5 B2B Lead Generation Strategies for Post-COVID-19 Success

As organizations attempt to get back to pre-Covid-19 figures, it’s becoming obvious that business will never go back to what we were accustomed to. 

From reshaping entire business models to recreating marketing plans, and shifting mindsets, brands have had to acclimatize to novel ways of thinking.

To support your lead generation efforts, here are five tactics that may help you achieve your post-Covid 19 lead gen goals.

1. Engage in Video Marketing

Research shows that up to 79 percent of B2B marketers credit video marketing for aiding their lead generation efforts. 

Not only does video enjoy a higher click-through rate, but up to 71 percent of buyers inch closer to making purchases upon watching marketing videos.

Marketing videos are undoubtedly powerful persuasive tools for drawing in audiences and influencing their decisions.

Top video ideas you can incorporate include

• Customer success story videos or testimonials. Social proof has a psychological impact on people—it says others have used your business solutions successfully. Customer testimonials and positive reviews share such stories, building confidence in would-be buyers.
• Webinars. B2B professionals watch webinars to stay abreast of industry trends, and the impact of new regulations, and learn about upcoming products. When you research and cover topics that interest your target market it may help pull in leads.
• Animated explainer videos. Great animation alongside effective music and clear voiceovers helps turn complex issues into snackable pieces. They make learning fun and your solutions more appealing.
• Product demos. Showing rather than telling works. With product demos, you’re demonstrating your products in action. It helps show people how to maximize your solutions fully. They make great sales collateral.

2. Make Cold Calls

Most teams find cold calling nerve-wracking—you’re interrupting people’s lives and are likely to receive a rude response.

But this is not entirely true and you shouldn’t let fear control you. You aren’t calling to disrupt, you’re a professional looking to improve the prospect’s working life. You have important information to pass on to them.

Best practices include

• Strengthening your position statement. You only get one short chance to hook your listener. Prepare a strong statement that describes your solution, target audience and the market needs it fills.
• Keeping distractions at bay. Set aside time for making calls where you focus solely on the people you’ll be speaking to. Multi-tasking takes away from the call—you’re likely to miss parts of the conversation or annoy your prospect.
• Sharing customer success stories to build trust. Where possible, ask your manager to share real-world customer statistics that you use, to back up your claims and to build credibility. It helps reassure the prospect of your expertise.
• Asking relevant questions. Industry-relevant questions show that you’re genuinely interested in the prospect’s business. Be sure to collect information that may help tailor solutions that suit the prospect.

3. Consider Dark Social

An analysis revealed that over 77 percent share content, and links and make references through dark social.

With dark social, we’re considering inside channels like slack, email, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram your target audience is using to share information about you. 

Since these conversations are private, your greatest challenge is that you can’t track these conversations via regular analytics software.

In other words, there’s a huge chunk of invisible audiences that love your content, but you simply aren’t aware of them.

So how can you track and leverage dark social?

• Go for sticky share buttons. These buttons allow you to pick up dark social shares on messenger, email, or text. You can then measure shares through attribution software.
• Via Google Analytics. Incorporating dark social segments into good old Google Analytics may help you understand what percent of traffic comes through this channel. 
• By shortening links. Link tracking codes are great but they are easily removable. Link shorteners assist web page address tracking and offer accurate dark social analytics.

4. Create User-Friendly Landing Pages

As with cold calling, you only have a couple of seconds to impress the visitor and get them to take desirable actions.

Understand that businesses are unique. If you want to meet your target audience’s needs and improve conversion rates, you’ll need to place focus on their needs.

To do this, consider the following

• Understand your target audience. Think about what pain points drive prospects to your page. Let your address the problems these people face and provide explicit answers to build confidence and conversions.
• Consider mobile device users. With smaller screens comes difficulty in tapping on links or buttons. We recommend expanding the tappable area and leaving negative spaces around target areas.
• Use navigational hierarchy. This is particularly important when you have more than one offer. When people come to your landing page, they try to familiarize themselves with it. Having a clear structure that people can intuitively is important, otherwise, they will leave.

5. Write Case Studies

You’ve probably heard that case studies make for effective sales and marketing collateral. 

And rightly so, since they address in detail the business issues your customer faced, the solutions you provided, the implementation process, and the resulting outcomes.

To write an effective case study, consider including the following components:

• A powerful executive summary. It increases relatability by letting readers know what they are about to get into and its benefits. It introduces the customer and highlights their challenges, the solution, and the results.
• An outline of the customer’s challenge. Here you illustrate the obstacles your customer encountered that prompted them to search for a solution. It’s a great place to use direct customer quotes.
• The path to finding a solution provider. This section covers the steps the customer undertook to solve their challenges. It can include overviews of other business solutions they investigated and the moment of discovering your solutions. It’s important to recap facts and not toot your horn.
• Cover the solution. In this component, you pitch your business solutions without sounding overly sales-y. Talk about how your solutions aided the customer in reaching their objectives.
• The implementation process. Provide a clear picture of what implementation was like, including any problems that arose and how you both overcame them. It’s a fine opportunity to showcase your excellent customer service.
• The results. From hard numbers to time savings or increased productivity, illustrate the ROI the customer enjoyed from the partnership. Here, you’ll talk about how aptly your business solutions solved your customer’s pain points.
• CTA as a closing statement. It’s the perfect ending to a success story. Guide your readers to what they should do next through a CTA that speaks to their situation.
  

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