completely different. Remember, service teams don't necessarily care about growth. Actually, it might be kind of annoying for them. So what does Salesforce talk about? Well, it talks about customer service. It talks about customer satisfaction, loyalty, customer service, resolution, agent productivity. This is stuff that service teams care about. Straight between the eyes. Another effective strategy for B2B websites is to have calls to action at different levels. Not everyone is ready to become a lead. Book a demo, talk to the sales team now. Other people will need much softer calls to action which might feel lower risk. One of our clients sells chat bots. Now we help them find the sectors that were most likely to value their chat bot service and we built out dedicated pages with them. For example, this is the one for housing associations. Now, when you come onto this page you might be ready to book a demo, in which case you can but you might also not be ready in which case you might wanna download this ebook the Ultimate Guide to Chat Bots in Social Housing. That's great for someone who isn't quite ready to take the High Commitment Booker demo step yet. So as you can see, the key to getting inbound B2B leads through digital marketing is to get in front of your customer as they're moving through this decision making process. In this video, I give you the content marketing playbook that you can use to do exactly this. We break down the funnel and we talk about the different types of content that you want to create for people at each different stage. And by the way, this is the exact playbook that we've used on campaigns where we've generated millions of pounds worth of sales. If you enjoyed this, feel free to subscribe and I'll see you next time.