These past few years have seen digitization take the B2B space by storm. Following the pandemic, businesses that previously fence-sat digital tools quickly realized they were on the brink of losing their market share if they didn’t digitize.
Rolling out eCommerce strategies meant shifting from traditional lead generation practices to those that attract potential customers where they now hang out—online.
So, today, we’ll look at digital lead generation practices that may help draw in quality leads.
- Optimize for Local Searches
Think about your local community. Up to 97 percent of the people there will head to the internet to find information about a local business. 28 percent of local searches result in purchases.
People prefer working with brands that are in proximity to their own location for many reasons. The chief is accessibility, followed by credibility. You’re more likely to trust a business within accessible distance of your own than another that’s half a world away.
Optimizing your content for local searches, building local backlinks, leveraging local keywords, and getting local coverage in local publications are some ways to leverage local searches.
The benefits of doing so are considerable including:
- Improved online visibility which translates to increased awareness. Businesses searching for companies offering what you do are more likely to find and engage you.
- Receiving relevant traffic. Assuming you published a helpful blog but failed to include local keywords, you’ll probably receive hits from all over, including dead-end visits. A wide reach is great, but what are the odds these audiences will convert?
- Reduced ad costs. Where you previously had to pay for ads to gain visibility, using local SEO allows you to access organic traffic while building authority.
- Review Cold Calls
Most cold calling phone systems come with a call record feature and there’s a good reason for it. Call recording is vital to improving rep training.
Sales leaders use them to identify problem areas in conversations and insights into customer needs and thought patterns. Teams can also pick up trigger phrases that cause recipients to react positively or otherwise.
Here are some great ways call recordings can transform your calling strategy
- Analyze call replays daily. While you may call prospects within the same industry and cover similar topics, the conversations may differ from one to the next. You may encounter new questions, scenarios, and objections. Reviewing these calls ensures you stay on message.
- To determine call duration and how to maximize them. A first call may last under two minutes, while discovery calls run for up to 30 minutes. What points should the rep cover during this time? If the calls last longer to shorter, what was the reason?
- To provide actionable feedback. Most of us will cringe at something we said during a cold call. It could be a confusing position statement, hesitation at an objection, or failure to capture a key moment. Reviewing calls allows you to see where you went wrong and make corrections for future calls.
- Manage Your Brand’s Reputation
In today’s world, online brand reputation is everything. Most people hop online to assess your brand and will base their opinion of your business off what they discover.
Unfavorable mentions and a negative brand reputation are likely to push people away—even though they love the products/services you offer. Irrespective of your size.
If you want to build a strong online reputation that doesn’t cause leads to retract consider the following:
- There’s no going around honesty and transparency. Be truthful and accurate in your dealings; whether that’s in your description of your solutions’ capabilities or billing. Consider your audience’s needs, desires, and feedback, and act.
- Let your satisfied customers vouch for you. Positive customer stories may help you earn the trust and confidence of potential customers. You can always ask your customers to cover specific areas like expertise, transparency, and work ethic to promote your brand’s reputation.
- Be careful about the posts you share on social platforms. I’m sure you can come up with a couple of big names who messed up their brands’ reputations through social posts. Resist the temptation to vent even when you’re justified. Such comments may cost you, customers.
- Host Virtual Events
Webinars and virtual conferences are great lead generation tactics and depending on the platform you use, can offer great audience insights.
What’s challenging though, is maintaining audience attention throughout the session. Engaged audiences are likely to stick around longer making it easier to analyze their needs and interests.
Besides, an interested audience is likely to build emotional connections with your team and stay open to further communication after the event.
Tips for keeping audiences engaged include:
- Keep sessions brief. Expecting audiences to sit still for hours is impractical. With ever-busy schedules and distractions, they will probably lose interest or be forced to turn off and attend to other matters.
- Go for quality. From your internet connection to the virtual event platform, content, and speakers, aim for quality to facilitate great user experiences. Rehearse your presentation to minimize errors and missteps that may cause people to log off.
- Implement multiple chat rooms. Running multiple chat rooms consecutively allows attendees to participate in different activities and network throughout the sessions. Chat rooms can tackle different topics like tech support, Q&A sessions, and informational resources and links
- Collaborate with Complementary Brands
Collaborating with complementary brands with whom you share overlapping audiences can help you reach new markets cost-effectively.
You can collaborate on various marketing efforts, including promoting each other’s solutions, co-hosting webinars, or working on surveys, reports, and online courses together
Typical outcomes include expanding your contact list to include leads from your partner’s audiences and receiving direct referrals from your partner.
When considering a partner, look for one that shares your values to minimize friction between teams. They should also be producing content and receiving engagement from their followers.
Create a detailed and clear framework for joint effects that stipulate each group’s roles, timelines, metrics (ROI and conversion rates), and processes for measuring results. It will help you measure, optimize and improve the joint campaigns continually to maximize results.
