SaaS lead generation is also quite unique due to the nature of the business: in SaaS, you are not selling any physical product, and so your audience has more time to compare your product with other alternatives online. Also, the length of the SaaS life cycle can vary a lot, some can be very short, and some can be really long, which can complicate the lead generation process.

So, planning a proper SaaS marketing strategy is very important for any Saas business: you’d need to attract a lot of people to your SaaS website, capture their information and capture them as leads, and nurture these leads until they are ready to purchase.

In this guide, we will learn all we need to know about effective SaaS lead generation strategy. By the end, you can use our actionable tips to develop your own lead generation campaign and start generating more prospects.

Let us begin at the very beginning: the concept of SaaS lead generation.

SaaS Lead Generation

Lead generation, in a nutshell, is the process of introducing your business to strangers and converts them into leads or prospects. A lead, on the other hand, is someone who has indicated an interest in your brand/product/service.

In the SaaS industry, SaaS lead generation is the effort made by a SaaS business to attract more website visitors and capture their contact information (mainly email address). When a website visitor willingly provides their email information, they have converted as a lead or prospect. SaaS application services play a crucial role in providing the necessary infrastructure and tools for managing and optimizing lead generation campaigns.

The idea is that although these people might not be ready to buy immediately, they have shown an interest in your brand (by willingly giving their information). So, they might be looking for a SaaS solution in the future, and you’d have to nurture this lead until they are ready to purchase.

In general, SaaS lead generation consists of three core stages:

• Attracting people to your website

Before anything else, you’d need to attract visitors onto your website. It’s also possible to get the person onto other platforms (like your social media profile or an app), the idea is to get them somewhere where you can provide a form to capture their contact information.

However, a website that matches their needs and their search intent is generally the most effective.

• Engage and encourage them to take an action

This is typically done by engaging your audience with content (and keeping them as long as possible on your site) and then offer a compelling call-to-action (CTA) so they can convert into a prospect.

This is mainly done by offering a lead magnet: an attractive offer related to your content that can add further value for your audience. The most common form of a lead magnet is a gated content (a downloadable content like ebook or whitepaper that is related to the initial content), but we can also use other CTAs, as we will discuss later on in this guide.

• Convert visitors into leads

Your lead magnet and/or CTA should drive visitors into a landing page (or provide an opt-in form) which will capture their contact information. If it’s a landing page, you can also provide more detail into your lead magnet offers.

After you’ve successfully captured the required contact information (mainly email address), you’ve successfully converted this visitor into a prospect.

That’s it.

However, although the lead generation process is fairly simple, the details can be very complicated, as we’ll discuss in the rest of this guide.

Common SaaS Lead Generation Mistakes

Before we continue with our step-by-step guide to creating a lead generation strategy, let us discuss some common mistakes and misconceptions in developing a lead generation strategy:

Focusing on Quantity over Quality

While it might seem obvious to generate more and more leads, it can actually be counterproductive in the long run. Generating leads cost money, and nurturing these leads will also cost more money and time. As a result of this, generating and nurturing low-quality leads can be a major waste of your time, money, and resources.

On the other hand, when a lead has a poor experience with a certain solution, they might also tell this bad experience to other prospects and customers, which can hinder your future lead generation campaigns. A low-quality lead might actually convert, but they will also have a higher risk to churn.

Different businesses might also have different criteria to determine lead quality. The basic principle is, the closer the prospect is to your ideal audience (your buyer persona), the higher their quality as leads.

Also, your marketing and sales teams might have different definitions of “qualified leads”, and this is why we often differentiate between sales-qualified and marketing-qualified leads. In this case, make sure to bring your sales and marketing teams together so they can discuss their definitions properly.

In general, your sales and marketing teams should consider the prospect’s fit and interest. A higher fit means a particular lead more closely resembles your ideal audience (or buyer persona), as we’ve discussed above. However, even if a prospect is already a great fit, it won’t automatically mean they are interested in your product, and this is why it’s important to measure interest.

Measuring fit and interest will be directly related to our next point below.

Not having a full understanding of your ideal audience

One of the biggest and the most common mistakes in lead generation is ignoring the importance of identifying your ideal audience and buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a model, a profile of your perfect fictional buyer based on data and research. By properly creating a buyer persona, you can understand who your ideal prospects are, their behavior, their purchase habits, and so on.

A well-defined buyer persona is very important if you want to achieve success in lead generation—both in quantity and quality— because by knowing your audience, you can better create targeted content to attract and convert them.

So, do your homework: conduct your market research, study your competitors, and develop a proper buyer persona.

Ignoring SEO

We have discussed how content is the core part of any lead generation strategy: we use content to attract prospects to come to our website or platform where we can capture their contact information.

However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value and won’t capture leads unless your audience can find this content. This is where working with SaaS SEO services or agency as the primary means to promote your content is extremely important. Simply put, if you ignore SEO in your lead generation strategy, you’ll fail.

In fact, SaaS SEO should be the foundational basis of your whole lead generation strategy from keyword research to optimizing your content to aligning your content with your buyer personas.

Fear of failure

No matter how well you plan and execute your lead generation strategy, there’ll always be room for improvement.

It’s very important to test everything and constantly work on improving your website, your content, your opt-in form, and any other elements of your lead generation efforts. It’s very important to realize (and embrace) the fact that you can fail in your lead generation efforts, and in many cases, being wrong in lead generation is far more valuable than being right.

Also, it’s important to be objective in your tests and trials: we often limit what we test in a way that will skew the data to help us reach a certain conclusion (circular reasoning), and in most cases this will be counterproductive.

So, it’s okay to be wrong, it’s okay to fail, what’s important is to keep improving and optimizing your lead generation strategy.

Looking at the wrong KPIs and metrics

One of the most common mistakes in lead generation and marketing, in general, is that many marketers are looking at the wrong metrics.

Before anything else, your team (or teams) must have a consensus on what a lead is and what a qualified lead is, as discussed above. Your entire organization must understand the objective of your lead generation process, and how to measure each of their performances according to these objectives.

For example, if the main lead generation objective is to capture email addresses, then we must measure the conversion rate for email newsletter sign-up. It’s also important to look at the number of return visits, which indicates that a lot of potential leads are coming back (and you should devise a way to capture these leads).

So, don’t underestimate data and information: define your KPIs and metrics, and set up a system where you can capture and analyze this data effectively.

How To Develop a SaaS Lead Generation Strategy

Set your Lead Generation Objective

Before we can start developing a lead generation strategy, you’d need to first figure out the objective(s) of your lead generation effort.

While you can have various objectives depending on your business goals, in general, your lead generation objectives must be:

• Specific: that is, your objective must be clear enough for your whole team and stakeholders. The easier they are to understand, the better.
• Realistic: it’s always better to have attainable, realistic goals. This is useful to maintain your team’s morale (and yours) by producing a sense of achievement. If you have a big objective, you can break it down into smaller milestones.
• Measurable: you should be able to measure whether you’ve achieved the objective by monitoring metrics and assigning KPIs.

To properly figure out your objectives, here are some key considerations you should have:

1. What is it that you want to achieve according to your marketing and business objectives? List all possible objectives and their priorities
2. Define the KPIs and Metrics for each objective. Set benchmarks and milestones for each goal to let you know that you’ve achieved this specific goal.
3. Discuss and brainstorm all objectives with all stakeholders, to ensure that these objectives are agreed upon
4. Decide the timeline of each objective. This is very important so you don’t spend too much time on your efforts and can adjust your strategy when necessary.
5. Assess whether you have the resources (human, technology, financial) to achieve this goal.

With that being said, here are some common lead generation objectives you might consider:

• Website traffic: for example, increase website visitors by 1,000 per month by next February
• Generated leads: generate 10 marketing-qualified leads per month by next January
• Lead conversion ratio: the percentage of website visitors that convert to leads/prospects. For example, we can have an objective of reaching a lead conversion ratio of 2% by January next year.
• Social media followers: also important nowadays, for example, to increase LinkedIn followers by 100 next month
• Social media engagement: for example, having your blog posts shared at an average of 10 times in six months
• Email open rate and CTR: for example, hitting an email open rate of 30% and/or click-through rate of 10% by the next quarter

Obviously, these aren’t the only objectives out there, but they might inspire you in finding out the best possible lead generation objectives for your company, according to your marketing and business goals.

Let us move on to the next step.

Figuring Out Your Target Audience

Before you can reach your target audience with your lead generation efforts, it is very important to first specify who your ideal audience is. If you are a B2C SaaS company, then you’d need to figure out what kinds of consumers are going to need your solution or service. If you are a B2B business, then you’d need to figure out who are the ideal companies/organizations that might need your solutions.

For example, it might not be appropriate to target huge enterprises if you are a brand new startup (unless you have a really innovative/game-changing solution). Generally, you’d need to have big brands in your existing clientele before you can start aiming for these big potential clients.

Finding out the right audience is very important if in lead generation, and to do this properly, you’d need to have reliable data. Unfortunately, more than 40% of surveyed SaaS companies admitted that they are not confident of their abilities in segmenting their target audience.

Here are some common ways you can segment your target audience:

• By location/geography. Due to the nature of the SaaS business, this is pretty uncommon but is still possible
• Based on industry/vertical, pretty effective if you are a B2B SaaS business with a specific software product
• Targeting very specific companies (account-based marketing). This is a pretty effective approach if you are in a relatively narrow niche/vertical
• Based on the target audience’s online activities. Pretty common for B2C SaaS companies

And so on. This step can be very simple or very complex depending on your niche/industry. However, the key is to collect as much data as you can. You can do this using survey templates, or via focus groups, interviews, competitive analysis, and/or other approaches.

Define Your Lead Generation KPIs

Based on the objectives you’ve defined above and your target audience, we should first define and start tracking our KPIs.

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are essentially metrics to help you check your performance of your lead generation efforts and whether they’ve achieved their objectives. What KPIs you should observe would depend on your objectives, but here are some important ones to consider:

• Organic traffic

You can’t generate leads unless you have incoming traffic to your website, and organic traffic (traffic coming from organic search) is the best type of traffic for lead generation because they are already showing an interest (by actively searching for information).

The higher your organic traffic is, the higher the chance of your lead generation success.

• Conversions

No matter what your main objective(s) is, you need to know how many conversions are generated by your website. If your number of conversions aren’t as desired, then you might need to check the other KPIs on this list to figure out what went wrong.

However, don’t only analyze your failures. If you are learning a lot of conversions, then you should also examine what you are doing well so you can use this data for future success. Remember that even

• Conversion Rate

Obviously your conversion rate is related to the number of conversions on your site. Our overall conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who convert into prospects. However, we can also measure the conversion rate of different pages.

Your ideal conversion rate would depend on many different factors, however, in most cases, we can consider 5% and above as a healthy conversion rate. If your conversion rate is too low, chances are you aren’t giving your visitors the value they need and remember that it’s likely that they are leaving your site for your competitors.

Check your pages as a whole, and identify areas where you could improve them.

• Average session duration

Average session duration is the average time a visitor spends on your site as a whole (or a specific page). If the session duration is low, your visitors might not find what they are looking for on your site and they might check out your competitors’.

Low session durations would usually affect conversion rate and are usually related to bounce rate and exit rate (which we will discuss below). However, if your page is fairly small with just a small amount of content, then a low average session duration is expected, and it could mean that your content is user-friendly (which can actually lead to high conversion rates).

However, if your content is long (say, more than 1,000 words), then an extremely low average session duration would mean that something is off. Check how you can improve their session duration and dwell time.

As you can see, average session duration is in most cases not a standalone metric, but you’d need to compare it to other metrics and factors on your site.

•  Bounce rate

Another important KPI related to average session duration, bounce rate is the number of people that leave without visiting other pages of your site. Ideally, you’d want them to visit other pages on your site for a higher session duration so you’ll have more chance to convince them to convert. So, the lower your bounce rate, the better.

• Exit rate

At first glance, exit rate is similar to bounce rate, but it is only relevant to one page on your site. So, measuring the exit rate is important to determine your most popular pages and less popular ones (which might be bad for your conversions).

• Cost per lead

Also important. This metric tells you how much you invest to get one single lead, and this should include human resources costs, technology, advertising, and other costs you’ve spent to generate one lead. Measuring this is very important if you want to maximize the ROI of your lead generation campaign.

Developing a Working SaaS Lead Generation Strategy

In its most basic form, a lead generation process would involve the following stages:

1. A stranger is attracted to visit your website. This can be done in many different ways: they might stumble upon your advertising, they might search for something and click on your content, or they might learn about your website on social media, among other ways. The stranger consumes your content and becomes a website visitor.
2. A website visitor then clicks on your call-to-action, which can be a link, a button, or an image.
3. The CTA would take this visitor to a landing page, which includes a form designed to capture their contact information. You’d offer something in exchange for their contact information.
4. Once this visitor fills out a form with their contact information, they have been successfully converted into a prospect.

To summarize, a stranger comes into your site and turns into a visitor. This visitor would then click on a CTA that takes them to a landing page where they would fill out a form with contact information to get something valuable (your lead magnet). After this, they become a lead.

So, in creating a lead generation strategy, there are two key questions to answer:

• How would you attract strangers to your website?
• What kinds of lead magnets would you offer that might interest them?

We can use various promotional channels to answer these questions and put all of these elements together:

Content marketing

As we’ve repeatedly discussed above, SaaS content marketing is one of, if not the most effective way to attract strangers to your website and eventually to a landing page. The most common practice here is to provide visitors with free but valuable information, which is made visible via SEO.

A great thing about using content to generate leads is that it’s pretty versatile. You can include your CTAs anywhere in your content: at the beginning, in the middle of the post, at the end, and so on. Also, you can tailor your whole content to meet your lead generation objective and to align with your lead magnet offer. For example, if your offer is an ebook about SEO strategies, then you can write content that is also related to SEO, which would make your CTA and lead magnet highly relevant.

The more valuable your content is for your visitor, the more likely they are to click your CTA and convert.

Social media marketing

A great thing about social media networks today is that it’s now very easy to include CTAs in your social media posts. Although they aren’t as versatile as a website or a landing page, you can use the swipe up option on Instagram (if you have a business account with more than 10,000 followers), short URLs on Twitter, and other approaches as CTAs.

Social media is certainly where your audience is nowadays, and so it’s a great place to reach a lot of potential prospects.

Free-trial

This is a very important aspect of SaaS businesses: offering free-trials can allow potential prospects to try your SaaS product, and once they’ve registered on your free-trial program, you can nurture these free-trial registrants with additional content and offers to encourage them to purchase the full version.

Advertising and Remarketing

Your paid option. A key advantage of using advertising and remarketing (retargeting) campaigns is that you can generate results in a fairly short term compared to organic efforts. Make sure your landing page and what you offer are properly aligned with the promise in your ad, and make sure that the actions you want these prospects to take are clear enough.

While ads are very effective in generating results, they can be very expensive if you are not careful. So, the key here is to balance your ad campaigns with other organic channels (above) so maximize cost-efficiency and ROI.

Referral marketing

Also known as word-of-mouth marketing, referral marketing is useful in various aspects of lead generation. Essentially, when a happy customer recommends your brand/product/service, there is a higher chance these people might become your prospects.

Your Lead Magnet

Here, our focus is on how we can convince our website visitors to click our CTA, fill our opt-in form, and convert into a prospect. This is where your lead magnet comes in.

A lead magnet is, in a nutshell, a valuable offer that you’ll give for free, in exchange for the site visitor’s contact information (typically an email address). After the visitor fills an opt-in form ( a lead generation form) with their contact information, they can access this offer.

A lead magnet can be anything as long as it’s valuable for your user. A discount coupon, for example, can be a lead magnet. In-depth content like ebooks, research reports, and whitepapers are also common lead magnets, and you can also offer free access to your software, and so on. Basically there are only two rules in creating a lead magnet:

1. It has to be related to your product (and even better if it’s directly related to your content)
2. It has to be perceived as valuable by your target audience, or else you won’t be able to attract them

Although the subject of lead magnet is pretty deep, here are a few tips:

• Keep lead magnets as targeted as possible

While it might seem like common sense to try to capture as many different people as possible, a lead magnet has to be very targeted to work properly. If your offer is not very specific, you might end up collecting irrelevant and low-quality leads, which can be a major waste of time and money.

So, make sure your offer is highly targeted, and as relevant to your business as possible.

• Alignment between content and offer

This is very important, use your content as a glimpse for your lead magnet. Tell your reader how your lead magnet can provide more value for them, and show it through your content’s quality. If they feel that your content is informative and valuable, they’d also perceive that your lead magnet will be even more amazing.

Provide an elaborate description of your lead magnet on your CTA, and list out the benefits your audience can get from your offer. For example, tell them how the lead magnet can help visitors improve their objectives clearly and directly.

Remember that a lot of people are offering ebooks and PDFs as lead magnets these days, and unless you can communicate that yours are going to provide immediate value, it won’t be so attractive.

• Design a lead magnet with repeated usage

The more a prospect interacts with your brand, the higher the chance they are going to convert into an actual customer. However, many people might opt-in for your lead magnet, interact it once time (if, for example, it’s an ebook), and they’ll forget about your brand the very next day.

We can certainly nurture and remind them via email marketing, retargeting campaigns, and other means, but if your lead magnet has repeated usage, you can dramatically improve its results.

For example, if your site is about digital marketing, you can offer a free guide on how to implement SEO in 30 days (with one actionable step for every day) while they can also use your 30-day free-trial period at the same time. This way, you have a full month to interact with and convince this prospect.

End Words

Lead generation is essentially about communicating your brand’s value to your potential prospects and convincing them to provide their contact information.

In today’s very saturated digital marketing, it’s obviously very tough to get noticed, and the key here is to provide immediate and (if possible) everlasting value with your content, your lead magnets, and your product, more than what your competitors are offering. You can also work with SaaS marketing consultant and SEO expert if you want results faster.

Also, a key to a successful lead generation is a proper understanding of your target audience and their needs, so you can offer something that is going to provide immediate value for them.

The post How To Develop SaaS Lead Generation Strategy To Grow Your Company appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

If you can’t bring any leads, you simply can’t get new customers and grow your business. This is why we often measure a marketing team’s success in how many high-quality leads they can generate in a given amount of time.

In startups, arguably lead generation is even more important: since the business hasn’t yet made any money, we have the challenge of generating as many leads as fast as possible so we can generate revenue faster – often with the limitations of a tight marketing budget.

So, how should startups get around this challenge? How can startups compete with bigger enterprises with millions in marketing budget in generating leads?

The good news is, if you plan your lead generation strategy right, your startup can generate a lot of high-quality leads in no time, even in the cases of limited capital. Here, we will show you the top lead generation strategies startups can try and onwards.

What Actually Is Lead Generation?

Before anything else, let’s discuss the concept of lead generation so that we are on the same page.

First, we have to discuss the definition of a lead.

A lead, or a prospect, is, in a nutshell, anyone who has demonstrated interest in your business. The level of interest can be very low or very high, but if they have shown any interest, they can be categorized as a lead.

In practice, a lead is someone who has given you their contact information, for example when they download an ebook in exchange for their email address, signed up for your free trial campaign, signed up for your email newsletter, and so on. In short, they have given your business permission to contact them.

So, lead generation, or just lead gen, is the process of generating leads. Any effort to attract strangers and convince them to give you their email addresses (or any other form of permissions to contact them) can be categorized as a lead generation tactic.

Typically any lead generation tactic involves three main steps:

• Attract: attracting people to visit your website or platform, for example by publishing high-quality, attractive content that can attract your ideal audience
• Engage: keeping them on your platform as long as possible while introducing your business, what you do, and what you sell (building awareness). The longer we can keep them on our platform, the more opportunities we’ll have to convert them
• Convert: giving them a valuable offer, the lead magnet, for free in exchange for their contact information. These lead magnets can be a free e-book, free-trial for your product, discount coupons, and any other forms, but the idea is to give something valuable for free so they are willing to give you permission to contact them.

That’s it! This is the whole concept of lead generation.

However, although this is seemingly simple, implementing lead generation can be challenging, and in a startup environment, these challenges can be multiplied, as we will discuss below.

Lead Generation Challenges for Startups

In a startup environment, there are three key factors that can make lead generation even more challenging than in an established business:

• Limited resources: most startups tend to struggle with limited time and money. Even if the startup is backed by a strong VC or investor, the capital and resources are still limited. Obviously, the startup would need money to pay the staff on time and take care of other expenses, so the marketing/lead generation budget is typically limited.
• Reputation: obviously we—as customers—are more likely to submit our contact information to established businesses with good reputations, so a brand new, relatively unknown startup can have a harder time attracting potential prospects.
• Experience: a startup might not have the required experience and/or experienced talents to perform advanced lead generation techniques, and related to the above, might not have the budget to hire an experienced marketer to do the job. Since every startup is unique, unique lead generation software might also be necessary, so a lack of experience might also be a significant issue.

Why You Shouldn’t Buy Leads

Nowadays, we have so many websites and platforms selling email databases and customer information. So, isn’t lead generation now redundant? Isn’t it faster and easier to simply purchase these leads?

First, remember our definition of leads above: a lead is someone who has shown any interest in your brand. So, when we, for example, purchase an email database from a third-party vendor, we can’t actually categorize them as leads because they haven’t been aware of your brand at all.

Yes, some of them might be interested in your brand and/or product/service, but it’s more likely that only a (very) small percentage of them will end up being interested. Also, remember that with GDPR and other regulations, sending emails to people who have not opted to receive your emails might be illegal.

In practice, people in this purchased email list might flag your email as spam, and when a lot of people flag your emails, you might be blacklisted by the email service providers, which will hurt your lead generation and marketing efforts in the long-run. Getting out from this email blacklist can be very difficult if not impossible, and will lower your email deliverability once you’ve generated actual leads.

So, never rely on a purchased email database, and build your own email list instead. This is also accounting for the fact that you are dealing with a limited budget and resources as a startup, you have to make sure that your lead generation efforts are spent on high-quality leads that are interested in your service or product.

Designing A Lead Generation Strategy for Startups

Now that you’ve understood the concept of lead generation for startups, and why a lead generation strategy is very important, it’s time to finally develop a lead generation strategy.

In general, we can divide our lead generation strategy into three core elements:

Attracting leads

This aspect of the lead generation strategy focuses on bringing people to our platform (mainly our website). For example, we can publish an attractive blog post and use SEO to boost its presence on the search engine so it’s more visible to our target audience. Using social media and influencer marketing can also be a part of this strategy.

The main idea of this is fairly simple: by bringing more people to our website, we get more opportunities to convert some of these people into leads or prospects.

Lead magnet to convert visitors

The second aspect of our lead generation strategy is to create an effective lead magnet to convert people we’ve successfully attracted to our platform (i.e. our website visitors) into actual prospects.

Again, our focus here is to offer something that is valuable and attractive for our audience to convince them to submit their contact information (mainly email addresses). The lead magnet can be a downloadable white paper, ebook, a free-trial, and anything else of value that is also relevant to what you sell.

Lead scoring

Say we have successfully converted our website visitors into leads via lead magnet, we have to remember that these leads aren’t made equal. Say a prospect is already interested in buying your product, but don’t have the budget. Then we can’t say that this is a qualified lead.

Since, again, you are going to deal with a limited budget and resources, knowing which leads are qualified are very important so we can focus our resources on the prospects that are the most likely to make a purchase. This is where lead scoring comes in.

Depending on your business model and target audience, there can be many different approaches to scoring your leads. For example, we can score a prospect as more qualified if he or she has consumed more than five content in a month’s timeframe.

Below, we will discuss each of these aspects of lead generation strategy, one by one.

Lead Capture Strategy for Startups

Inbound Marketing: Content Marketing+SEO

Inbound marketing, as we know, has been a major buzzword in digital marketing and lead generation for the past half-decade or so. Yet, what actually is inbound marketing?

To put it in layman’s terms, inbound marketing is using content marketing and SEO to pull our ideal audience towards our business instead of pushing our promotional messages outwards like what we usually do in traditional (outbound) marketing like advertising.

The main idea behind inbound marketing as a lead capture method is fairly simple: by consistently publishing relevant, high-quality content, we can let people that are looking for information related to our niche to find our content. This way, we can effectively bring them to our blog/site and can start introducing our brand/product, while offering our lead magnet.

Why is inbound marketing so effective for SaaS companies?

As we know, more and more people are now actively avoiding advertising, whether by using ad-blockers or by ‘dodging’ these ads subconsciously. Advertising and other outbound marketing efforts are designed to disrupt our activities: we wanted to watch a YouTube video, and that’s why we are often annoyed with the ads shown at the beginning and in the middle of the said video.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, won’t disrupt what we are currently doing. The prospect is the one actively looking for information/content, so if they are happy with your content, they are more likely to perceive your brand as a helpful, valuable brand.

This is why inbound marketing typically generates more qualified leads for startups—both in quantity and quality—- compared to outbound marketing.

While inbound marketing is a very broad subject, here are some important areas you’d need to focus on:

• Content is king: yes, everyone is saying that content is king, but just because it’s a Cliché, doesn’t mean it’s not true. The quality of your content and how relevant it is for your audience is the most important factor if you are going to use content marketing for startups as a lead generation tactic:

1. Keyword research: target keywords with high enough search volume to ensure your content is relevant
2. Search intent: make sure to meet your target audience’s search intent with each keyword
3. Competitive analysis: check the highest-ranking pages on Google for your target keywords. Our job is to create better, more unique, and/or more relevant content than these pages.

• Content promotion: no matter how good the content is, it won’t generate leads if it doesn’t reach enough people. Promote your content via all the available channels with two objectives: generating more traffic to the content, and get more backlinks in the process, as we will discuss below.

• Backlink building: Backlinks remain one of, if not the most important ranking factors in SEO. Yet, nowadays the quality of the incoming backlinks is more important than quantity. Generally generating just three to five backlinks each month from quality sites in our industry is sufficient, but it can be easier said than done:

1. 1. Give them a reason to link your page. Include at least one link hook like unique data/information, an engaging story, a great photo/image, and so on.
   2. Build relationships with relevant sites and influencers in your niche. Be proactive, and aim to build long-term, healthy relationships instead of focusing on getting backlinks.
   3. Guest posting, when done right, can still be effective in generating backlinks and used by many link building consultants.

Be more creative in social media

Obviously, social media is where our audience is nowadays, so generating leads via social media marketing is a given.

However, on the other hand, the social media marketing landscape is now very saturated, so getting our voice heard amidst all the noises is now very difficult. In today’s social media marketing, we have to effectively utilize all three options in social media marketing:

• Organic: that is, building our own followers and spreading your own promotional messages organically. This is the most affordable option (can be totally free), but take the longest to achieve results.
• Paid: using paid advertising options offered by the respective social media platform. These options are virtually guaranteed to generate quick results but are also the most expensive.
• Influencer:  working with influencers so they can help promote your brand/product/service/content. Can be more cost-effective than paid advertising options, but can also be more expensive.

Be more creative in utilizing all of these options, and maintaining the right balance between cost-efficiency and time is very important. Make sure your audience can notice you, and also understand what your brand represents.

Effective Usage of Landing Pages

Don’t be afraid of launching more landing pages to capture as many different audiences as possible. One of the most common mistakes of many startups is that they do not have enough landing pages to effectively convert their audiences. The more landing pages, the more opportunities you’ll have to generate leads.

However, it’s not only the number of your landing pages that is important but also how optimized they are:

• Clear offers: make sure your offer is as clear as possible. This will closely be determined by the quality of your lead magnet, which we will discuss again below
• Simplify everything: streamline every element on your landing page so your audience can focus on your offer and your call to action (CTA).
• Optimize CTA: make sure your call to action (CTA) is as straightforward as possible, make it to-the-point, and obvious.
• Contact information: make sure it’s easy for them to contact you. Provide as many options as possible.
• Social proof: add testimonials from previous clients and existing customers, display your awards/accolades if any.
• A/B test: test every element on your landing page, and continuously optimize it.

Optimizing Your Lead Magnet

Now that we’ve successfully attracted people to our platform (website), the next step is to convert these visitors into leads by offering our lead magnet.

As we’ve discussed above, a lead magnet is essentially something valuable that you offer for free so you can get the audience’s contact information. This is how we turn someone from just a visitor into a lead.

The main principles in creating a lead magnet is that:

1. It should be valuable for your target audience
2. It should be relevant to  your brand, and preferably related to your product/service
3. It should be cost-effective depending on your business model

While you can be as creative as you can in developing your lead magnet, here are some common ideas you can try:

• Gated content: a very common lead magnet is to offer a more in-depth version of the content the audience is currently consuming. For example, offering an ebook about the latest diet tricks on a diet-related blog post.
• Free-trial: especially if you are selling a digital product, a free trial offer can be an effective lead generation campaign.
• Webinar: an effective tactic especially nowadays when people are more familiar with Zoom meetings and webinars in general. You can offer free webinar sharing tips/educational videos related to your niche.
• Tools: if your niche allows, you can offer a simple but valuable tool as your lead magnet. For example, if you are a fitness blog, you can offer a BMI calculator or calorie counter as your lead magnet.

To be successful, your lead magnet should:

• Provide immediate value: offers offering delayed (progressive) value can still work, but the more immediate the benefit is, the more effective the lead magnet will be
• Problem-solving: a lead magnet that can effectively solve a pain point faced by your target audience is typically effective
• Unique: fairly self-explanatory, you should offer something that is not offered by your competitors
• Easy: it should be as easy as possible for your audience to sign-up for your lead magnet offer. Even if your lead magnet is already attractive, if it’s too difficult for your prospect to convert, they’ll likely bounce from the offer.

Lead Scoring

Now that you’ve properly generated your leads, it’s time to start scoring your leads so you can put your time and resources only nurturing highly-qualified leads that matter.

While the lead scoring methods can vary depending on your business model and your ideal audience, here are some general steps you can follow:

Defining the stages/tiers

The most important step in lead scoring is defining the stages/tiers of your leads. The standard tiers are:

• Stranger: a website/platform visitor that hasn’t submitted their contact
• Prospect: a contact that has submitted their contact info (email address)
• MQL: marketing qualified lead, a lead that has engaged several times with your content. Need to be monitored closely and we should gauge their actual levels of interest.
• SQL: sales qualified lead, a lead that is highly likely to make a purchase, ready to be approached by a salesperson

Assigning points

For example, we can use a 100-point system with the above tiers:

• 10 points for a stranger
• 50 points for a lead
• The lead is qualified as an MQL when they have 80 points, each of the lead magnets offered is worth 10 points. So, when they signed up for three lead magnets, they are an MQL.
• 100 points before the lead is qualified as an SQL, so they have to take two additional offers.

Define scores for actions

Above we have defined that signing up for a lead magnet is worth 10 points, but we can also assign scores to other actions. For example, every email open and read can be assigned 1 point, and clicking on links worth 2 points, and so on. Define scores for possible actions depending on your business model.

Define point decay

Your leads aren’t static and they might change their minds about your brands before, or even after they’ve made their purchase. We can assign point decays, in this case, to properly ‘demote’ a lead for more accurate scoring.

For example, we can subtract 10 points after 30 days of no actions, and another 40 points after 60 days of no actions. If a prospect hasn’t made any action after 90 days, we subtract all points.

When assigning point decays, it’s important to consider your product/service’s typical sales cycle. For example, if your product is relatively expensive so it has a naturally longer sales cycle (i.e. people tend to spend more than a week or two when considering buying a car), then you can be more lenient with assigning point decays.

On the other hand, if you are selling a product with a relatively short sales cycle (i.e. an affordable consumer product), then you can be more strict with this.

By following these steps, now you have a functional lead scoring system in place, and now you can use it to identify your most qualified leads and whether some leads are worth nurturing or not. As you gathered more leads, you can always go back and redefine this scoring system according to your needs. The main consideration is that the scoring system should be relevant and representative of your sales cycle.

Conclusion

As discussed, lead generation is often the most challenging aspect of starting a startup, but at the same time, it is a very important thing to focus on if you really want to grow your startup quickly.

If you can’t generate leads, you won’t get more customers, and you simply can’t grow your business without first generating your leads.

By following the tips we have shared above, and working with a startup SEO agency can now develop a lead generation strategy for your startup, generate more prospects, and grow your business in the process.

The post Top Lead Generation Strategies for Startups appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

On the other hand, the resource to learn about this is—not quite limited—, but confusing. Do a quick Google search about “B2B lead generation”, and you’ll get various content discussing different points that often contradict each other. Many of these articles are pure misinformation, that will further confuse an already-stressed B2B marketer.

The Main Lead Source for B2B Is More Complex Than You Thing

Let us address the elephant in the room: there is not one single most effective channel to generate B2B leads.

Let us take a look at this chart, published by Hubspot a while back.

Image source: Hubspot

What is the most effective source of leads according to the chart? We see popular channels like SEO, which as expected is among the most effective, social media, email marketing, and so on.

However, the highest on the chart happens to be “Other”. Meaning, we don’t even know where the leads actually come from.

We might get lead while attending a conference, “oh, I saw your blog posts before!”. We might get a lead when a business partner recommends us to their peers, and so on. The fact remains, however, that having a consistent marketing effort and proper presence are still essential to allow these “other” things to happen.

So, think of lead generation as a culmination of an integrated digital marketing strategy. We have to make all the different channels, even unquantifiable efforts,  to work together for one purpose: generating leads.

1. Content Marketing, SEO, and Consistency

Content marketing, together with SEO—the concept we call “inbound marketing” — is a very effective lead generation tool if we do it right.

First, let us discuss how we can generate leads through content marketing:

The Lead Magnet Method.

A very common (and very effective practice) which typically involves two “stages” of different content. The first stage is a valuable, informative content for your audience to capture their interest.

Then, we offer the second stage, which is a more informative, more interesting piece of content that they can get in exchange for their contact information.

These lead magnets can come in the form of:

• Ebook, white papers, research reports. These can be very valuable for professionals, especially if you can publish unique data and information not available anywhere else (i.e. reports from your own research). This type of content can also help establish your position as an expert in your niche—building your credibility.

• Webinars. Another effective and relatively cost-efficient way to capture leads is to offer a free webinar. Remember that your webinar’s purpose is not to promote your product/service (you can still do it, but avoid hard-selling), but rather to provide information related to the original (first stage) content.

Remember, however, that before you can offer these lead magnets, you have to first capture your audience’s attention with your content.

This, can be easier than done, but here are some important principles to follow:

Define and Understand your Target Audience

Great content marketing begins with a proper understanding of your audience.

So, do your market research and develop your buyer’s persona.

Remember that in B2B, there can be different stakeholders in a single company that will be involved in the purchase process for your product, each with different roles. You have to develop a buyer persona for each of these roles.

Keyword Research

Based on your target audience, find the target keywords with three main principles:

• The keyword(s) but be valuable and relevant for your brand, product, or service.
• The keyword(s) must be relevant for your target audience, indicated with a high monthly search volume.
• The competition for the keyword must be manageable depending on your budget and time frame.

Develop Your Content

Do a quick Google search for your target keywords (or you can use various keyword research tools for this), check out the top ranking content for these keywords (at least the top 3 results).

Your job? Is to create significantly better content than these. Consider the fact that there are millions of content being published every single day. If you aren’t much better than most, it simply won’t cut it.

Alternatively, you can aim to be different and cover the topic from a unique angle.

Simply put, give people a reason to consume your content.

Promoting Your Content

Content marketing doesn’t stop in the content development process, but how you promote your content is just as—if not more— important.

Promote your content via various available channels with two purposes: getting traffic to your content, and in relation to SEO, getting more backlinks in the process.

Backlinks

Backlinks are the most important asset in B2B SEO. Think of backlinks as votes. When a website links to yours, Google will view your site as more relevant, even more so when the ‘vote’ comes from a high-quality site.

Contrary to popular belief, the quality of your backlinks is more important than quantity. In fact, getting too many backlinks at one time can get you penalized.

Aim to get just 2 or 3 high-quality backlinks every month for all your content pages, and you are good to go.

Consistency is Key

The most important thing to keep in mind is the fact that B2B content marketing and SEO are both long-term strategies. It will take months if not years before you can rely on them as lead generation devices, but the results will be worth it as you’ll get a sustainable source of leads.

Thus, the key here is consistency: keep publishing high-quality and relevant content.

2. Social Media Marketing

One of the most common myths surrounding B2B social media marketing is the statement: “I’m in a boring industry, social media won’t work in this niche”.

Here’s the deal, there are over 3.2 billion people that are active on various social media platforms daily, almost 45% of the global population. Do you seriously believe none of those 3 billion people are interested in your brand?

Even if there’s only 0.00001% of those 3 billion people that are interested in your brand, it’s still a huge potential revenue, and it’s worth pursuing.

So, your job as a B2B social media marketer is to find them.

There are, however, two key facts we must consider in implementing social media marketing for B2B:

• Social media marketing is not only about good—even excellent— social media presence. It’s much more than that, and we’ll discuss more about this below.
• No, we’ve moved past the misconception that social media is the ultimate source of leads, ever. However, it’s still an effective lead generation channel where—as mentioned—billions of people are active in. Don’t underestimate social media as a lead source, but don’t overestimate it either.

How To Use Social Media as a Lead Generation Device

Social media is still a very effective lead generation medium, the thing is, it’s still fairly underutilized in the B2B environment.

There are mainly three ways to use social media to generate leads:

• Convert social media audience for newsletter signups. This is an effective way to generate leads on social media. For example, you can allow newsletter signups on your Facebook page, or you can encourage people to join your newsletter when a post or content is gaining some traction.

• Drive people to visit your website. Capturing leads is—in essence— getting a visitor’s contact information, mainly email address, so we can follow up with a lead nurturing process. The thing is, it’s harder to do this in a social media environment (i.e., it’s ineffective to include a lead capture form in 140 characters). So, we have to direct them to our website for a more effective capturing process. Give them a reason to visit your website.

• Effectively use Call To Action(CTA). Don’t be afraid to include CTAs in yous social media posts, however, use them sparingly and naturally.

Linkedin as a Lead Generation Channel

Linkedin deserves a special mention in the world of B2B social media marketing. Why? Because it’s simply effective. 80% of B2B social media leads come from Linkedin, compared to 7% from Facebook and 13% from Twitter.

So, it would only make sense to put extra attention on Linkedin as your lead generation channel.

In B2B marketing, your main target audience is professionals in your niche. For example, if you are selling a SaaS digital marketing tool, then your target market is marketing professionals in specific companies.

Linkedin is where these professionals gather, making it an ideal place to get your prospects.

Here are some tips to generate leads from Linkedin:

• Have a strong Linkedin presence. pretty self-explanatory. Make sure you provide clear and specific information on your Linkedin profile so they know what your business is about. Be active, and start to make connections with industry professionals.

• Join relevant groups. There are a lot of groups in Linkedin that you can join right away—probably one of Linkedin’s strongest features—. Find groups where your target audience gathers. Linkedin provides the feature to filter groups based on the audience’s behavior and demographics, so use this to your advantage.

• Engage. Build relationships, join relevant information, ask exciting questions and provide useful answers. Again, be active.

• Use Linkedin’s paid options. Linkedin understood that many businesses like you want to use the platform to generate leads, so they offer paid campaigns for lead generation purposes. This can be cost-effective if you target the right audience. If you don’t want to run ads, you can alternatively try LinkedIn automation tools that help you automate organic marketing techniques.

It’s important to understand that nowadays, social media can be divided into two different aspects:

• Organic: pretty self-explanatory, build your organic presence and grow your followers, then convert your followers into leads.
• Paid: using various paid advertising and campaigns to generate leads. With organic reach in all social media platforms continues to decline, we have to invest in these paid options. The idea is to balance out your paid and organic efforts to maintain cost-efficiency.

3. Influencer Marketing

Influencer was a fairly underutilized marketing channel in B2B environment. In recent years, many B2B businesses tried to follow their B2C counterparts by endorsing influencers and celebrities. Some are quite successful, but many aren’t.

With that being said, influencer marketing is a very effective lead generation device based on a fairly simple idea:

In this saturated digital world, it’s really difficult to get our voices heard amidst all the noises. An influencer can help bypass this situation by promoting our message directly to their loyal followers.

With that being said, here are several important principles in implementing influencer marketing to generate leads:

• In recent years, people are getting more resistant to sponsored messages from big influencers and especially celebrities. Aiming for micro and nano influencers can be more cost-efficient and might result in less resistance
• The most important thing to consider is finding the right influencers for your business. This can be even more difficult in a certain B2B niche when there aren’t many “experts” or “thought leaders” available. Various influencer outreach tools can help you in this aspect.
• Build relationships with these influencers before you inquire them for marketing opportunities. This might help with cost-efficiency and can help in developing the best possible campaign for the influencer. Also, some influencers might not want to work with your brand at first.
• Since your purpose here is lead generation, design a proper way to capture leads through the influencer marketing campaign. For example, ask the influencer to present a link to your landing page where you can display CTAs and lead capture forms.

One last thing to consider is that influencer marketing won’t bypass the need of having your own online presence. Let’s say a website visitor comes to visit your website after being directed by an influencer. If the said visitor finds that your website is not interesting and your content is shallow, they simply won’t convert.

Think of influencer marketing as a way to amplify your business’s online presence and your already-decent digital marketing efforts, not the other way around.

4. Email Marketing

Even with all the new marketing channels and technologies, email marketing—as one of the oldest digital marketing tactics around—remains one of the most effective channels with the highest ROI.

Email marketing is more commonly implemented as a lead nurturing campaign. That is, to nurture leads that have been captured through other channels. However, email marketing can still be effective as a lead generation device.

Although email marketing is one of the oldest marketing channels around, doesn’t mean that it hasn’t changed.

Nowadays, the average people can get hundreds of promotional emails every single day, a lot of them will go straight to spam or to the “promotions” tab in Gmail. Meaning, if your email is not interesting at first glance, it won’t get noticed, ever.

To tackle this issue, we have to send the right message to the right people at the right time, and the answers for this are automation and personalization.

Personalization

Email personalization is much more than using the receiver’s first name in the subject line. Think carefully to create subject lines that can interest your audience, use interesting images, find the right position for your CTAs, and so on.

You might want to check out this guide by Neil Patel on more about email personalization.

Automation

Email marketing automation is more than automating some of the processes to lessen your workload, but rather, it’s about timing. A marketing automation tool can give us the ability to send different messages exactly at the right time, a concept we call drip marketing. For example, we can send a personalized offer to website visitors who viewed our product page, increasing the chance of a conversion.

End Words

B2B lead generation is—admittedly— a long and hard work. As mentioned, not one single lead generation tactic can work for all situations, but rather, it’s about an integrated effort using many different marketing channels and working with B2B marketing consultant to build your online presence and credibility.

Thus, it’s important to continuously evaluate your progress, re-optimize and adjust your tactics, and always pay attention to changes in trends and your customers’ behaviors.

The post The Truth About B2B Lead Generation appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Simply put, lead generation is the process of attracting, engaging, and converting website visitors into leads.

A lead, on the other hand, is basically anyone that has shown any signs of voluntary interest in your products and/or services. Since here we are mainly discussing B2B lead generation, then your leads—and target customers— are businesses and organizations that are in need of your product or service.

Another important factor that is unique for the B2B environment is that there can be several different stakeholders in a single target company.

For example, if your product is a B2B software, then the target company’s IT officer, IT manager, finance manager, and CEO might be involved in the purchase decision. Meaning, each of these individual stakeholders with different roles can be considered a unique lead, with each of them requiring different lead generation approach and targeting with SEO for SaaS and Software companies.

How B2B Lead Generation Works

How do we ‘convert’ a random website visitor into a lead?

The answer is to capture the visitor’s contact information (mainly email address) via an opt-in form so we can then send email content as a lead nurturing process. The typical steps would be similar to this:

• We attract
• We place CTA (Click-To-Action) buttons like “buy now” at optimized places on our web page, this will be closely related to the lead magnet, which will be discussed below.
• Visitors that clicked on the CTA button will be given a lead capture opt-in form so we can collect the necessary information from the consumer (their name, email address, physical location, etc.)
• Once the form is submitted, the visitor is effectively converted as your lead/prospect
• Now we can effectively connect with the said prospect and enter the lead nurturing stage as discussed above.

As we can see, the key here is the CTA button, its placement, and the offer we placed behind the CTA—the lead magnet—, which we will discuss above.

The Idea of Lead Magnet

A lead magnet, in essence, is something valuable we offer the website’s visitor for FREE, in exchange for their contact information.

It’s that simple. So, the key to offering an effective lead magnet is to understand our audience’s needs, pain points, problems, and what can interest them.

In general, there are three things that construct an effective lead magnet:

1. Instant Solution: the lead magnet can immediately—or almost immediately— provide a solution for the web visitor’s problem.
2. Perceived Value: the website visitor can perceive that the offer can provide value. Remember that the key here is the audience’s perception—and not yours—. Sometimes, something that is actually valuable is not perceived as such by the target audience.
3. Communicate Unique Selling Proposition: the lead magnet can communicate and convince your website visitor about your brand’s unique value proposition. This way, when the consumer signs up voluntarily to the email opt-in, they have a higher chance to convert as actual customers because they understood what your brand offers.

Effective Lead Generation Best Practices

Here, we will discuss some of the most effective tactics in implementing B2B lead generation.

1. Inbound Marketing: Blog Post+Gated Content as Lead Magnet

This is one of the most commonly practiced lead generation tactics today both in the B2C and B2B environments.

Gated content is, simply put, a downloadable content that is ‘gated’ behind a lead capture form. When the user provides their contact information in the opt-in form, they can now download the content.

The main idea is fairly simple:

• Publish valuable content to attract website visitors, promoted mainly through B2B SEO.
• Engage users through the content, and offer a related, more valuable (at least, perceived as more valuable) content in exchange for their contact information.
• The visitors are attracted to download the gated content and effectively converts as a lead/prospect

For example, let’s say the company is selling an SEO keyword research tool in a SaaS business model, so the ‘main’ content discusses something like “enterprise SEO strategy”. Then, the gated content can be something like “Step-by-Step SEO Strategy” in a 10,000-word long ebook.

2. Social Media Lead Generation

Social media is an effective lead generation channel due to one obvious reason: it is where the audience is nowadays, even in the B2B environment. In fact, influencer marketing—as an aspect of social media marketing is currently— very popular in B2B marketing.

There are over 3 billion social media active users all over the world. Nowadays, even B2B stakeholders consider social media as a valuable source of information.

There are three main approaches to using social media for lead generation:

• Organic: that is, growing your own social media followers and attract them organically with your content.
• Paid: using advertising and other paid promotional options offered by various social media platforms to generate leads. For B2B businesses, for example, LinkedIn offers a specific lead generation ad campaign.
• Influencers: working with influencers to promote your brand, product, and/or service. In essence, a mix of organic and paid approaches.

In practice, you can use social media to direct your audience to a content (which will offer a lead magnet, as discussed above), or straight to a landing page with an opt-in form, among other methods.

Social media is among the quickest, easiest to implement, and most cost-efficient B2B lead generation channels available, and it’s also highly versatile.

3. Effective CTAs

The design of the CTA and how we place it will significantly affect the conversion rate. However, creating a highly effective CTA can be easier said than done: on the one hand, it has to be simple and clear enough for our audience. On the other hand, it has to effectively attract and engage.

So, how can we develop highly effective CTAs? Here are a few pointers:

1. The offer: a CTA can only be as powerful as the offer behind it (see point one above), the other
2. Text/Copywriting: this is about how you communicate the offer. This guide by Hubspot on CTA copywriting might help you in this aspect.
3. Visuals: a CTa can come in the form of a visual button (or even a banner) or a text-based hyperlink. In general, however, well-designed buttons tend to catch more attention.
4. Contrast: the CTA has to stand out from its surrounding ‘environment’. Use different colors than the rest of the page, use typography that sticks out, and so on.
5. Size: fairly obvious—the bigger, generally the better. Yet, it’s important to maintain the balance of the overall context.

Make sure the CTA is clear and communicate the right message about the role of the user. For example, if the user is going to download something after they click on the button, then say “download”. Similarly, if the CTA is about free-trial sign-up, say “sign-up for a free trial here” or something similar. Keep it specific and don’t mislead the user.

4. Slide-In Scroll CTA

The idea here is fairly simple, and also one of the most effective ways to generate leads.

Here, we ‘slide-in’ a scroll box—technically a contact capture form as a CTA— after the user scrolls through a certain percentage of the entire content, for example, we can slide in the opt-in box after the user scrolls through 70% of the entire page.

You can use tools like OptinMonster to create this type of CTA.

5. Effective Use of Pop-Up Forms

A pop-up box is also effective in collecting direct leads.

Simply adding a pop-up box at the end of your content can significantly improve lead conversion rate. Why at the end? Because placement is very important, and most users decide whether they’d want to commit with your brand—or not— when they reach the end of your content. So, placing your CTA here will translate to asking them to make the decision right away.

In short, timing is important.

Also, this might convert visitors that are originally unwilling to at the start of the content.

6. Create a Quiz

An interesting and interactive quiz can be an effective method to generate more leads, and you can use tools like Interact Quiz Maker or Bucket.io to create this lead-generation quizzes.

The idea is quite similar to ‘traditional’ CTA and lead magnet: provide value with your quiz, and communicate this value as best as possible.

For example, tell them that this quiz will provide insights into how they can grow their website traffic, and don’t forget to deliver on this promise.

Keep in simple: ask around 6 to 12 question, and only include three or four options for each question.

End Words

Lead generation is—in its purest essence—, an art of understanding your target audience, provide value according to their needs and/or problems, and find out opportunities to capture their contact information.

Don’t annoy your site visitors, and always aim to provide value to your audience. Also, timing is key.

The post 6 B2B Lead Generation Ideas To Implement appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Top 6 Lead Generation Companies

Based on the factors we have discussed above, we have researched numerous lead generation companies that have already established their credible reputation. We’ve assessed companies with the best qualities of databases, most reliable tactics and methods, and other factors. Based on that, here are our recommendations for the top 6 lead generation companies, in no particular order:

1. MikeKhorev.com

MikeKhorev.com is the online hub of Mike Khorev, a globally recognized SEO and growth marketing consultant specializing in B2B technology, SaaS, and complex digital products. The firm has worked with funded startups and established tech companies worldwide, helping them achieve measurable organic growth and revenue impact through data-driven SEO strategies.

One of Mike Khorev’s core strengths is his deep focus on technical and AI-driven SEO. Rather than relying on generic playbooks, strategies are built around in-depth market research, advanced analytics, and full-funnel optimization. This includes everything from keyword mapping and content architecture to attribution modeling and conversion-focused optimization.

Engagements are structured for speed and clarity. Clients typically begin seeing structured execution within weeks, supported by transparent reporting and performance dashboards that track rankings, traffic, and revenue contribution. Every campaign is customized, ensuring alignment between SEO efforts and broader business goals.

A defining differentiator of MikeKhorev.com is its results-oriented approach. By combining technical SEO expertise with behavioral data analysis, Mike Khorev identifies high-intent opportunities and prioritizes actions that move prospects through the funnel efficiently. This allows clients to not only grow organic visibility, but also convert that visibility into qualified leads and revenue.

2. Nine Peaks Media

An SEO based lead generation company with a global-reaching reputation. Nine Peak Media uses various digital marketing channels to generate qualified prospects, but especially focuses on organic lead generation through content marketing and SEO (inbound marketing).

By consistently producing high-quality and relevant content, Nine Peaks Media can help your business in not only generating leads, but also to establish your credibility and online presence. On the other hand, by ensuring these pieces of content are ranking on top of the search engine results page (SERP) for the right keywords, you can get a reliable, sustainable source of long-term traffic.

Nine Peaks Media also emphasize the importance of online reputation management, and provide the service to manage reviews of your brand and to maintain a positive presence on social media platforms.

3. Vsynergize

Vsynergize has been one of the top lead generation companies in more than a decade, and especially focuses on using various available channels to generate the best possible quality leads to their clients.

One of their specialties include data-mining for custom-tailored customer databases where clients can get qualified prospects. Vsynergize then will use various verification method to ensure the clients get the best possible fit according to their buyer persona.

Providing various outsourcing services from data cleansing to appointment setting, Vsynergize can be a good choice if you are looking for a one-stop digital marketing and outsourcing service.

4. TechnologyAdvice

TechnologyAdvice is also a full-service digital marketing agency and marketing tools provider with lead generation as one of their core services.

One of the key qualities of TechnologyAdvice is their huge proprietary database of over 45 million customer contacts from all around the world. Which, when paired with their sophisticated data mining tools, can ensure a great source of qualified leads for any businesses.

Technology advice will use different lead generation and lead nurturing methods according to the client’s needs, from telemarketing to social media marketing to SEO, as well as automating some of your marketing processes.

5. Netline

Netline specializes in using content marketing and content syndication to generate more leads through inbound approaches.

Content syndication, is a nutshell, is publishing content on your business’s behalf on third-party sites to get more leads and backlinks to your own site. This approach can be very effective especially for businesses that can capitalize on content and inbound marketing.

Besides content-focused strategies, Netline also offers various other marketing methods from account-based marketing to funnel acceleration to programmatic advertising solutions to generate more prospects.

A one-stop lead generation service that will suit especially businesses with an existing content marketing presence.

6. CIENCE

CIENCE is a San Francisco-based lead generation company with a global reputation, and called their business PAAS, People-as-a-service.

The idea behind PAAS with CIENCE is combining human intelligence and creativity with digital approaches including A.I. and machine learning to research, generate, and nurture new prospects.  So, their service will focus around dedicated, personalized staffing to grow your business, according to your needs.

CIENCE divides their services into two: outbound and inbound SDR (Sales Development Resources), and will work together with you from researching your needs and your ideal audience’s behavior to developing strategies to actually generate the prospects you need.

Important Factors When Choosing  A Lead Generation Company

Lead generation, by definition, is a relatively simple concept involving three key processes:

1. Attracting people to your brand (or in most cases, your website/landing page)
2. Capturing their contact information, effectively converting a random visitor into an actual lead/prospect
3. Figuring out whether this lead is qualified and worth nurturing (lead qualification).

So, when choosing a lead generation company, we should consider their expertise in these three main processes, namely:

1. How They Actually Attract Visitors

Lead generation companies can use many different approaches to attract and engage with prospects. So, figuring out their approach can be a major factor in determining your choice.

Remember that not only the quantity of the leads is important, but also the quality. So, the process can be really important here, and those that focus on assessing and capitalizing on purchase intent are generally the most reliable. Here are some of them:

Telemarketing

Pretty self-explanatory. The lead generation company calls their contact database to measure their interest. While telemarketing might seems old-school for this digital age, it’s actually a very effective personal approach where the company can measure potential interest for specific products/services.

Content Marketing

Another effective approach nowadays is attracting prospects through content marketing. This is very effective since the lead generation company can establish the client’s position as the expert of the niche, attracting more qualified leads in the process.

Generally, in this approach we use lead magnets to capture the content reader’s information, for example by offering a more in-depth content in the form of ebook or white paper in exchange of their email addresses. Content syndication, which is publishing your content in third-party sites in exchange of leads.

Usually companies who use this approach will also provide content development and SEO consultancy services.

Nurture Campaigns

Here, the lead generation company nurture an existing contact list to convert them into actual leads. The company can use email marketing, online surveys, phone calls, and other approaches to engage the potential prospects.

The goal here is to create a new list consisting of more qualified prospects where your sales team can convert more effectively.

Database Mining

In this approach, the main goal is to “mine” new contacts through various methods including using software and programs to crawl public records and existing databases.

The technology used by the companies can greatly vary (and can sometimes be a scam). So, if a lead generation company offers you this kind of service, make sure to have them demonstrate their approach and learn about it as much as you can before making a decision.

2. Quantity and Quality of Existing Database

Besides generating brand new, organic prospects for your business, some lead generation companies will offer to sell their own contact database.

It’s important to understand that in general, organic contact lists (the ones generated from various methods we’ve discussed above) will perform better than these third-party databases. However, these databases can still produce great results when used properly and when they fit your buyer persona.

It’s important to consider both the size of the database and whether the prospects in the list are aligned with your ideal audience. Buying these leads can be very expensive, and so it’s important to only buy those with the highest chance of conversions.

Some companies will push you to buy these leads, even when they don’t have a campaign that can fit your needs. Avoid these companies, and make sure their database is properly aligned with a program that fit your business.

Conclusion

Choosing the right lead generation company is not simply about finding a vendor that can deliver a high volume of leads. It is about partnering with an agency that understands your market, your sales funnel, and your long-term business objectives. Credibility and a proven track record should always be the foundation of your decision, as these indicators reflect an agency’s ability to generate not just traffic or contacts, but leads that are genuinely qualified and sales-ready. As highlighted throughout this guide, lead generation is a complex and evolving discipline. Buyer behavior continues to shift, digital channels change rapidly, and competition grows more intense each year. Because of this, businesses must look beyond surface-level promises and carefully evaluate how a lead generation provider attracts prospects, captures data, and qualifies leads before passing them to the sales team. An agency that prioritizes alignment with your target audience and funnel stages will consistently outperform one that focuses solely on lead volume. Inbound strategies such as SEO, content marketing, and content syndication have proven to be especially effective for companies seeking sustainable, long-term growth. These approaches not only attract higher-intent prospects but also help build authority, trust, and brand visibility over time. While outbound tactics and third-party databases can still play a role, they must be used strategically and supported by strong nurturing and qualification processes to avoid wasted spend and low conversion rates. Ultimately, outsourcing lead generation should be viewed as a long-term investment rather than a short-term expense. The right partner will integrate seamlessly with your existing marketing and sales efforts, provide transparency through reporting and analytics, and continuously optimize campaigns based on performance data. When done correctly, working with a reputable lead generation agency can create a predictable pipeline of qualified prospects, strengthen your overall marketing strategy, and drive consistent revenue growth over time.

Key Takeaways

• Lead generation is critical but complex
  Generating leads requires time, expertise, and constant adaptation as buyer behavior and digital channels evolve.
• The wrong leads can hurt sales performance
  Poor-quality or misaligned leads waste sales resources and can be counterproductive, making lead quality as important as lead volume.
• Top lead generation companies use different strengths and models
  Some focus on SEO and inbound marketing, others on outbound, databases, content syndication, or hybrid human + AI approaches.
• Choosing the right provider depends on alignment with your funnel and audience
  Businesses must evaluate how agencies attract traffic, capture leads, and qualify prospects – not just pricing or brand reputation.
• Inbound methods deliver more sustainable, long-term growth
  SEO, content marketing, and content syndication tend to produce higher-quality leads over time compared to one-off database purchases.
• Databases can work – but only when used carefully
  Third-party databases can be effective if they match buyer personas and are paired with the right nurturing strategy.
• Lead generation should be viewed as a long-term investment
  The best results come from agencies with proven track records that align lead gen efforts with broader business and revenue goals.

FAQ’s

Q1. What should I look for when choosing a lead generation company?

You should evaluate how the company attracts visitors, captures contact information, and qualifies leads. Their methods, data quality, transparency, and alignment with your target audience are more important than just lead volume or cost.

Q2. Are inbound lead generation strategies better than outbound ones?

Inbound strategies like SEO and content marketing generally produce higher-quality, more sustainable leads over time. Outbound approaches such as telemarketing and database mining can still be effective when executed properly and aligned with buyer intent.

Q3. Is buying lead databases a good idea?

Purchased databases can work if they closely match your ideal customer profile and are used alongside proper nurturing campaigns. However, organic leads typically convert better, and poorly targeted databases can waste budget and sales effort.

Q4. How do lead generation companies qualify leads?

Lead qualification can involve behavioral tracking, engagement scoring, manual verification, surveys, calls, or data validation. The best providers prioritize purchase intent and funnel readiness rather than raw contact numbers.

Q5. How long does it take to see results from a lead generation agency?

Timelines vary by strategy. Outbound and database-driven campaigns may deliver faster results, while SEO and content-based lead generation usually take longer but provide more consistent, long-term growth.

The post Top Lead Generation Agencies To Grow Your Brand appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

For example, the common perception is that B2B content should always be technical and informative, limiting creativity. However, that isn’t always the case, as we will discuss in this guide.

Here, we will discuss all the ins and outs of B2B content marketing strategy, and how to generate more leads with it. First, however, let us discuss the differences between B2B and B2C content marketing strategies.

B2B VS B2C Content Marketing

Why does content marketing differ between the B2B and B2C? Because the audiences, and especially how they make the purchase decisions are also different.

We all have been a B2C consumer in one way or another. When, for example, we are considering purchasing a new smartphone, what is the typical buyer’s journey? Most of the time, it’s something like this:

• A company launched a new smartphone model, and we saw the trailer or read the announcement article (we consumed content that piqued our interest)
• If we do have the budget, we then consider purchasing the phone. If not, we are going to wait and see.
• Depending on your interest level, you might check different reviews about the phone, as well as competing products. Sometimes during this “research” period, we ends up picking another phone.
• The decision is made, and we make the purchase.

Both B2C and B2B purchase decisions are made to fulfill a (perceived) need. However, the main difference is that in a B2B purchase, the buyer will also consider tangible profitability. So, although both B2B and B2C purchases will use logic and emotion, in general B2C purchases are more emotional, while B2B purchases are more logical.

Although B2B purchase processes will vary depending on the business types (both the seller and buyer), size, and many other factors, in general it will look something like this:

• B2B purchases typically began when a business (the buyer) encountered some problems. An employee will then look for possible solutions for this problem (they might directly search for products to solve this issue, or just look for information).
• During this “research”, this employee stumbled upon a product, which they consider as a possible solution. They might check the features of the product, online reviews, or even contact the sales representative for further inquiry.
• This employee will then discuss the prospect of buying this product with their higher ups. Probably they will also research other alternatives for the product.
• When all the higher ups agree, the purchase finally happens.

As you can see, another clear difference between B2C and B2B purchases is the number of people involved in the decision. In a B2B purchase, multiple people with different roles can be involved, which might require different marketing approaches. For example, a marketing executive might be interested in the benefits of the product, while an IT executive might prefer a breakdown of technical features.

So, what will this mean to our approach in B2B marketing? Here are some important consideration:

• B2B marketing must target all the possible buyer personas, each with their role and behavior.
• The core of B2B marketing is communicating our product/service’s abilities to provide solution(s) for specific problems.
• We must be prepared in discussing profitability, and communicate how our product/service can provide tangible value.
• Depending on your product/service, communicating the technical aspect of your product might be necessary.

B2B Content Marketing, Step-By-Step

Based on the principles discussed above, we can design the proper B2B content marketing strategy to accommodate our audience. Here are the key steps we can do in achieving this:

1. Knowing and Understanding Your Audiences

In B2B businesses, we are targeting other companies, and within these target companies we can have several roles involved in the purchase decision. So, when identifying our audience, there are at least three different layers of considerations:

• Your ideal target companies. Different organizations will have different goals. The idea here is to find the right companies where your product/service can help in achieving their goals.
• Key decision makers within the company. Again, this can include different roles with different needs and preferences.
• Key prospects—for lack of better words—, which is, the person/role who are most likely to find out about your product/service first. For example, if you are selling a tech product, the IT manager might be your most ideal prospect. On the other hand, if you are selling a marketing tool, you should be targeting marketing managers and officers.

Carefully consider these three layers, and develop the proper buyer personas accordingly. The better you understand your audience and their needs, the better you can plan your content.

2. Having The Right Mindset

Without defining proper and realistic goals, we can’t have a proper content marketing plan in place. Be as specific as possible. For the most of us, the goal is to get as many people consuming the content as possible, which in turn can be converted as paying customers.

But how can we achieve this? There are several facts we should consider:

• The market is getting really saturated. There are a lot of businesses promoting their products and services every single day through various channels. Getting our voice heard amidst all these noises will be more and more difficult.
• People will only purchase from brands they trust. This is even more true in the B2B environment where—again— profitability is the main consideration.
• Tell a compelling story. Even the most technical and complex content can be engaging. It’s no use being informative when people fell asleep when reading your content.

In short, yes, our ultimate goal is to get more people to buy our products or services, but we can only do it by building credibility and trust. So, avoid hard-selling, but be informative and deliver value to your audience. This way, slowly but surely, we can establish our position as the thought leader/expert of our industry.

3. Keyword Research

Based on the target audience you’ve figured out above, the next step is to find the target keywords that are searched by these audience groups. While keyword research can be complicated at first glance, here are the key principles to consider:

• First and foremost, the keyword(s) should align with your brand value and benefit your business goal in the long-run. While you can target keywords that will guarantee lead generation, it won’t be sustainable if the keywords don’t align well with your brand.
• In general, you should look for keywords that are relevant for both your business and your audience, with high enough search volume, yet manageable competition. Aiming for overly popular keywords with excessive competition be very difficult (and expensive), so the key here is finding the right balance
• Consider different layers of audiences discussed above when looking for different keywords. Remember that each of these groups can have different needs and will search for different queries.
• Your aim in content marketing shouldn’t always be about selling your product and service, but to build trust and credibility.

4. Expand Your Keywords Into Topics

We can expand a single keyword into virtually an endless amount of possible topics.

On one hand, this can be an advantage since we can develop a lot of content targeting the same keyword. However, too many options can often lead to confusion, so we’ll have to be careful here.

So, when planning your topics, here are some key principles you can consider:

• Remember that properly understanding your audience is key. This way, you can plan topics that they are interested in, and content that will ultimately provide value.
• Nowadays, there are various tools that can help you in this aspect like BuzzSumo, Link Bait generator and Hubspot’s blog ideas generator, to name a few. Use these tools to your advantage.
• Consider topic clustering, which is, creating a big content covering one big idea, and smaller content pieces covering the details. For example, you can have a pillar content covering “digital marketing” in general, and then cluster content pieces covering “SEO”, “content marketing”, and “social media marketing” which are linked to the pillar content. This will help increase your relevance in the eyes of Google, as well as your human readers.

5. Editorial Calendar

If you are serious about your content marketing, it is wise to develop a marketing calendar. Your content calendar should describe what (the topics you’ll cover), why (why it’s relevant for which audience), when (when this content will be published), where (the channel where you’ll publish your content), and how (how you will promote the content).

Content marketing by itself is a long-term game, so ideally you should plan an editorial calendar for at least six months to one year. We haven’t covered the where and how mentioned above, and so we will discuss in on the next steps.

6. Content Development

Now that we’ve figured out the target keywords and expanded them into topics, it’s time to actually develop the content according to the content calendar.

Nowadays, it’s important to consider that there are various forms of content we can use, four being the major ones:

• Text, pretty self-explanatory, ranging from blog posts to ebook to whitepaper among other forms
• Images, from shareable images and photos to infographics
• Audio, mainly podcast, which is increasingly popular as a medium nowadays
• Video, from the popular YouTube videos to live streaming to webinar

You can cover the different topics with various forms of content, and you can also integrate different forms in just one piece of content.

There are two main benefits in doing this:

1. Even in B2B environment, fewer people are huge readers. With this layered content, you can attract those that prefer infographics, videos, and podcasts
2. A textual content can be monotone and boring even for the most avid readers. Using images or even videos can help break this.

While content creation can have many different approaches and involve many different techniques,  here are the main principles to focus on in a B2B content creation:

• Remember that as discussed above, B2B marketing is about providing our audience with facts that our product/service can provide a tangible benefit. Let this concept translate into your content marketing: make sure your content is factual and informative.
• Your goal is not only for someone to click the content (through an interesting title or click-baiting), but for them to consume your content as much as possible, get value, and trust your business. Make sure your content is engaging throughout the whole piece.
• Remember the different groups of audiences, and always make sure that the content will provide value for the respective audience.

There is no one surefire way to develop perfect content, and you’ll have to experiment with different approaches that will fit your brand. Remember, however, that your goal is to establish trust, so develop your content with that purpose in mind.

7. Optimizing Conversion

It is important to realize that website visitors that came to consume your content are not necessarily equal to leads or prospects. We have to convert these visitors into actual prospects by capturing their contact information.

There are several different approaches we can use here:

• Using lead magnet, which is essentially, offering something valuable for free in exchange for the audience’s email address. A common approach in content marketing is to offer in-depth content (ebook, whitepaper, etc.) regarding the topic covered in the article.
• Directly offer CTAs within the content, for example, by saying “don’t forget to subscribe to our email newsletter” within the closing section of the article.
• You can use other elements within the page (which are essentially outside the content) to capture leads. For example, by using a CTA button beside the content.

Lead generation can be tricky and difficult, and without it your content marketing won’t bring any value. You might want to schedule a call with B2B marketing consultant to develop your marketing strategy.

8. Content Promotion

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value unless your audience actually consumes the content.

A common misconception is thinking that content marketing is only about publishing great content pieces. However, promoting your content is just as, if not even more important.

Here, we are dealing with how and where. There are various ways to promote your content, and there are various promotional channels in achieving this feat.

In general, however, the best way to promote your content is through B2B SEO. By letting this piece of content climb higher on the search engine results page, more people will be aware of the content.

While SEO is a pretty broad subject on its own, in general, there are only three key elements of SEO strategy:

1. The quality of your content, and how relevant it is to the target keyword.
2. Inbound links (or backlinks), especially from quality sources.
3. Technical aspects from page load speed to mobile-responsiveness to structured data markup, among others. You can check this technical SEO checklist for this aspect.

Backlinks are especially important here, because when we are promoting our content in other channels, we can also get more backlinks in the process, for example:

• By using influencer marketing to promote our content, we can get backlinks from the influencer
• Guest posting, another common content marketing approach where we can also get backlinks
• Social media marketing, where any shares for our content can count as social signal
• Even through various forms of online advertising, the more people consume our content, the higher the chance we’ll get more backlinks from them

In short, treat each piece of content as a landing page, promote them individually and aim to get more backlinks in the process. The backlinks—especially quality backlinks— will in turn improve your ranking on the search engine results, which will also translate to more traffic.

As we can see, content promotion is not a singular effort, but rather a continuous effort where multiple channels work together.

9. Monitoring and Re-Optimization

Our business, the market, and the industry are always evolving, and so must our content also evolve.

So, here we must monitor the performance(s) of our content pieces, and make adjustments when necessary.

Just because content is not performing well at the moment, doesn’t mean we should just ditch it or leave it as it is. There are various approaches where we can use this content in further achieving our goals:

• Update the content. We can update the information with newer ones, while we can also re-optimize the technical aspects.
• Leverage in other forms. Sometimes, a content that’s not working in its current form can be re-made in others. For example, if a blog post is not performing well, maybe creating a video of the same content will generate better results.
• Adding other forms. For example, you can add images and videos to textual content to enhance its performance.

Depending on the situation, you might also need to adjust other factors like targeting new keywords or adding more internal links. The idea is, monitor your progress and adjust when necessary.

End Words

In implementing B2B content marketing strategy, remember that the end goal is not simply more website traffic or even a higher SEO ranking, but rather, more customers. You can download my SEO Growth Program on B2B SEO service page to learn more about my approach to content marketing strategy. So, make sure your content fulfills the purpose of establishing your credibility and encouraging conversions.

Another thing to remember here is that content marketing is a long-term game, so the key here is consistency both in quality and quantity. Regularly monitor your progress, and adjust your strategy whenever necessary.

The post B2B Content Marketing: How To Get More Leads and Conversions With Your Content appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Going beyond the needed resources and tools, how you build and maintain a lead generation campaign is what enables you to secure potential customers who will help you grow your business.

Surprisingly, you don’t have to spend a lot just to acquire high quality leads. All you need are these effective tips that can help boost your lead generation.

1. Create industry-specific content

When it comes to attracting leads to your business, building brand awareness is crucial. In order to create a brand identity that resonates with the needs of your market, you will need to craft content that speaks to your audience directly. Indeed, content marketing comprises the bulk of a business’ audience outreach budget. But, for sure, spending too much on content creation does a lot less than writing articles the tackle a compelling issue or creating engaging graphics. These, of course, will involve a lot of insights.

Of course, industry specific content is simply not enough to produce conversions. You also need to focus on creating content that is highly readable and straightforward for your target audience to understand. After all, you can’t build links in blogs or any other type of content if the content itself reads like an undergraduate thesis. You need to keep your audience engaged so they can have a compelling reason to click on the links you have built.

The more time and effort you invest in creating quality content, the more conversions you can generate. Hiring an expert content writer or blogger is important, especially if you want content creation to be taken seriously while you focus on equally important activities within your business. However, you should be able to sit down with your in-house writer to discuss the type of information your organization wants to promote and the specific keywords to use for the links you are helping to build.

2. Do competitor research

The business landscape can feel like a battlefield. One way you can survive intense competition is to have a good understanding of what your competitors do. Intelligence-gathering is essential in terms of crafting a lead generation campaign that’s bound to support your business’ growth. So, it pays to spend time and resources on knowing the strategies that your competitors implement. Reviewing their websites, social media pages, and landing pages can help you develop a wealth of knowledge that can enhance your lead generation strategies. Make time for comparing what you’re doing with what other businesses’ are doing and see if you can execute it better.

For this to work, you should be able to determine who your primary and secondary competitors are. Once you categorize them properly, try to monitor the posts they publish on a daily or monthly basis. Is there a trend with the way they publish their content? Do they follow a strict schedule for their social media and blog content postings? Also, what style and tone they use for crafting content? Knowing about these finer details should give you enough information on how you can go about creating an effective lead generation strategy.

When analyzing your competitors’ campaigns, it is important that you focus more on how they engage their customers. When people have positive experiences with a certain organization, long term relationships are built. This is one goal you might want to focus on, so make sure to determine those factors that made your competitors successful in their audience engagement.

But what does this have to do with link-building? Competitor research also allows you to track those backlinks that have helped your competitors rank higher or get consistent clicks. For this, it helps to run a competitor analysis based on the links you are using.

There are various apps that can help you with this. Rank trackers  are helpful when it comes to uncovering opportunities that you might have missed. Being able to focus on those links that have high CTRs and support the value of your content marketing efforts would give your business a much-needed boost.

3. Focus on building website authority

Your website has to be the most important element in your lead generation campaign. Aside from raising awareness within your market, your website can also capture and nurture leads. You just have to improve its searchability by enhancing its search engine authority. One way you can do this is through link building for local search and creating content that’s rich in industry-specific keywords. If you need help with these strategies, opt for a firm that has the capacity for implementing them.

Improving your site’s authority is integral to your lead generation efforts. Considering that it contributes to your business’ online searchability, enhancing your website helps you unlock opportunities you couldn’t possibly find on your own.

There are several ways you can increase your website’s online authority, but the most crucial strategy to consider is coming up with a keyword strategy that is focused on positioning your business front and center within your niche. Using tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner and BuzzSumo, you can generate a long list of keywords to use for improving your website’s search engine ranking.

With these tools, try to review the keywords your competitors rank for and pay close attention to the number of clicks they generate. You might want to focus on those high-value keywords your competitors haven’t ranked for yet and leverage while you still can. Another important strategy is to come up with a list of long-tail keywords. These are ultra-specific and could result in high-value conversions if you use them well in your content marketing campaign.

Another important strategy to consider when building site authority is to make functional improvements to your website. This could mean reducing the time it takes for individual pages to load and ensuring that your website is bootstrapped for generating quality leads. For this, you might want to consider a content audit in which you analyze your site’s design and see if you can make improvements that enhances its lead generating function.

That said, make sure to install plugins such as Yoast to ensure that your website is search engine-friendly all throughout. You might also include fill forms for capturing leads and for building a lead nurturing process using newsletters. Finally, come up with a simple and straightforward design for your website that reduces loading time, enhances customer experiences, and makes it easier for anyone to navigate from one page to another.

4. Never let go of traditional methods

Despite the growing popularity of digital marketing, traditional inbound and outbound strategies such as telemarketing still remains an essential strategy for reaching out to interested leads. That’s because consumers are more responsive towards people who are actively reaching out to them, listening to their needs, and making sure they can provide all the answers for certain issues they need to resolve. With a robust telemarketing strategy, you can improve the way you generate high-quality leads.

That said, it’s important that you create call scripts that won’t make your callers sound robotic. Instead, make use of call scripts that take your audience’s most important needs into account. Testing out different call scripts could be one way of determining how best to engage your prospects over the phone.

Aside from telemarketing, you might also want to make use of tried and tested techniques for reaching out to your target audience. One thing’s for sure, using the old-fashioned way when it comes to lead generation is still just as effective as any recent tool for handling such a campaign.

Participating in industry-related events, for the most part, has to be the most effective means of reaching out to people who might want to buy a product or service from you. Taking part in conferences, workshops, and trade shows allows you to build networks with other business leaders and engage potential clients who might want to learn more about the services you’re promoting. It’s only a matter of distributing the right materials that can help encourage your prospects to initiate an engagement. You can use flyers, brochures, and other printed media to give your leads enough supporting information to convert.

While television ads have been pushed to the sidelines as video marketing has taken on digital dimensions, you can still get a fair amount of leads from producing videos that provide value to your audience. Make sure to create videos that are professionally made and include calls-to-action in case interested prospects decide to contact you.

The world of business is changing rapidly, and the only way you can stay relevant within your niche is to adopt those tools and work with digital marketing consultants that prove to be very useful in terms of generating leads. Rapid growth, for sure, is certainly possible.

The post Here’s How You Can Boost Your Lead Generation appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The increasing sophistication of digital tools has encouraged companies to refine their client acquisition strategies. Such strategies require insights into the needed formulas and skills that guarantee the best possible results.

At most, the best they can do is to hire someone else to run their marketing for them. With the rise of “startup culture,” the market for outsourced digital marketing services has been flooded by a high surplus of skills.

The rise of digital marketing agencies has also met considerable challenges as companies aim to outdo one another in a race to get a larger share of their respective markets.

Newcomers, in particular, will find it impossible to build an initial client pool, let alone position their brands in the best possible manner.

Then again, it is only a matter of using the right strategies to enable digital marketing agencies to gain a great deal of leverage.

Here are a few important ideas that will help boost your digital marketing agency’s lead acquisition campaign.

1. Formulate a realistic action plan

We all know what SMART stands for, but does it really hold up for digital marketing agencies that are out to acquire more clients and secure more conversions?

It takes a lot more than drawing up a simple mission and vision statement to know about building a business that’s sustainable and highly engaging.

You can’t risk making estimates and expect things to go your way. For example, your agency has to be firmly planted in the reality that it’s impossible for startups to survive in an over-saturated market.

It is these types of realities that should help shape the way you build your business strategy. Make sure to get real-world insights and examine possible action plans for implementation.

Analysis is essential for building your strategy, but don’t forget to keep your ear to the ground. Pay attention to buzz on current market trends.

Between these two approaches, you should have a clear idea of what you’re going to do once you start to roll out your strategy.

2. Monitor the competition

Coming up with a lead generation strategy should come with knowing who your competitors are. This is crucial because you want to build a campaign that produces results that can impact the bottom line and make it easier for you to position your brand better.

Knowing what your competitors are doing is as basic an activity as it comes, but it’s not so easy in practice. In fact, it will take you weeks or even months to prepare a comprehensive report on your closest rivals.

You need to know certain information about your competitors, including:

Their products and services: What do they offer that you don’t? What are the potential factors that would influence people to buy their products?

Their current position: How do they rank in terms of searchability? Do they command a large following across different locations and demographic segments?

Their image and reputation: Do they suffer from too much negative publicity in the form of comments and reviews? How well do they connect with their audience?

Their presence across all channels: Where do they usually get a lot of engagement? In what channels are they strong?

These questions should help you compare your competitors and see if there are gaps you can fill in. In other words, you might want to work on the propositions and messages they weren’t able to deliver before.

Competitor analysis should form the basis of all your marketing endeavors and it makes perfect sense to replicate what works for your audience and to try and improve it.

3. Build your marketing funnel

Once you have laid down the foundation of your lead generation campaign, it’s time to build the process that leads prospects from point A to point B, which is a sales conversion.

This means creating a sales funnel that is guaranteed to acquire leads, nurture them, and convert them into sales.

Easier said than done! Tracking the journey of potential buyers takes into account a few important dynamics, much of which involves knowing how to keep leads from dropping out.

This will all depend on how you build effective sales processes that address your main goals of growing revenue. These include the following principles:

Awareness

You want people to recognize your brand and let them know that you’re in the business of selling social media marketing services or content creation services. Since this is the first tier of the funnel, prospects are not that likely to purchase a product. Your goal here is to attract them with what you’re offering and lead them down the funnel.

Interaction

At this level, the prospect wants to know further details about your digital marketing agency. You might want to publish relevant blog posts that lead them toward signing up for a newsletter. That way, you can handle follow-ups that keep your audience within the pipeline.

Interest

By the time your client becomes familiar with your services through blog posts and email campaigns, it’s time to provide a high-level sales call where you can make your pitch. Whether or not the prospect agrees to make a purchase, your main goal here is to keep them interested until they develop a desire to buy.

Action

This is the culmination of all your efforts in trying to reach out to your audience and get them to buy something from you. The quality of your pitch will determine whether the client decides to hire you or not.

The main point of having a funnel is to have an effective reference for what you need to do and deliver to potential clients.

However, you might still need to ensure that your campaign is properly equipped to produce the results you need for propelling your digital marketing agency forward.

Using the right platforms, you can create sales funnels that allow you to track deals and determine whether your prospects are ready for a sales pitch or not. But aside from using the right lead databases, you still have to consider the best possible channels to use in your lead generation campaign.

4. Gather all your resources and platforms

Let’s face it, you can’t reel in new business and convert leads into sales without content. After all, content is the lifeblood of any digital marketing strategy for startups, so it makes sense that you use the right channels for marketing your digital marketing agency.

You will need to have a good mix of digital content to be able to drive the results you want.

These would include:

• Blogs:

Look along the lines of tips and tricks. Write engaging, timely, and industry-specific articles relevant to your clients.

• Social media:

What are the best practices for creating content on Facebook or LinkedIn? Discuss them at length so as to prove you have industry knowledge. Also, you can use different social media marketing tools to help ease your workflow.

• Videos:

In terms of conversions, it’s high-quality videos that attract high-value clients. You just have to know how to make videos that strike a balance between informational and entertaining.

• Infographics :

If you want to explain difficult concepts in digital marketing, you might as well create infographics that simplify such things as “personalized content” and using cloud computing for data backup.

All these items are typical of any digital marketing arsenal, but these are just a part of the larger dimension that your website maintains.

5. Develop a highly engaging website that’s searchable

Your website has to be your main driver and leads conversion source. Its success in achieving the numbers you are aiming for will depend mostly on how well you design and maintain your website.

That being said, make sure you follow these important principles when building a website for generating, nurturing, and converting interested prospects:

Design: Make your website user-friendly. In other words, make it less of a hassle for users to navigate from one web page to another and find what they need.

Mobile responsiveness: A majority of users accessing websites use mobile devices. This is a good reason to optimize your site for phone and tablet screens.

Keyword research: Keywords make your website searchable, so you might want to spend time and money on building a list of high-value keywords that your competitors might also want to rank for.

Readable content: It’s not enough that you create content that includes all the relevant information that’s bound to make your audience want to take a better look. To keep them interested, you need to write blog posts that are also easy to read.

Building a digital marketing consultancy from scratch is one thing, and building an initial client base is another. For this reason, your lead generation strategy should be carefully crafted.

The post How to Generate Leads for Your Digital Marketing Agency appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Building a B2B buyer persona has several crucial differences when compared to the B2C environment, which can produce unique challenges.

Here are some of the crucial areas to pay attention to, which we will also address one by one throughout this guide:

• B2B higher-ups tend to adopt a more conservative point of view, that usually opt for a wide-net marketing strategy instead of specific targeting. 
• In B2B, our target customers are companies or organizations, and there can be more than one decision makers with different roles and pain points. Each will need a specific buyer persona.
• Nobody really knows where B2B prospects are coming from, and so it can be difficult to create a lead generation strategy even after we’ve defined proper customer profiles.

To really answer these challenges, B2B marketers must really understand the key benefits of targeted marketing campaigns. With that, we can develop a proper lead generation strategy and convince the bosses to shift to highly-targeted campaigns. 

The Truth About Customer Retention VS Customer Acquisition

What actually costs more? getting new customers or retaining existing ones for repeat orders?

Many studies have suggested that customer retention is (significantly) more profitable, with a huge claim that increasing retention rate by just 5% can increase profitability as high as 95%.

So, it’s pretty clear, right? If you want to increase profits, then customer retention is the way to go, as it can cost 500% more to get a new customer than to retain an existing one. 

However, it’s no secret that generating leads—that is, the effort to acquire new customers—remains one of the most sought-after goals for any marketers, B2B and B2C.

After all, the number of acquired customers is one of the metrics most commonly related with business growth.

Yet, it’s important to understand that your project to acquire more customers shouldn’t neglect—or worse, push away— the efforts to maximize retention.

It’s important to understand that growth should consist of both customer acquisition and customer retention. Yes, you might acquire a customer, but if that same customer cancelled their subscription or doesn’t make any repeat purchase, you don’t really achieve growth.

With that being said,  understanding your ideal buyer persona should help in both customer acquisition and customer retention strategies. The better you understand a certain segment’s pain points, the better you can build lasting relationships. 

What Is an Ideal Buyer Persona?

Simply put, a buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal,perfect audience, which in the case of B2B: a business or an organization. 

The buyer persona is a full description of this hypothetical organization, describing all the necessary details including how they might get value from your products/services, and how they can provide significant value for your business.

So, it’s the perfect model of a customer you’d want to get in your lead generation efforts, and those you’d want to retain at all costs. 

Remember, however, that your relationship with the buyer persona should be beneficial in two-way: you have to deliver value to them, and they to you. If it’s only one-way, the relationship won’t be sustainable.

How To Build B2B Buyer Persona

Step 1: Information Gathering Process

We have two options here. 

If you already have a significant number of existing clients (let’s say, more than 10 companies), then gather all information of these companies.

If not, for example if you are a brand new business, then pick at least 10 potential companies that might be your customers. You can, for example, list the customers of your competitors. 

Collect as much information as possible and write them down (i.e., create a dedicated spreadsheet). List down basic information such as:

• Their organization size
• How long have they been in operation (stage of the business)
• Company culture
• The different decision makers, their roles and backgrounds
• Location

If you are using data from existing customers, there are more information you can gather, such as:

• The total cost of acquiring this customer (Customer Acquisition Cost) compared to the total revenue they’ve brought
• Whether they’ve made any referrals, and how many
• Their influence in the market (i.e. whether other businesses are likely to follow their step in buying your product)

Identify patterns, and re-check the data if there are any information gaps. The goal in this step is to list out as much information as you can and present it in an organized record. 

The more organized and complete your list is, the better we can execute this next step.

Step 2: Analyze The Data To Make a Description

In this step, our main goal is to understand who our perfect customer is by analyzing the data. 

Find patterns, correlations between variables, and similarities on these following factors:

Demographics Data: size of the company, the company’s position in the market and supply chain, number of employees, revenue size

Behavior Data: time required between touch points, their purchase patterns, their problems and pain points, their goals (current and previous)

Company Culture: their branding, offline and online presence, traditions, what they are known for

Look at overlaps in data between different companies, but aim to be as objective as possible instead of relying on assumptions. 

For example, you might find out that 4 out of 10 of your customers have revenue sizes between $1 million and $3 million, this might be an indicator. 

Also, discuss this data with key people in your company, especially those that often interact with customers. They might have useful insights about your existing clients.

Here are some of the key questions to ask when analyzing this data to describe a buyer persona.

• What’s their most important reason to purchase your product/service?
• What’s the most possible reason preventing them to buy your product/service?
• What makes your brand/specific offer appealing to them?
• What benefits would they get with your product? What goals do they want to achieve with your product/service?
• How are their previous/current approach in achieving this goal?
• Why did they decide to pursue this approach? What was the possible decision-making process?
• What is the main issue with their previous/current approach?

Step 3: Defining Three Customer Circles

In practice, we won’t always get the prospects and customers that are the perfect fit to our ideal buyer persona. Thus, we can divide three different customer circles into three different buyer personas:

1. The Best Customers

 This is the perfect, most ideal customer for you, and you value their business as much as they value your service. Your pricing and their budget are a good match with each other, so they won’t have any issue in buying your product/service.

2. The Near Best, Near Ideal Customers

Those who fill a lot of your ideal customer criteria, but fall short in one or two aspects. For example, they might have several decision makers, some of which might not agree with investing in your product, even if they can meet your pricing comfortably. 

3. Opportunistic Customers

These are the customers that have transactional relationships with you, but they don’t have any real relationships with and loyalty to your brand. Meaning, if a competitor launched a cheaper alternative to your product, these opportunistic customers won’t hesitate switching. They only look at your business as a valuable opportunity. 

So, how should we approach these different groups? First, define these factors for your “best customers” group:

• The company size: revenue size, number of employees, number of locations, etc.

• Special conditions/prerequisite: for example, if your product is a WordPress plugin, then using WordPress is a prerequisite. 

• Ideal customer industries

• Precipitating events: for example, if you are selling chatbot service, companies that just made the commitment to improve customer service are more likely to look for your solution

• Typical stakeholders in the buying decision: sales VP, procurement, IT manager, etc. depending on your product/service and niche.

After you’ve figured out all these details, move on to the “near ideal customers” group. Figure out the attributes that are similar to your “ideal customers” group, but note those that chance, and how significant is the change.

Then, figure out the key attributes that might shift this group into an ideal customer, and on the other hand, the factors that might shift this group into an opportunistic customer.

For example, this “next best customer” might turn into an ideal customer if they have a slightly higher budget (then you might want to offer them discounts).

In general, you wouldn’t want to specifically target opportunistic customers in your marketing efforts. They tend to be unqualified leads, and might waste your time and resources.

Step 4: Write It All Down

Now that you’ve (hopefully) figured out all the necessary information, write everything in a concise description for your buyer persona.

Create a template listing all basic information and in-depth information like we have discussed above. Make sure it’s easily customizable, you might need to add new information along the way as you execute your marketing and sales efforts.

Step 5: Describe Key Decision Makers

As mentioned, the key difference between B2B and B2C buyer persona is the number of stakeholders—purchase decision-makers—-. You should’ve figured out these different decision-makers on the very first step above, and here you’ll need to also describe them. 

Different stakeholder roles might have different behavior, pain points, and preferences. You might need to develop different marketing tactics for each of them. 

Again, list as much information as you can, but be prepared to add more information in the future.

End Words

Now that you have a full, in-depth description of your buyer persona(s), you can create a better lead generation strategy with your marketing consultant to go where the stakeholders and decision-makers are and start capturing their attention.

You can, for example, use a targeted content to target the keywords they search for. Every marketing effort will be more effective the better you understand your audience, and target lead generation tactics will produce better cost-efficiency. 

The post Developing Buyer Persona for More Effective B2B Lead Generation appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide, we will share the blueprint of developing a recurring revenue model where you can automate your marketing. Let us begin by discussing the benefits of the recurring revenue business model.

The Advantages of Recurring Revenue Business Model

In the past decade or so, one of the most interesting shifts in the business world is the rise -and success- of subscription-based business model, which we often call the “recurring revenue” business model. Yet, the recurring revenue business model is not solely about subscription, as there are many different models that can produce the recurring revenue.

Here are some of the best advantages of the recurring revenue model.

Predictable Revenue Stream

With a recurring revenue model where customers will need to pay a fee monthly or annually for using a product or service, we can easily predict our monthly revenue.

Having a predictable, and especially measurable monthly/annual revenue has many benefits on its own. For starters, you can notice immediately when there’s something wrong or when you are not seeing any growth. This way, you can evaluate and adjust your strategy if necessary.

Scalability

Another key benefit of the recurring revenue model is the amazing scalability, and so it is easier to achieve growth. When a customer is locked in into the recurring revenue via subscriptions and monthly payments, you wouldn’t need to spend your time -and resources- to retain customers.Meaning, you can put your resources into acquiring new customers and only managing your churn rate when necessary.

Minimize Churn, Maximize Loyalty

We have briefly discussed churn rate and customer retention above, and with a recurring revenue model, it is significantly easier to manage retention and brand loyalty. This is mainly because with a monthly payment or subscription, the purchase -the hardest part of running any business- has been made on a monthly/annual basis. So, all the business has to do to maintain or increase retention is to keep the customers happy and engaged. Compare this with a regular business model where a customer can so easily switch to your competitor’s product every month, and you will need to keep convincing them.

Maximizing Revenue and Profit

Also, a recurring revenue model will allow you to more frequently reach out to customers, because they know they are tied to your service/product, and won’t be annoyed when receiving another promotional email. This way, you will have a higher open/click-through rate on your email marketing, where you can update your customers with new product features, or even offering up-sell.

By offering your existing customers add-ons, new features, expansions, and even new products/services, you can generate higher revenue and profit.

Now, we’ve learned the key advantages of the recurring revenue model, and especially why you should adopt the business model. For the rest of this guide, we will discuss the key steps to build a recurring revenue business and automate your marketing processes. Let us begin.

Step 1: Choosing The Right Product

Not every product can be sold in a revenue-recurring business model. Yet, contrary to popular beliefs, your options are not solely limited to tech-based products and especially SAAS (Software as a Service) products. There are many different products across many different industries, and here are a few examples:

• In the F&B industry, you can start a daily food box delivery business where clients pay a monthly fee
• Property rental is actually a form of recurring-revenue business,probably the oldest one in the world. Billboard advertising leasing alo belongs to this category
• Similarly, leasing vehicles and equipment belongs to this business model
• Laundry all-in service (pickup, wash, delivery) where your clients pay a monthly fee
• Supplying regular office consumables (i.e. printer ink) in a contract-based relationship
• Supplying raw food materials or beverages to restaurants

Those above are just a few examples to give you an idea. As long as you can charge the client with a monthly fee or subscription, the product is viable. Now, obviously there’s two different approaches you can take for this step: producing your own product/service, or reselling from vendors. If you do have the available resources, obviously manufacturing your own will generate a higher profit margin in general.

Producing your products can have many different approaches and unique strategies on its own, so we won’t discuss it here. Instead, here we will discuss some key principles when you decide to resell your products:

• Test many different vendors: make sure they are reliable with their delivery, quality control, etc. Make sure you can stand behind the product and build a brand around it. Don’t be hasty when choosing your vendors. Remember, it can make or break your business

• Have a plan B: have at least two different vendors unless it’s absolutely impossible (your vendor is an exclusive manufacturer of the product). There will always be cases where your vendor wouldn’t be able to deliver on time, or when you have an order overload and would need a second supplier. Always have a plan b and even plan c and d whenever possible.

• Dropship when possible: dropshipping has many benefits. It eliminates your needs for a warehouse (at least, a big one), it saves your time and resources, and especially, eliminates your need for a big capital.

• Cost efficiency: in the end, we want to make profit in this business, and we need to make sure we get the best possible COGS (cost of goods sold) to ensure maximum profit.

Step 2: Getting Your Foot In The Door

Now that you’ve decided on a product, it’s time to finally build the infrastructure of your business. This can be an extremely simple of overly complicated process, depending on many factors. Yet, here are some key areas you should focus on:

• Branding: develop a brand according to the chosen product in the previous step. There are several elements here from design to core messages to packaging among others. Check out these huge list of branding examples compiled by HubSpot.

• Write your business plan: having a clear business plan will help especially when the going gets tough. So, don’t neglect this seemingly unimportant step. Check out this guide by Bplans to help you.

• Legalize your business: do the legal aspect of your business early so you won’t have to worry about this later. The process might vary depending on your area, so double check with your local lawyer/small business association if necessary.

• Finance your business: figure out how you are going to finance the business. The money can come from your personal savings, loan from friends and family, getting an investor, and other means. Plan your finances well, as it will be the backbone of your business in the long run

• Building your team: your business is only as strong as your team’s weakest member. So, whether you will need a partner, employee, or outsource to a freelancer, do this step carefully. Check out this guide by Entrepreneur.com on building a startup team.

• Find a location: you might or might not need a physical location depending on your product choice, budget and overall business strategy. Keep in mind that renting a space can be a major expense.

• Build your website: developing a website is now easier (and cheaper) than ever, and there are many tools to assist you in the process. By having your own website, you have more control of your online presence and are not dependent of third-party solutions.

• Choose an ecommerce platform: most likely in this business model, your main platform to sell your product will be your ecommerce. There are many different platforms available today in various price ranges. So, choose one according to your needs and available budget.

• Social media channels: register your social media accounts based on your branding.

As we have mentioned, there might be other areas you will need to focus on in this step depending on your industry. Double check everything, as your infrastructure will play a huge part in your chance of success.

Step 3: Determine Your Pricing Model

While pricing strategy is very important for any business, it is arguably even more important in a recurring revenue model. Why? Because instead of a one-time purchase, your customer must commit to a relatively long term deal, which is also relatively more expensive in value. Second, with the subscription-based model, the pricing strategy will obviously be more complicated compared to “ordinary” businesses.

While there can be many different pricing tactics in a revenue recurring model, they will usually boil down to four big categories:

1.Tiered Pricing

In this pricing model, there are several different “tiers” of pricing where users get more when they choose to pay more. This pricing strategy is generally ideal, but not limited to usage-based services. For example, a cloud storage service like DropBox might charge 10$ monthly for 10GB storage, $20 for 20GB, and so on. On the other hand, a healthy food box business might have a more affordable menu option for $200/month, a more expensive menu for $300 monthly, and so on. For usage-based services, usually penalties/higher rates are billed when users exceed the monthly usage limit.

2.Unlimited Plan

In this pricing strategy, users can use the service or order the products as much as they want after paying a specific fee. This pricing strategy can be applied for any products/services, but is generally more appealing for a usage-based services like cloud storage or phone’s data plan. This pricing model is usually used in combination with other models, and especially the tiered pricing model. Balancing the value between the limited and unlimited prices will be the key to success in this pricing strategy.

3. Freemium

The term freemium rose in popularity around a decade ago with various internet-based products and services. Here, you essentially offer the product for free, while customers have the option to pay for the “premium” version of the product with more features. Another version of this model is to give free-trials, where you offer a specific period where customers can try the product/service for free.

4. Installment/Flexible Payment

This pricing strategy is used in combination with other models. Typically in a recurring revenue business, customers can have a more affordable price if they opt to pay for 12-months of more in advance instead of just a month. To further make this option more interesting, we can offer them a flexible payment options or installments, where they can pay for 4-months or 6-months first in advance. This pricing model can also work if you are a contract-based supplier. For example, if you are a meat supplier for a restaurant, you can let the restaurant pay every quarter instead of monthly.

As mentioned, these are not the only available pricing strategies for revenue recurring businesses. Be creative with your pricing options, and the key here is how you can make the price interesting enough for customers while maintaining profit.

Step 4: Scaling Your Model

Above, we have mentioned how one of the key advantages of the recurring revenue business model is its scalability. In any industry, the market leader always have an almost unfair advantage, which is especially true in the tech-related businesses. So, it is very important to plan your scaling strategies ahead and aim to achieve as much growth as you can, to be the market leader as soon as possible.

But, how can we actually scale the business? Again, there can be many different strategies, but there are generally two approaches you can take: to acquire more customers, or to get more revenue from your existing customers.

Acquiring More Customers

While there can be many different strategies to acquire more customers, it will boil down to just three:

• Generating More Leads

You can’t have new customers when you don’t have new prospects (or leads). So, to scale effectively, you will need to have working lead generation devices. We will discuss this more in the next steps, but check out this guide by Optinmonster listing a lot of creative lead generation methods.

• Have More Sales Team

Having more (proper) salespeople in your team will generally result in more sales. Yet, won’t having more people in your team results in a higher overhead and less profit? The higher overhead is correct, and this is why many revenue recurring businesses offer a cheaper price for customers who are willing to pay upfront (for 12-months, usually). Yet, it doesn’t necessarily result in less profit, as each performing salespeople can bring more than one customers, resulting in exponential rise in revenue.

• Customer Advocacy/Referral Marketing

Arguably the best way to achieve scalability is when your customers turn into your advocates and promote your products for essentially free. This is the dream of all businesses, but it is obviously easier than done. In essence, you will need  to have your product went viral or be a market leader before you can achieve exponential growth from advocacy.

To tackle this issue, we can do referral marketing instead, which is offering incentives to your customers and even non-customers to be your referral marketers. The key of a successful referral marketing is the amount of your incentives: give too much, and your risk the quality of your referrals. Yet, offering too little, and you might not get any referral marketers.

Step 4: Setting Up Marketing and Sales Funnels

Customers won’t generally buy your product/service immediately after they have been introduced to it. Instead, they typically follow a process we know as buyer’s journey.

This is why, we should develop our marketing and sales strategies based on this buyer’s journey, by creating a model we know as marketing funnel and sales funnel. We call them “funnels” because with each step, generally we have less prospects, and so if we put these steps into a diagram, we will see a funnel shape.

Typically, the bottom of the marketing funnel is also the top of the sales funnel: marketing generates interests (leads), and then it’s the job of the sales team to finalize the deal. Different businesses and products will have different sales process, and thus different funnel. However, generally we can divide the marketing and sales funnel into three big stages: the top, the middle, and the bottom, each with their own different goals.

Top of The Funnel

The goal here is to attract new prospects, or technically, generate leads. This stage of the funnel is mainly about making your business known, and so that the targeted audience can be aware that your company/brand/product exists.

It is important to note that your audience in this stage is generally not ready to purchase your product/service.So, your main job here is to showcase credibility and authority as an expert in your niche/industry, to also show that you have a reliable product.

In practice, activities in this stage of the funnel can be a  new audience who stumbled upon your content after a Google search, or someone who clicked on your banner ad while browsing.

Middle of The Funnel

More often than not, we give too much focus on the top and the bottom stages of the funnel and neglect the middle one. Yet, this stage is actually very important, as this is where you build relationship and trust so that those that are already aware of your brand can then be interested. In short, this middle stage of the funnel is about nurturing leads until they are ready to purchase.

So, this stage is all about amplifying your credibility and authority which you have built on the previous stage. Also, in this stage you should qualify (link to lead qualification) and nurture your leads.

Bottom of The Funnel

The audience that stayed in this stage already has an adequate level of trust with your brands, and so here your main goal is to convert these prospects into purchasing customers.

Here’s the catch: even when people are already convinced with your product/brand and is ready for a purchase, they won’t buy immediately when there’s no urgency. This is why many marketers often use limited time offer or similar tactics to build urgency in this stage.

So, what you’ll need to do in this step is to break down the processes and strategies you will have for each funnel stage, which will be necessary for the next step. Simulate different funnel possibilities, for example, a prospect might stumble upon your content from a Google search (the top of the funnel), nurtured through email marketing (middle), and finally converts after attending a webinar (bottom). Trial and error different funnel scenarios, and optimize on the most effective one(s).

Check out this guide by Teachable to help you further in building your marketing funnel.

Step 6: Developing A Marketing Strategy

Now that you have known how your marketing/sales funnel will shape, and the key processes that should be addressed, we can work with B2B marketing expert and consultant to develop a proper marketing strategy according to the funnel.

As we have discussed above, since there are three primary stages to the funnel, we can also divide the marketing activities into three big groups:

1. Lead Generation

Here, the purpose of the marketing activities is to attract as much prospects as possible. While there can be many different approaches, the strategies will boil down into two: first, attracting leads by reaching out to potential prospects through advertising, paid social media marketing, events, cold calling and other similar “outbound” activities. We call this “outbound” or traditional marketing. Next is allowing ourselves to “be found” by customers, mainly by consistently publishing valuable contents that are relevant to our customers. This way, we get “inbound” leads that come to our business instead of us to them, and so we call this inbound marketing.

Common tactics in this category are:

• Content marketing: by regularly publishing valuable contents, you can establish your position as the industry expert, and thus gain customers’ trusts.

• SEO: Search Engine Optimization works hand in hand with content marketing, especially written content. The main way people consume content is through a Google search, and with SEO experts you can give your content visibility.

• Influencer marketing: essentially, getting influencers of your industry to promote your brand. In this saturated marketplace, this tactic is very valuable.

• Advertising (including paid social media): always effective, but can be extremely expensive not managed well. The key here is to balance

• Referral marketing: getting people to market your product/service in exchange for an incentive.

Obviously, there can be many other lead generation tactics you can try. Check out this guide by Marketo to help you further.

2. Lead Nurturing

As the name suggests, in this category our activities should focus on nurturing the prospects until they are ready to buy the product. There are two main aspects to lead nurturing: qualifying (scoring) leads, and content marketing. Content marketing here serves two purposes: educating your prospects with the benefits of your product, and to maintain your relationship with the prospect.

Qualifying Leads

Although at first glance, having as many leads as we can to work with can be a great thing, the thing is, we only have a finite amount of resources and especially time. This is why qualifying your leads is very important: we only need to nurture those with the highest chance of converting. Yet, how can we determine that? Lead qualifying can be a pretty broad subject on its own, and there can be many different frameworks to utilize. You might want to check out this guide by HubSpot to learn further, but here are the key aspects to consider:

1. Fit

How the prospect will fit to your business according to demographics. You can use the infamous BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Time) to assess this aspect: can the prospect afford your product? Do they have the authority to make the purchase decision? Can you answer their specific need/problem? What is their timeline to fix their problem or increase their life quality?

2. Interest

You can track various behaviour to determine the prospect’s interest by using various analytics tools like Google Analytics or KISSMetrics. If the prospect spent a lot of time on your site and engage a lot with your social media channels, for example, this prospect is interested enough.

3. Behavior

Further examining the prospect’s behavior can show whether they are looking to purchase, or just researching for information. For example, prospects that are only consuming blog posts should have a lower score compared to those who registered for a free trial or attend an event/webinar.

4. Time

How ready is the prospect to purchase the product, and where are they currently on the marketing and sales funnel? Analyze behaviors and align them with the top, middle, and bottom stage of your funnel.

Content Marketing

Above, we have mentioned how content marketing is a very important aspect of the lead generation activities. Yet, it is also highly essential in this lead nurturing stage, showing its importance in any marketing strategy and at every stage of the marketing funnel.

In this saturated and highly advanced marketplace where customers are now highly resistant to advertising, content marketing is now the primary voice of any brands online. It attracts, engages, and educates your audience until they are ready to buy. There can be many different applications of content marketing as a lead nurturing device, but here are the primary ones:

Email and Content Marketing

Even with all the new platforms and technologies, email is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with your prospects and customers. In fact, email marketing still has the highest ROI of over 4,000% compared to other marketing channels. Why, it’s simple, because studies apparently suggested that 73% of consumers prefer emails over other channels, especially to receive promotional messages.

On-Site Content Marketing

Your brand website is your storefront, it’s where your prospects ultimately will judge whether they can trust you or not. Content marketing on your website primarily comes in three different forms: your blog, where you can update it regularly with fresh content pieces, your highly-targeted landing pages, primarily as a showcase that you are an expert in your industry, and a centralized resource center where people can find any information related to your product and/or your industry.

Social Media Content Marketing

Social media content strategy can be a pretty broad subject, and we probably won’t give it much justice here. The key here is to find the right social media platform(s) where your ideal audience are primarily active, and present these audience with the right content type according to the platform. Check out this guide by Curata to learn further about this subject.

3. Conversion-Focused Marketing

In the past, the job of the marketing team stopped in the lead nurturing and even in the lead generation stage, while conversion was primarily the job of the sales team. Nowadays, however, the lines between marketing and sales are increasingly blurred.

The ultimate goal of your marketing strategy, after all, is to drive more sales, and here are the key marketing tactics in this category:

• Content marketing: yes, content marketing is also here. Your content pieces will be the ones educating customers about your product, and where you can establish yourself as a trustworthy brand in front of the customers
• Email marketing: as mentioned, email marketing still has the highest ROI over other channels. Keep the content short, to the point, and consider giving interesting offers
• Advertising: one of the most effective ways to drive more conversions is by investing on high-quality ads paired with conversion-focused landing pages
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Bottom Line

A recurring revenue business certainly has many benefits over the traditional models, especially since we can accurately predict our monthly/annual revenue. Remember, however, that the key to success in recurring revenue model is still similar to other businesses: providing value and answer your customer’s problems.

Many recurring revenue businesses made the mistake of too aggressively pushing products (that are often low-quality) and pressuring their customers with scammy sales funnels, and yet still complain when their business doesn’t grow. So, the secret here is to manufacture and/or resell high-quality and reliable products that can bring value to your customers.

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