Are you struggling to generate B2B leads? If so, you’re not the only one. Generating new leads is one of the hardest things for any business to do, but it’s also one of the most important. Having a system in place that helps you to constantly generate new leads is the best way to keep your business growing, no matter what else happens around you. With that in mind, here are four tips you can use to generate leads and start driving more sales.
Focus on Two-Way Conversations
In today’s digital world, too many of our sales techniques have come one-way. We present information on our websites, or make a pitch via email, and hope this will be enough to convert someone into a lead or customer. However, when you’re working on B2B sales, it’s often more important that you try to have a conversation.
Other businesses are often more cautious customers. They want to take their time and consider all the benefits and drawbacks for anything they invest their money into. To sell to them, you usually can’t just talk at them, you need to talk with them. Luckily, there are a few easy changes you can make to do this.
For instance, you could gear your email marketing campaign towards setting up appointments with your sales team, rather than trying to sell the product or service outright. Another thing you could do is set up a chat bot on your website so visitors can quickly talk to someone from your team.
Take a look at your current marketing materials, and look for ways you can optimize it for conversations. Change the words you use or the goal of the marketing campaign entirely. If you do it right, the end result will be more people coming into contact with your sales team, who can then convert these leads into sales.
Become an Authority in Your Niche
The next thing you’ll want to focus on is building up your own reputation, along with that of your business. Imagine the following scenario: There are two companies – Company A and Company B – both selling a similar product. A customer learns about the product, and has to decide which company to get it from. As they’re doing their research, the customer finds that Company A is all over the Internet. They’ve published articles on other websites, the CEO has given talks at major conferences, and other prominent companies list them as a valuable resource. Company B on the other hand is nowhere to be found.
In a situation like this, the customer is much more likely to go with Company A. Why? Because Company A clearly has a better reputation as a leader within the industry. This makes them more trustworthy, something that is essential in B2B sales.
To generate more leads and drive more sales, you should focus on building up your reputation. Provide valuable information for free on your website, host webinars, connect with other industry leaders, give talks at conferences, etc. The more you do, the more quickly you’ll start to be seen as an authority in your niche.
Optimize Your Website
Your website is one of the most important tools you have when it comes to both generating leads and driving sales. A great habit you can get into is regularly optimizing your website. There are a lot of different elements to your site – the titles, the copy, the images, the calls to action, the links, etc. – and it’s hard to know what the exact right set up is for generating leads and driving sales.
This is why it’s a good idea to try new things and see what works best. For example, you could change the call to action on one of your pages, let it run for a while, then compare the results against your old message. Or you can change the copy on your contact page and see if it results in more inquiries. By doing this for all the different elements on your website you can learn what works best, and what doesn’t.
A great method for doing this is called split testing. With split testing, you essentially create two almost identical versions of the same page, but with some small changes. Then, when someone visits your site, they are randomly shown one of the two copies. Over time you can learn which page performs better, and make further changes based on your results.
Not sure what changes to try out? A great way to generate ideas is to see what your competition is doing. What sort of calls to action are they using? How do they keep people from leaving their site? How do they place their keywords? Take some time to research your competition, then monitor your competitors over time to see what changes they make. This can be a great way to brainstorm some ideas that might work for your own site.
Utilize Social Media
Finally, if you want to generate leads and drive sales, it’s almost essential that you use social media. Social media is one of the best tools available to marketers, no matter what kind of business you are. With social media you can reach hundreds or even thousands of potential customers, all with just a few clicks of your mouse, and usually for a low budget.
To get the most out of social media though, you need to use it right. You can’t just post a link to your product or service on Facebook and hopes that’s enough. If you want to generate more leads and sales from social media, here are a few things to try.
For starters, choose which social networks you want to focus on. Some B2B sales are more suited for one social network over another. For example, if you provide professional photography services, you might want to focus more on Instagram, whereas a digital marketing company targeting CEOs will want to focus on LinkedIn. Consider your target audience, then think about which social media sites they are more likely to frequent.
Next, make sure you’re sharing good content. People are not going to follow your accounts unless you are providing something of value, so think about what you’re sharing. Share the recent blog posts you’ve written, other articles you’ve come across that you think your audience will like, information on the latest sales you’re having, etc.
Finally, make it a habit to use social media regularly. It’s hard to build up an audience if you use social media every day for one week, then ignore it for a month. You need to be consistent if you want to bring in more followers. To make this simpler, if you’re running your site through WordPress, you can use plugins, like a Facebook plugin, to automatically share things to your account. There are plugins available for every social media network, helping to save you a few steps.
Tips that Help Now and in the Future
The great thing about the tips above is that they are not short-term fixes. They’re best used as a part of a long-term strategy, and can help your business generate leads and drive sales for a long time to come. However, while they can set you up for long-term success, they don’t take long to implement. By dedicating just a small amount of your day towards becoming an authority in your niche, or optimizing your website, you can get the results you’ve been after.
So, take some time to develop an action list for things you want to start doing. Maybe you can get published on an authoritative website in your industry, or dedicate yourself to using social media more. Once you have your list complete, spend some time each day working towards your goals, and before long you’ll see the leads flowing in and the sales numbers rising.
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