Lead Generation Resources For B2B Websites.

Online AD spend continues to increase year-over-year. In fact, eMarketer is predicting that ad spend is expected to increase by another 7% in 2020.  Here’s a crazy idea: What if, instead of spending more on ads to increase traffic, we focused on making more of the traffic we already have.

I can’t help but notice that most B2B businesses aren’t doing nearly enough to take full advantage of their website from a lead generation perspective.  Most businesses struggle with identification, education, and retention. These are the three key pillars for creating a really effective lead funnel.  In today’s article I want to take the time to lay out some simple, yet effective ways you can take better advantage of your website.

CHAPTER ONE

Lead & Customer Identification

You may be receiving leads through your website, but how much work are you doing to collect data on those leads prior to human interaction?

What about those who visit your website everyday, but don’t make direct contact with you. Do you have any information on them?

Knowing your audience is critical to success in B2B sales, so having a strong identification process in place is absolutely critical. Consider using LinkedHelper to streamline and automate your outreach efforts on LinkedIn. 

Identification can be broken down into two key areas pre-contact, and post-contact. Let’s discuss how you can make the best out of both to have the fullest amount of data available before ever doing your own research.

Making The Most Out Of Each Visit

Pre-contact identification boils down to having data on your website visitors before they’ve reached out to you. Data analytics tools such as Google Analytics do a good job of providing you with general information on your website traffic, but often lack actionable details.

To truly make the most out of your traffic you need the right identification tools in place.

This is where Lead Forensics comes in.

How can you take advantage of a user that departs without submitting their information?  Lead Forensics is a B2B IP tracking tool that can be added to any website, it can help you track who has been on your website recently. At a minimum, you’re able to see the following information about the user on each website visit:

• Company Name

• Names, Positions and Email Addresses of Key Decision Makers

• Industry

• Location

• Pages Visited + Time On Page

• Referring Website
• How Many Times They’ve Visited Your Site

Having this kind of data on hand can be critical in many ways. Knowing which companies are interested in you can prompt some proactive outreach from your end, or help you create more targeted digital ad campaigns.

It also can be extremely critical for shaping the type of content you create and how you market it.

Pre-contact identification often goes overlooked for most businesses but is typically the largest pool of untapped opportunities available to you.

Getting The Most Out Of Each Lead

Having the most information possible for each opportunity that comes your way is critical, especially if you’re running a lean sales team without a ton of extra available time.

But we all know asking someone to fill out a 30 line form that includes their social security number and senior thesis paper isn’t going to convert.

So how do we find a happy medium?

Hidden Fields + Programmatic Pass-Through

With some smart use of cookies or javascript you can carry data from a user’s session throughout the website. This data can then be used to pre-populate fields that aren’t seen by the user but get recorded with the submission.

One common way we often do this for clients is by taking UTM variables from campaigns and automatically applying them to forms. This allows us to track campaign success beyond just CR%, we can identify the quality of leads by knowing exactly where they’re coming from.

CRM + Lead Identification

Most modern, quality CRMs have the capability to give you deeper insights on prospects and leads that enter your forms.

This type of information connected with your lead not only can save time for the entire sales process but give you amazing insights into who they really are and foster a stronger conversation.

CHAPTER TWO

Education

There’s no doubt that establishing yourself as a thought leader in your given field is critical to success in modern B2B.  How do you turn this content strategy into lead opportunities?

Giving Them The Content They Need

Typically with a softer lead submission, the user is interested in learning more about your services or some industry topic but is not quite ready to speak to someone. There’s a big debate on how much information to require the user to submit in order to obtain the downloadable resource, as well as how to react to the submission once it comes in. We’ll save that debate for a different post, but I do want to discuss how to get the user to download the resource.

Achieving The Download

You’ve created a valuable piece of content or you really want to make sure a user sees one of your case studies, using a tool like OptinMonster can be that extra nudge a user needs. You’re able to configure slide-in scroll boxes and inline forms to request the user to download at the perfect time.

Acquiring Leads Beyond The “Contact Us” Page

There’s multiple types of leads that you’ll acquire from your website that are commonly defined into two tiers:

A Hot Lead – A lead where someone fills out a contact form directly, calls, emails, or reaches out via chat. This type of lead is at the point where they want to make contact with you to at the very least start a conversation.

A Warm Lead – A warm lead is someone who is still in their research phase.  You may have something on your website that catches their attention and prompts them to interact with a piece of functionality that may or may not collect their information.

Adding functionality to your website that answers a major question for the user is a great way to acquire a warm lead. For example, we identified that pricing was the most commonly asked question so we built a project calculator tool on our website.  It asks the user a few questions and then provides them with an estimate based off last year’s web design project engagements.

Once a user is qualified as a “Hot” or “Warm” lead, you can decide how you’d like to interact with them. A “Hot” lead typically warrants a scheduled phone call or meeting. A “Warm” lead can be put into a “Lead Nurturing” campaign. This allows you to continue to provide value to the lead over a period of time, hoping to turn them into a “Hot” lead.

CHAPTER three

Customer Retention Resources

Keeping a prospect or lead engaged is critical for keeping your brand top of mind.

Creating targeted, deliverable content campaigns are an amazing way of accomplishing this.

Lead Nurturing

Using a tool like Drip, you can create personalized email campaigns specific to whatever content the user downloaded. This is HUGE!  Ideally, what you want to do is spend time identifying the types of customers you want to reach out to and what’s important to them. Then  write a series of emails that feed them relevant content.  This content should coinciding with their interests, such as a relevant blog post or a case study you have of a similar service/product.  The goal here is to continue to have softer touch points that add value to the lead and eventually have them reach out to schedule a call.

Bonus! – When you are looking to ask the prospect for a formal meeting, include a scheduling link like Calendly. Nurturing leads AND booking meetings automatically = Success!

CHAPTER four

The Wrap-Up

We’ve been taking this approach when working with our clients to help them make their website an asset to the growth of their business. If you’re interested in learning more about how we successfully implemented this approach with one of our clients, you can read our case study for Navatar Group.