B2B Lead Generation Ideas to Take Marketing to Next Level 2017

The New Year is an opportunity to re-evaluate your business development lead generation strategy and see how you can take things to the next level in 2017.

Our New Year’s wish is for you to have more leads, more conversions and bigger profits in 2017. Following these lead generation ideas will help get this target off to a good start:

1) Improve Your Lead Generation Forms

A frustrating number of potential leads are lost to businesses each day through slow or poorly designed contact forms on landing pages. People fill in so many clumsy online forms that it becomes a real source of frustration. You can improve your forms by implementing these action points:

• Restrict your information fields to data that you genuinely need. The average is three to five fields, but if you can use less, then do so. The quicker the form is to fill in and the less personal detail a prospect has to give, the higher the chance they’ll fill it in.

• Clearly explain what you’re going to use the data for. Don’t hoodwink prospects into signing up for something under false pretences, or you risk alienating them immediately.

• Redesign your form so that it is simple, easy to understand and FAST. Ugly forms that take a long time to load are a big turnoff.

• If you use a CAPTCHA app to weed out spam bots, make sure it is easy for people to use and genuinely works.

2) Base Lead Scoring on Prospect Behaviour

How does your business define what qualifies a lead? It is sometimes helpful to re-evaluate your lead scores so they take into account not only demographic information, but also behavioural factors. For example, your score can be calculated by the source of the lead, their behaviour on your website, the number of email link clicks etc.

You can start to understand a person through their demographic and employment details, but this doesn’t necessarily predict how they will behave as a business person. Lead scoring based on behavioural triggers gives you a better understanding of your prospect’s motivations and how they can be approached in your nurturing programme.

Understanding someone, lets you relate to them better, and offer them more valuable, personalised services and content. Relationship building is the key to success in B2B marketing.

3) Chat About Your Business Development KPIs

You and your immediate team will know what your lead generation KPIs are, but how widely are they understood by the rest of your organisation? Lead generation is ultimately a team effort and benefits everyone in the company. If people don’t know what the targets are, then they won’t be achieved.

 A 2015 Hubspot study showed that 74% of businesses that failed to reach revenue targets were not aware of important KPIs such as new leads, conversion rate or sales opportunities. This is an uncomfortable thought, so while we should always focus on building relationships with new prospects, we should also look at ways we can strengthen cooperation within our own businesses.

Set realistic benchmarks for the New Year and be ambitious about achieving them. Bring stakeholders in from other company departments and chat openly about how you can make lead generation a team effort. It is especially important that your marketing and sales teams both work closely together to share the job of guiding prospects on their buyer journey.

Stuck For Lead Generation Ideas?

To help you gain new insight into lead generation, we have put together 30 Lead Generation Tips. Ranging from the orthodox to the unusual, this free guide explains the best approach to take to B2B lead generation, where to find leads and what to do with them when you get them.

Click here to download your copy.