Lead Generation Best Practices to Scale up Your Conversion

Introduction

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Whether a start-up business or a well-established company, every business's most common challenge is increasing lead generation. Lead generation processes are the most important aspect of the sales funnel. The HubSpot statistics say that nearly 74%  of the business says that converting their leads into their customers is their business's most priority task. 

Today the customer buyer's method has transformed a lot. Thanks to the rise of the internet and smartphones, we can no longer rely on old advertising methods to make sales.  Research says that 81% of prospective customer’s use their time on online research before their purchase decisions. This indicates that when your potential customer reaches your business, they are almost closer to the sales deal and decide to buy. 

The most vital part of the B2B lead generation process is building a sales pipeline with high intending prospects for businesses. This article will look into the lead generation best practices that businesses can implement to drive new leads into the b2b sales funnel stages. These best processes will significantly improve lead generation and conversion.

What Is Lead Generation?

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Lead generation is the most important part of the marketing and b2b sales process. In this process, businesses stimulate and attract the leads who are interested in their product or service. Lead generation aims to develop a sales pipeline with quality leads. This process enables businesses to nurture their targeted customer until they're ready to make a purchase/buy.  In other words, it is a process that companies use to engage clients as potential customers. The benefits of lead generation can be felt by any size of business for both B2C and B2B.

Lead generation is an online marketing strategy that helps the sales and marketing team to identify and attract their potential prospects. It is also known as Lead generation or lead gen. Once the business has received the targeted customer attention, the ultimate goal of the sales cycle is to convert the interest into action i.e., converting the leads into a customer for their product/service. Any business success relies on producing a steady flow of customers, either online or physical stores. 

Stages of the Lead Generation Process

The lead generation best practices and the approaches differ from business to business. When a stranger initiates a connection with your brand indicates the organic interest in your business.  This stranger becomes your business customer, whereas the lead generation process falls into the 2nd category of inbound marketing methodology where your business wants to attract your targeted customer and then convert the website's visitors or warm leads into customers.  For example, if your business is an e-commerce store or online business, the business's ultimate goal is to make the potential customer make an online purchase.  

However, the B2B lead generation process includes the following stages. Suppose the lead generation approach is made in the right method. Then your business can attain a huge ROI faster.  The lead generation funnel has the following four stages. 

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Awareness – It is the first stage of the lead generation funnel. A data-driven approach can help make your prospects aware of your proposition. The first and foremost thing is your business needs to analyze and identify your potential buyer's interests. The first step of any campaign is to help your prospects become aware of what you’re selling. For that, you need to analyze what they want from your brand and how they want it. 

This awareness stage is described as top-of-funnel (TOFU). In this step, the business will create awareness about your product or service to your targeted audience in the form of blogs, social media updates, Digital magazines/ebooks, video/audio podcasts, videos, Ads, and more.

Education – Once you create interest, you must take the time to build trust with your prospects. The best way to do this is by using informative newsletters, events or webinars, useful resources, educational resources, quizzes, surveys, and more to showcase your business expertise and experience. 

Give your prospects more knowledge about what your business does and who you are. This step is known as the middle of the funnel (MOFU).

Evaluation – In the evaluation stage, the potential buyer will judge your brand and offering as a whole. Your prospects are very interested in your product. You will need to get them to use the free trial or demo to have them have a good experience to establish trust in the brand. At the same time, you need to offer enough, so they reach the final stage. The sale is usually the last step in a drawn-out process of pitching a service or a product. Here, you use demos and free trials to build the trust of your prospects.

Sales/ Purchase – If you follow these lead generation stages, then your end goal will be conversion. To convert, you need to show your leads how to get the desired results with your solution. Your business can use the framework above to create the perfect end-to-end lead generation process.

In this lead generation stage, you need to give your contacts how they can get the desired results or show how your product or service will resolve the challenges and pain points of the buyers with your solution. In this stage, prospects decide to make a buy. This step is known as bottom-of-funnel (BOFU). 

What are Lead Generation Strategies?

The lead generation strategy comprises the tactics to attract the interested potential leads and convert them into customers.  Leads are your business potential buyers who have shown interest in your business through some action. For example, they share contact details for scheduling a call or demo, email subscribers, follow your business on social media platforms, etc. Both B2b and B2C  lead generation strategies involve the following four elements.

Many businesses employ content to generate more leads. According to Social Media B2B, that B2B businesses generate 67% more leads through their blogs than businesses that doesn't implement content. It's exciting to see many companies taking a chance and starting a blog or a social media account to generate more leads. Every business is in the same boat in terms of identifying the possibilities of generating leads. Here we shall look into the  4 L's of a  b2b lead generation strategy in detail.‍

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1. Lead Capture

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There are best b2b lead generation strategies of collecting data from your targeted leads to generate more ideal leads for the sales pipeline. Marketers can ask email addresses of their site visitors is one of the most effective methods to capture the warm lead (interested people). Capturing an active email address is the best thing a marketer can do in inbound marketing. It will reduce the hard bounces on your email marketing campaign. The visitor’s information can be gathered through Call-to-action buttons. Information may include your prospect's name, contact information, designation, company name, etc. Data gathering is performed using various sources. Lead capture tries to create an effective sales pipeline by providing your company's relevant information about your targeted prospects.

Opt-in methods need to be mutually beneficial so that your business can acquire prospect's information. The best marketing technique is "giving before we ask". For example, if a visitor enters your website, the business can collect the visitor's data using Call-to-action  CTA, such as “ Sign Up Here”  “Redeem offers”, “Download PDF”, “ Book Sales Demo” etc. 

2. Lead Magnets

Prospects will often become new leads if you're able to offer them a valuable thing. It has to be mutually beneficial for both the business and the prospects. A successful client lifecycle relies on optimizing the process for converting visitors into leads, and we can offer the type of tools and services that will help you do this. But in real-time, there is a gap between traffic lead generation and lead generation stage. For instance, capturing one-time website visitor lead data does not help you succeed in the sales cycle as doesn't not like to hear from you consistently.

If your business removes the lead generation and lead generation traffic gap, then your business needs to implement the lead magnets. A lead magnet is a marketing technique designed to generate leads by offering your prospects a long-form resource in exchange for their contact information or data. Business uses the Lead magnets such as email opt-in, social media, follows ebooks, whitepapers, templates, and sign in for other downloadable assets.

This lead strategy aims to obtain approval from your website visitors to perform follow-ups with them further. Some of the lead magnets include.

• Offering free training video series
• Providing free trial
• Providing free meetings with an expert on a particular topic.
• Sign-ups for Webinars
• Free eBooks downloads
• White papers Downloads 
• Sign up to get bonus tips or offers to redeem

By offering free education material will help you capture and convert your visitors. These free lead magnets will help you grow your subscriber base and educate them on your business.

3. Lead qualification

After the sales prospecting or lead capturing process, lead qualification is the next most important step. It is a multistep process. The lead’s information is analyzed to determine how likely they are to buy.

In other words, the lead qualification is a process of discovering which potential customers are likely to make an actual purchase. The lead qualification is an integral part of the B2B sales funnel. 

It’s an integral part of the sales funnel. Lead qualification is the essential part that ensures the sales and marketing team resources are allocated more effectively. Then they can spend their quality time and efforts on the prospects who are likely to make a purchase instead of concentrating on the prospects who are less likely to purchase even if they are well engaged with your brands. 

4. Lead segmentation

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It is a process of segmenting leads based on their job title, demographic details, behavioral details, geographic details, psychological details, and more. Clustering them into a group of prospects based on different variables and insights. Lead segmentation methodology has delivered great results for some of the biggest brands.  So implementing effective lead segmentation will improve your sales results. 

Many large brands like  American Express,  Mercedes Benz, Best Buy, and more implemented the lead segmenting process and have increased their engagements, boosted sales, and improved products. Many marketers use specific answers to survey questions to segment their leads. There are different types of lead segmentation.

• Demographic Segmentation
• Geographic Segmentation
• Behavioral Segmentation
• Psychographic Segmentation
• Firmographic Segmentation
• Transactional Segmentation
• Needs-based Segmentation

Lead Generation Best Practices For 2021

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We will show you different ways to help your business design and execute a successful Lead gen campaign.

Design a Value-Packed Newsletter

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You may consider email newsletters as another way to develop qualified leads. Create a compelling piece of the content as a newsletter that will encourage prospects and provide reasons for prospects to stay connected. It shows them you have valuable information to share with your potential buyer.  53% of content marketers implement interactive content in lead generation efforts. Your business can use the Smartwriter tool content creator for creating compelling content for newsletters which will increase your email open rate and improve your conversion rates. 

The newsletter will make your brand stay top of mind with customers always. Avoid sharing sales or promotion kinds of content as the newsletter will down your purchase funnel, so always ensure the content your share is beneficial and provides value to your customer. The content you share in your newsletter might be:

• Upcoming events 
• Sharing your new blog content
• Any new updates on products or services
• Providing special offers 

Employ Social Media Platform For Lead Generation 

Social media channels are another best lead-gen channel. It helps the business to improve its brand value. Businesses can grow by utilizing  24% of social media for the lead generation process. 

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn enable the business to develop an active audience by constantly sharing valuable and relevant content with them.  Content marketing through social networks captures more new leads. This helps businesses to expand their targeted audience online and to develop stronger relationships with potential prospects. It is the most creative method of generating the right leads and them into the sales funnel.

Social media ads are a great way to collect data directly. Many popular social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have lead generation ads by the popular social channels. You can gather the leads data directly from the targeted audience on the social media platform. Using the right social media platform for the particular lead generation is more important.

Businesses can run contests on social channels. There are two major reasons why your business needs to run a social media contest.

1. It helps businesses to acquire more new leads.
2. The contest participants will share with their contacts. This will help to improve brand awareness and brand visibility among targeted audiences. 

Smartwriter AI social media content generator allows you to focus on your users instead of managing social media by allowing you to optimize the content you have for any given audience in no time. You can create compelling, personalized content that suits your audience. Sharing valuable insights about your company's product or services on social channels will cultivate interest among the customer. Sharing the existing customer experience about your product or service as social media posts or videos on the social media platforms will be social proof that builds the trust and credibility for your brand. 

Generate More Leads With Live Chat 

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Live chats are the guarantee of quick replies. Up to 83% of the customers want to support at the time of online purchases or transactions. Implementing the live chats will increase the conversion. Using live chat you can promote product offers, upcoming webinars, events, and more. Utilize tools like Freshdesk, Drift, Freshchat tools to automate your lead gen. 

Get the most benefit using live chat by assuring an immediate response. The stat says 45% of US customers leave the site in the middle of their online transaction because no one answered their questions and concerns. So implementing and assuring immediate response in the live chats will improve your sales conversion online. 

Here are some top benefits of implementing Live chat on the website

• Live chat will be building lead generation by providing real-time sales assistance. It helps to connect with the prospect instantly and to answer their sale-related queries. This enables prospects to make a better decision at the time of purchase. 
• Live chats also reduce or shorten the sales cycle as they proactively engage with the customer and immediately clarify the doubts of the potential buyers either on the product page or price page. So this will eventually increase greater deliverability with better sales experience to the customer and reduce overall sales cycle time. 
• It also helps businesses to reduce their website bounce. When the potential buyers receive support at the right moment they will move the customers to sales without any barriers. By keeping the customer engaged will decrease your bounce rate. 
• Lead nurturing is a continuous process of nurturing leads throughout the entire buying process until the sales are complete. Live chats would be the best way to nurture your qualified leads based on their entire journey for making a final sale. Nurtured leads helps to close 47% bigger deals.

Producing Sales Leads With Chatbots

Automate your lead generation process with tools like chatbots. Chatbots are changing the way brands engage customers. Using chatbots, brands are creating an immersive experience for their customers. These bots have revolutionized the way businesses interact with their customers by automating any sales-related tasks. For example, if your sales team isn't available, you can use chatbots to pre-qualify leads.

It is an excellent way to engage with visitors. You can build one for yourself or use one of the many pre-built bots on the sites. Your business can automate the process and implement a chatbot like Reve Chat’s AI to ask relevant questions for qualified visitors. A chatbot can reach out to many potential customers and will not hinder your sales team's effectiveness.

Advantages of using chatbots to generate more sales leads 

• You can identify your potential audience, and the chatbots help the sales team to segment your targeted audience based on their expectations, interests, and requirements. 
• The bots pre-qualify the leads using a set of questions, and your visitors can pre-qualify and provide the sales team with the actual fit customer for the cold emails or cold callings. 
• By using our bot for simple queries and live support for complex conversations, businesses can provide a better customer service experience. Reve Chat AI provides a hybrid solution to our clients, with a bot fulfilling quick requests for routine tasks and agents available for more difficult conversations.

Lookalike Audience & Engagement Custom Audience In Lead Ads 

When your business creates lead ads and an instant form for social media platforms, implement the best practices below to reach numerous people and increase conversion rates.

When your business creates lead ads and an instant form for business, implement the best practices below to reach numerous people and increase conversion rates.

If you want to capture data or increase conversion, optimize your ad with engaging images or video and a clear call to action. The lead ad you create has to inspire people and make them click and open the instant forms. For better engagement on the ads, have clearly stated why the prospects need to fill out their form.  

Limiting the amount of text in your ad will also improve your ad engagement. You can include a video of people using your product, a call to action, and a clear statement about what people will get after filling in your form.

Reach the people who are looking like your most loyal customer. Utilize lookalike audience features on the ads to reach people similar to your current or existing customers. Lead ads should be targeted using audiences consisting of your existing customers, rather than those who have submitted a form. This will ensure you reach those with the most value to your business. We suggest creating an audience based on your existing customers to ensure you're reaching the most likely people to provide the highest value to your business.

Another strategy to increase conversion rates is creating an engagement custom audience. Businesses can send targeted ads to people who started an application but never submitted it. These are the audience who have interacted with your lead ad but then dropped it. You can then target these people with retargeting ads to encourage them to complete the form. Start playing with custom audiences to boost your lead generation.

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Motivate Online Reviews

In a survey by BrightLocal, 68% of respondents were willing to write a review. And the survey says 88% of people trust online reviews before trying a product for the first time.

Online reviews are considered an essential element to verify the quality of your business products and services. Today online reviews are becoming more and more essential for lead gen and boosting business conversion. 68% of millennials trust online reviews than the traditional method of advertising

Concentrating on reviews as lead gen will help save thousands and thousands of money on your paid advertisements. Feedback from existing users or peers will improve your sales consistently. It will create trust in the new user or person willing to purchase for the first time. 

Use Best Lead-Gen Tools

Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator For Lead Generation

Using Linkedin Sales Navigator, find your best leads for the sales cycle. It is a powerful tool for prospecting.  The LinkedIn Sales Navigator framework will help you narrow down which leads will be beneficial for your business. You can filter by numerous different criteria to get a more targeted search. 

Visit your profile settings in Sales Navigator, where you will be able to customize your account preferences to suit your sales needs. These preferences will appear on your prospect's profile when you visit them. You can make your perfect account profile on the settings page. 

You can even narrow down your ideal client profile, with preferences by selecting information relating to the size of the company, industry, function, and geographical location. These preferences will show up whenever you visit a prospect’s profile on LinkedIn, where you'll be shown lead recommendations for given criteria. It will help to find your ideal buyer profile.  Start using Sales Navigator and generate quality new leads for your business. 

SmartWriter for Lead Scraping 

Smartwriter has a 5 step search algorithm to find and collect the email of any person your business wants to connect with or a person you want to reach out to. Email Verification feature is a great way to find and verify leads individually and in bulk by uploading CSV files. Using Smartwriter email finders, you can find the decision-makers, leaders like CEO, Directors, Sales Vp, Marketers, and more.

If you're looking for a way to find someone's email address, then Smartwriter is the only solution. Product provides a virtual assistant for all data scraping and emailing needs, such as automating the LinkedIn profile scraping and providing personalized outreaches through email and LinkedIn Inmail. 

You can search for email addresses with their SmartWriter system and confirm the existing ones you have by verifying the accuracy. One feature in SmartWriter is the ability to find the email addresses of your prospects. You also can verify the emails you already have to confirm the valid email before your cold email outreaches or cold calls.

Your emails will be automatically generated and sent to customers. You can create 'touch points with customers and set up meetings on a consistent basis. Verifying emails will protect your landing your emails on the prospect's inbox spam folder. It reduces bounces and improves email authority. We assure 98% email accuracy and improve your email deliverability. You can begin finding and verifying leads by entering the domain URL, prospect's name, or position.

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Use Smartwriter To Send Personalized LinkedIn Outreach

Our Smartwriter platform will save you time by increasing the efficiency of your marketing. With this, you can save hours of work by sending personalized outreaches to senior-level decision-makers. Sales and marketing professionals help you to produce a great email. When you use our service, we send your personalized email and track the results.

We're focused on developing One-Click solutions that help you broaden your network. One of our latest features is AI Social Engine, which analyses your prospects' entire LinkedIn profile and activity to create unique messages that increase the chances of a reply. Our team of experts will get results for you with a single click. Use artificial intelligence  AI to target your prospects and generate unique, personalized messages that don't come off like spam. 

It is the Best Linkedin automation tools, the AI engines will find and track your prospect’s post on LinkedIn, track their recent updates and tailor your message to their recent actions. Your message will stand out to them as they'll see that you've taken the time to find out about their recent activities.  Sign up for Smartwriter and find the ideal prospects and send personalized messages with no effort. 

Apollo.io

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Apollo.io is in business to help you find your ideal customers. You can use Apollo.io to analyze data and discover your target customer in order to convert them into buyers. You can find valuable connections on LinkedIn. The next step is to gather contact information for valuable connections. You can contact them based on emails and phone numbers that are verified on LinkedIn. Send out emails to prospects on LinkedIn. You can find phone numbers and emails with LinkedIn's handy search tool. We'll keep you updated on what's happening with your email outreach. Our solution will help you automate your email communication. One way we do this is by setting up meetings for you by syncing your calendar with the calendar of the person you're trying to reach.

BuiltWith Software

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Businesses can build lists or email lists using the BuiltWith lead-generation tool to generate lists of potential clients through our database. Using software your business is able to filter your prospect data by location, traffic, and industry. This will give you the ability to build email lists or create targeted lists. The software sales intelligence improves the conversation with your prospects. It enables businesses to know the platforms where prospects are active, and you can improve your conversation with valid insights about your prospects. 

Final Thoughts

In today's business world, lead generation is a frequent word you hear from marketers. In simple terms, lead generation is the process of filling your sales funnel with prospects who are likely to be of interest to your company. The more prospects you can collect, the smoother the process of selling your product becomes.

If your business needs rapid growth, then you need to build effective lead generation strategies. The above lead generation best practices will help you to improve your overall sales and revenue. To grow your business fast, prioritize your lead generation strategies and use the above tactics and qualify as many prospects as possible in your sales funnel.

Following the lead generation strategies increases the leads for your sales process. Automation tools like Smartwriter your business find and validate vast numbers of leads without the manual workload. The lead segmentation and lead qualification will prioritize the most valuable leads to your business and improve sales. And helps the marketer on the quality leads that are more likely to convert.