While we all know the power of word-of-mouth, it is important to cultivate a proactive approach to generating leads to ensure the continued success and growth of your business. Here are five techniques to add to your business-to-business lead generation strategy.
1. Social Media Presence
Social media is where your personality and what makes you unique as a business owner and company can shine. Pick the platforms that are the best fit for your business and create a content plan/strategy that will compliment your brand. Sometimes this requires hiring a social media manager, but not always. Create a mixture of graphics, video, and blog posts that will inspire, educate, or entertain your followers. Canva is a great website to create graphics and one I use on almost a daily basis.
A content plan can include: motivational quotes, how-tos, tips/tricks that have helped you, employee highlights, funny memes related to your niche, your unique story, how your company got started, things your company supports
If you always have the goal to either inspire, educate, or entertain your followers, you will never run out of inspiration.
2. Do Market Research
Who is your ideal customer or client? Who would benefit from your product or service? What problems does your product or service solve? When you can answer these questions, you have the starting point for market research. Market research should be conducted regularly and often and your findings should be organized and relevant to your company.
If you will use these findings to conduct outreach to other companies, it is important to know who the key decision makers are within that company and how to contact them. The larger the company, the more likely it is that there will be gatekeepers. Before any contact is made, knowing this information will help save you time as you conduct this outreach.
3. Meet with Key Decision Makers
Once you know who your ideal clients are and who would benefit from your products or services, it is time to contact them, preferably by telephone. You might think of this as cold calling, but with the proper research behind you and a well written call script, this can quickly turn cold calls into warm leads.
The initial calls should be quick, informational, and with a call to action: would you like to set up a meeting to speak more? These initial calls are NOT to sell anything. They are to introduce your product or service to another business. In the B2B (business-to-business) world, we refer to this as appointment setting.
Once you have a time to meet on the calendar, then you can focus on pitching your product or service.
We recommend that you schedule time in your own work day to conduct these calls so they don’t fall off the to-do list.
4. Provide Free Yet Valuable Resources/Information
Providing free yet valuable resources and information is a way to showcase your expertise and skills as well as build a prospective client’s confidence in taking the next step to pay for your services. You can create how-tos in Canva that can help solve problems your ideal clients may be facing, share tips and tricks within your niche, provide checklists, the possibilities are endless. This information can be available as PDF downloads and/or repurposed for blog posts, captions, and videos.
5. Keep Potential and Current Clients Updated with an Email List
While it is vital in this day and age to be active on social media, you don’t actually own any of those followers. If your profile were suddenly deleted or you were locked out of your accounts, how would you contact anyone? It is important to have a place to store contact information from past, present, and future contacts. How do you acquire these contacts? Through your valuable resources and information. You can ask for an email in exchange for a free download or you can create a newsletter with business tips each week. An email list can also be used to share news related to your business, discounts or specials, and just keep in touch with your contacts. Again, with an email list, you want to also provide valuable information.
We use MailChimp, but some other email automation platforms are Omnisend, Flodesk, and Constant Contact.
Moving Forward
It is important to remember that each of these techniques takes time to learn how to do and to do well and that some of them can be whole entire positions within a company (Social Media Marketers, Appointment Setters, Researchers, the list goes on). As your business grows, if you find one area is not receiving as much attention as it used to receive or tasks are slipping through the cracks, consider outsourcing them. D Foster Consulting’s expertise is appointment setting and data/research management and we have plans for any budget. We’ve helped hundreds of businesses at different stages of growth expand even further. Check out what they have to say!
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