Five Ways to Optimize Your Marketing Efforts to Increase B2B Sales Leads

Are you looking for ways to boost your marketing efforts to deliver more valuable B2B leads to your sales team? You are not alone. Hitting lead generation targets is important and converting those leads to sales opportunities is even more critical. Lead generation that is accompanied by a weak lead conversion rate can cause the sales team to lack faith in marketing qualified leads and more importantly, hurt the company’s bottom line. Here are five ways to optimize your marketing efforts and deliver more qualified B2B sales leads.

Refine Your Targeting

Understanding the intricacies of your audience is a key component of marketing. Having detailed insights into the people you want to reach ensures your marketing strategy is geared to include the right messaging, content and campaigns. Refining, or revisiting, your targeting can be a solid first step in boosting lead generation and conversion efforts.

• Evaluate Specific Buyer Personas: Your audience is made up of specific personas. Take a step back and evaluate them. Refining might mean updating them. It could also mean removing or adding personas altogether. There are a few questions to consider. Have the personas evolved? Are there new characteristics to add? Are there new buying behaviors that have changed what they value in marketing? These updates can guide in adapting marketing efforts to generate more qualified leads.
• Get Clear on the Buyer’s Journey: Spend some time looking at your buyer’s journey. It does not look the same for all B2B organizations. A defined buyer’s journey can help strengthen lead generation efforts. If it is clear what steps a prospect must go through to become a lead and then convert, you can use it as the foundation for an effective marketing plan.
• Tailor Messaging: Once targeting is refined, it is important to analyze B2B brand messaging. Messaging must speak directly to your audience and their steps through the buyer’s journey. Take specific buying behaviors or pain points and touch on them in the messaging. Ensure you are crafting something that will incite action from prospects and convert them to a lead.

Engage and Draw Action from Your Audience with Content Marketing

Drawing engagement and action from your audience comes from impactful messaging and relevant content. Your marketing strategy should include clear tactics to attract, engage and convert prospects. Content marketing is often the core driver of these activities. Here are a few ways to utilize content marketing to your advantage and generate more B2B sales leads.

• Create Relevant Content: Content only draws engagement and action from prospects if it is relevant. They want to read something that speaks to the pain points and challenges they face. Not only does it speak to them, but it also offers actionable solutions to address known challenges. The combination of these two pieces shows prospects that you have the knowledge and expertise to help whatever they are facing.
• Develop a Range of Content Assets: A range of content assets provides you with flexibility and choices for your prospects. This should include gated and ungated assets that cover a variety of topics and angles that speak to your audience.
• Use the Right Content at the Right Time: The buyer’s journey influences marketing and sales activities. Ensuring content supports this journey can help attract prospects to enter the journey, and convert them to a lead and eventually a sale. To attract a prospect and spark awareness of an issue, use ungated content like blogs, articles and infographics. This easily accessible content allows them to discover the information they need. In the consideration stage, elevate their interest with gated content such as eBooks, white papers and guides. At the final decision stage, case studies, demos and comparison charts can provide the information needed for a lead to convert to a sale.

Nurture Your Leads with the Right Content

With time spent on generating new leads, it is critical to spend time converting them to valuable B2B sales leads. The good news is you have their engagement. Now, it is time to maintain their engagement, provide them with more information and convert them. Nurture campaigns are the ideal avenue to do just that. Below is an outline for a strategic nurture campaign that will leave your leads informed, and interested in your offerings.

Example of a Strategic Nurture Campaign:

• 1st email: Start with a welcome email and set the stage for the information they will receive in your emails. Include a few relevant assets to get things started.
• 2nd email: Follow your first email up with additional relevant content that will be of interest to them. Include diverse asset types.
• 3rd email: Provide a customer case study or testimonial that highlights the benefits of your offerings. This gives them an idea of what results you can generate.
• 4th email: When wrapping up the nurture series, end with a more sales-oriented message. Explain why you are the right solution provider for them and make it clear how to get in touch with you if they are ready to learn more.

By the end of this nurture stream, if the time is right for them, they will take action.

Discover What Speaks to Your Audience Most

The beauty of marketing is that you can try out different strategies to get a grasp of what is working with your audience. This concept can be applicable throughout your entire digital presence, helping you understand how to best connect with them and generate more leads. Here are a few variables to test out to further refine your marketing strategy.

• Try Different Delivery Channels: Some of your prospects might be more responsive to social media while some will respond better to an email. While this typically varies by persona, it is in your best interest to test different delivery channels to see which receive the best results. Try a lead generation campaign on LinkedIn ads. Run a press release on a specific industry. Deliver a new case study via email. Compare results across channels. Did email obtain more engagement than the press release? How many leads were generated from the LinkedIn ads? More insight into where to reach prospects will boost lead generation and conversions.
• Try Out Numerous Offers: Some topics might spark more interest than others. Some content asset types might do the same. Find what speaks to them. Test out sending a case study and an eBook via email. Which gained more clicks on the call to action (CTA)? Test out an industry trends report versus a blog highlighting common persona challenges. Were prospects more interested in the trends or challenges? These are only a few examples but find the balance of offer and topic that engages and drives action.
• Try Various CTAs: CTAs are what initiate everything from a prospect. Always keep CTAs clear and simple. There should be one call to action within content, emails, social media: any marketing activity. This keeps the prospect focused on what you want them to do. Certain CTAs might speak to them more than others. Is it something simple such as “Contact Us”? Or is it something more elongated like “Generate More Sales Today”? Testing is all about finding what converts.

Strengthen Sales and Marketing Collaboration

It is no secret that marketing and sales can be disconnected from each other. Marketing is working on a new product launch, while sales might be focused on growing a different side of the business. Disconnection can cause challenges in lead generation, nurturing and conversion. Below are a few strategic ways to ensure there is sales and marketing alignment and collaboration.

• Ensure Goals Are Aligned: Sales and marketing goals should always support each other. Ultimately, these goals should be aligned with overall business goals. Whether it be which market to focus on or how many qualified leads are needed for the sales team to hit their target, these goals should be aligned so that each team can support the other and contribute to business success.
• Set the Standard for Lead Quality: As part of sales and marketing collaboration, it is important for activities that both teams are a part of to be well-defined. For example, lead quality is one activity where sales and marketing are both involved. What a marketing-qualified lead is and what a sales-qualified lead is should be clearly defined. If you are struggling with conversion, it might be time to revisit these definitions and set a higher standard for lead quality.
• Empower the Sales Team: Marketing has a personal interest in seeing the leads they generate convert into sales opportunities and revenue. To optimize conversions, the marketing team needs to support the sales team by providing them with the right tools and resources to help them get the leads across the finish line.

Incorporating these strategies and tactics into your current marketing efforts can help optimize lead generation and deliver more valuable B2B sales leads to the sales team. If you are looking for support in making this happen, request a free marketing consultation or contact us today! Our B2B marketing consultants can help your team achieve sales and marketing alignment, deliver impactful nurture campaigns, generate leads and more.