B2B lead generation tactics take require a little more tuning than B2C lead generation. They require a more personalized approach, more touchpoints, and a longer sales cycle.
Here are 20 battle-tested marketers sharing their favorite and time-tested tactics for B2B lead generation.
Let’s jump right in:
Jordan Choo, Kogneta
Podcasting layered with ABM is my favourite lead generation tactic. We've been using this tactic quite successfully for our own agency. We'll reach out to ideal clients to have them on our podcast. This not only helps us develop a relationship with them but also resources for content marketing and social proof. Once the interview is over, we then nurture the relationship using multichannel ABM (account based marketing) strategies such as leveraging email, LinkedIn, lumpy mail, etc.. Do not hesitate to use Account Based Marketing to fuel your B2B demand generation strategy: it works! From there we speak to ones who are ready to buy while continuing to maintain the relationship with those that are not quite ready yet.
Daryl Driedger, Cowlick Studios
New strategies have been emerging in for B2B Lead Generation and how you Brand your company. One of the major shifts has been the rise of "Account Based Marketing" where you know and find your ideal customers in different social networks like LinkedIn. If you know your ideal client and have created a solid avatar around who you are looking for online... you can use those demographics to find more leads in Sales Navigator and other B2B directories. It all starts with great market research and knowing who you are going after. Build out a plan on how to resonate with your audience. Always remember, "Culture is Strategy", you want your brand to be associated with the right people who are excited to buy from you. Another great tactic in the B2B space that is buzzing right now is "Demand Generation", very close to lead generation, but it focuses more on building a "real need" in the mind of consumers for your services and products before they make contact with you. A simple Google search will give you a lot of information here on this particular B2B strategy, but it's truly about having great marketing collateral at every stage of the customer journey, so you can close more leads through your sales funnel. Think about creating more "Marketing Sound Bites" might include a... YouTube Promo Video, Podcasting Series, Sales Presentations on SlideShare, Demos and Live Webinars. The more content marketing your company achieves the more visible you will be online. Lead Generation is great, but just don't forget about Branding and widening the top of the funnel with more marketing collateral for more customers to fall into your lead funnels.
David Bell, Diving Bell Creative
There are many lead generation strategies for technology companies or non-tech ones that you can use. Facebook lead ad campaigns have proven to be effective for service-based clients lately. If your business doesn’t quite fit the B2B or B2C traditional marketing channels, it’s worth a shot. I’m talking about accountants, dietitians, lawyers. You can’t just offer a sale on a product because it’s directly tied to your time and value proposition. Traditional Facebook ads are becoming less effective due to ad blindness, but On-Facebook Lead campaigns have shown a solid return on investment for our clients. With quality image graphics and language to support your offers, like a free assessment or discount, we've seen these as a highly converting ad strategy. The percentage of conversions is higher because it's already on a trusted platform - Facebook. The prospect doesn't have to leave Facebook to interact with a site they've never been on before. I'd recommend giving it a try for any small business looking for leads.
Carlos Obregon, Bloom Digital Marketing
In the B2B space the bottom line rules. What I mean by that is that in order to do successful lead generation in B2B you need to be ready to prove how you are going to improve the bottom line. This can be done via case studies of previous projects you have worked on, detailing what the challenge was, how you approached it, and the results you were able to obtain for the organization. Other great sources of validation are references from key players in the industry and testimonials from past clients in the space. If you are just starting out and do not have any previous projects to showcase you can always approach a charitable organization or non-profit and offer to do some work at a discount or pro-bono. This can be a great starting point as these organizations are usually well regarded and well known in their location.
Jeb Butler, Butler Law Firm
Doing well by doing good. That idea drives our marketing efforts derived from our charitable activities. It is easier than ever before to make a difference in the lives of other people, thanks to advances in philanthropic thinking and data-driven charity evaluation. For less than the cost of a bicycle or a leather couch, we can save children from death by malnutrition, cure blindness caused by parasitic flies, or distribute hundreds of malaria-stopping insect nets. These opportunities are too good to pass up. That’s why we started the Giving Project. We donate a significant sum of money to a worthy cause that can use the funds to help people. To determine where the grant goes, we ask the public to share their thoughts. We also allow organizations to apply for the grant in an application process that includes the creation of a YouTube video. This effort allows us to get publicity and news mentions. It also provides heartwarming stories for social media and allows us to get in front of our core audience consistently while showing different sides of our brand.
Shaurya Jain, Attention Always
One of the best ways to generate B2B leads is via closed communities on Facebook, Slack, and other groups. You have to share your unique knowledge here. Please don’t post links to your blog posts though. Make a post native to the platform without any external links. Not only will it have more reach but also people are more likely to read it because there is no friction to click and open an article to read. Moreover, it feels like you are sharing something exclusive with the community. The post can be anything related to your niche which shows how to do something, tips related to something, how you solved a problem, anything which is new and unique. If your post is good enough, you will have people hitting you up themselves to ask if you offer some service related to the post you made.
Mark Joye, Joye Law Firm
Information is one of the most valuable resources in society today. Potential customers need it and they are looking for it. Are you providing it to them? Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. Research has shown that on average, buyers encounter 13 content pieces —such as information on a website, reports, and reviews — before purchasing. Planning and executing a content marketing campaign is not a simple undertaking, however. You need to set your mission and your goals, establish your KPIs, select your audience, set benchmarks, select your content channels, create a content calendar, and begin publishing. Finally, you need to distribute and market your content and measure the results. It’s a lot, but if you want to establish your brand as the expert authority in your niche, then you need to start publishing.
Jason Schulz, Maid2Match
Offering a free tool is hands down the highest ROI approach we have done for generating B2B leads. We Created a tool for real estate agents to estimate the gardening costs of properties they managed, then pushed it out via email to agents. You can see examples of this in action across industry leaders though. The largest example is Hubspot with their free CRM, but one of my most loved examples is Crazy Egg. You only need to go to their homepage in order to understand “Make your website better. Instantly.” Another one that is now the industry norm, is the use of repayment calculators for mortgage and finance companies.
Ray Lim, I-credit
My favorite B2B lead generation tactic is simply just setting up landing pages around location + niche + "offer". It's not very scalable due to the content cost of it, but that makes it worth doing. No one else is going to put in the work, or at least willing to. This gives you a slight edge till someone else decides to do what you do. Come down to it, you need good branding, domain name, and brand familiarity to get better clickthrough and all that. As well as an established domain name with good backlinks towards them. The tactic is not so much as a "fix-all", but a way into getting what you need if you have all the essentials. You can't fix a broken brand, you can only enhance what they have to better generate leads, and the quality of leads depends entirely on brand trust as well as intent match/mismatch.
Zach Doty, Zach Doty
Far and away, my favorite B2B lead generation tactics have to be content marketing & blogging. It’s not even close! Content marketing for B2B (or any other audience for that matter) is a force multiplier. Content marketing is versatile and durable. If you do it right, content marketing can “pay its rent” as soon you publish. If you do content marketing well, it can be deployed at every stage of the customer journey and be repurposed almost anywhere. The whole process of doing content marketing well also forces you to learn both the customer and sales cycle inside out. I’m hard-pressed to find another single tactic that lets you target competitor pain points to set up SDRs, create customer support content for retention, target niche account requirements, and everything in between. With an effective content marketing flywheel, you can drive social engagement, bolster CX, and maybe even cover some prospecting ground that would otherwise require precious ad spend. Bonus tip: you can also apply flywheel thinking to your company's budget.
Tim Robinson, inVPN
From my personal experience and from what I observed over the years, public speaking at live events is one of the highest ROI B2B Lead Generation tactics. In some cases, you have to pay for your spot to speak at a trade show or live event. But usually, it is free if you have some authority in your industry. Sometimes, you can even get paid for this! On another side, you are getting an opportunity to get in touch with an extremely quality audience. Be sure to prepare appropriately, as this audience will require the highest quality of content. If you have a public speech at a live event, don't plan any other meetings on the same day as you will get many opportunities for personal contacts with your potential B2B clients. Be ready to chat informally with a drink or two. One of the best things about this tactic that one good public speech can bring clients for you for years!
Amanda Thomas, Konstruct Digital
My favourite B2B lead-gen tactic is long-tail keyword search. Over the years, we’ve been seeing a dramatic trend of B2B consumers behaving more like B2C customers which means that search is becoming a key part of the product/solution evaluation journey. For some B2B companies, they often devalue search because search volume isn’t high. However, we’ve found that keywords that might often show in SEO tools like “0” search volume, or even “10”, can often be incredibly profitable. Keyword tools are often not great at predicting traffic on low-volume keywords, sometimes even estimating that they have 0 volume. However, using a combination of business intuition, SEO know-how, and customer understanding you can often come up with a keyword list that shows “0” in the research, but in practice delivers a steady stream of high-intent traffic ready to convert. The additional benefit of these keywords is that they’re often easy to optimize for with low competition. It can take a bit of a leap of faith to attempt targeting keywords that have low volume, but the higher the price point of the product you’re selling, the more valuable this tactic will be.
Tim Tate, Tate Law Offices, PC
Try different tactics and see which ones work better. Then put the winner to work for your business. That’s the concept behind A/B testing. An A/B test, also known as a split test, is an experiment for determining which of different variations of an online experience performs better by presenting each version to users at random and analyzing the results. After running A/B tests with our marketing agency, we found the need to update and alter many key landing pages in order to better satisfy our customer journey. We're in the middle of a redesign now to apply our test results across more pages of our website. Split testing allows you to take what you're already doing and increase its effectiveness exponentially. Review your analytics, install tracking software like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity, observe how people are interacting with your sites and begin to make tweaks. Don't be discouraged if your testing doesn't always increase results. It’s a learning experience. Keep with it until you find a variation that works.
Bryan Sibrian, The Law Offices of Hilda Sibrian
Pay very close attention to how your competitors are marketing themselves online and offline. Are they showing up in Google Ads for your target keywords? Do they have listings in the search engines above you for your keywords that your potential customers are searching for? If so, it means they’ve found winning keywords that generate leads. SEO research tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush will make it easy for you to break down a competitor’s paid and organic keyword campaigns so you can target the same sites and keywords to drive more qualified leads to your site. Be sure to invest in a small paid ads campaign to see if your competitors' keywords actually attract and convert your ideal leads before going through the effort of creating new content and other resources. You need to prove that these keywords are in fact bringing in leads before you start to mirror your competitors' strategies.
Chris Sloane, Heaviside Digital
My favorite B2B lead generation technique is Facebook Ads. While it can be challenging and there are many wrong ways to do it, if you have the basic elements done right it can be extremely effective. A typical objection we hear is that businesses are not looking for services on Facebook. That is true to an extent, but people run businesses and they use the platform and if you engage them properly you can nurture them along. Our most common strategy here is to create a funnel within the ads platform and bring engaged people through it. For example, we'll run a video testimonial with headlines and copy that grab their attention. The level they engage will trigger different retargeting approaches - someone who clicks through to the landing page will see a different ad than the person who watched less than 25% of the video. If you have a well-thought-out funnel presenting a great offer, it's going to work. It's a matter of optimizing from there!
Justin Herring, YEAH! Local
Try building or white labeling an online tool that solves your client’s problems and then give it away for free! This B2B strategy has proven extremely effective at getting potential clients on your email list in exchange for the value you provide them with the awesome tool. Hubspot does this beautifully with its free website grader and marketing plan tools. You enter in all your info and then must give your email to get the results. Another example could be a Google Ads performance calculator tool that gives your results once you submit your email. We also use a free website audit tool that lets potential clients see what’s wrong with their technical SEO after they provide their email. You can find some more good lead generation tool examples at convertcalculator.co The best part about this B2B strategy is you don't need any experience or technical knowledge to get started! All you need is to add the HTML code from your free tool to the page. Run some paid traffic and start generating leads today!
Pui Teng, Sell Click
One of my favorite ways to generate B2B leads is using LinkedIn. While on LinkedIn, people are there for business, they are basically ready to be sold if you presented the right offer. Here’s how to use LinkedIn to generate B2B leads. • Optimize your profile so when someone visits your LinkedIn profile, they’ll know that you’re an expert in your niche. • You must make an effort every day to add an amount of targeted qualified audience that can serve as your clients in the future. • Engage with your prospects’ content and establish a genuine relationship before pitching them your offer. • Create content around your niche. Share your own posts, pictures, and etc. Focus on creating content that provides value instead of a sales pitch. This will help spread the word about your expertise. With this, you’ll become an authority in your niche. The next time when you post, people are going to engage and would like to have a conversation with you.
Garrett Nafzinger, Garrett Digital
Thought leaders at B2B companies have gotten great value from Clubhouse, the newish audio-only social network. After you sign up: Fill out your profile -- share details about hobbies, your experience, and what keeps you up at night. Next, join clubs, and follow people in your industry. The Clubhouse algorithm uses this to provide suggestions on what you might like. When you're in a room, listen to people's problems and provide real value. Stay focused on relationship-building. There are many whose goal is to sell their products or services. People pick up on that, and it's a turn-off. Be as giving as you can, if someone is dealing with a particularly complex problem, offer to get on a Zoom call 1-on-1 to walk them through solving it, they'll never forget your act of kindness. Understand that often, just reframing someone else's problems provides value to them. If your product is an exact fit for someone's pain points, don't be shy, but don't make it the sole focus.
Kevin Dam, Aemorph
One of my favourite tactics I learned a few years back was to create an industry report showing all the different tactics, information, ads, content created, offers provided, social presence about the leader in a particular niche. The purpose of this was multiple folds: to learn intimately about the niche I want to work with, understand what's working and what isn't, reverse engineer, and create a plan to beat the #1 player. We would then send this report as a lead magnet to competitors who are also spending on advertising or doing some form of marketing and invite them to an "Industry Reveal" event. This event would position us as the knowledgeable experts of the industry and allow prospects to learn from us, ask us questions, pick our brains, build trust and rapport. The presentation would include some of the recommendations to beat the #1 player, but not everything, and we're focusing on our repeatable systems and processes. The amazing thing about these events is showing a potential marketing play to every prospect who wants to also beat #1 in the market, and we're putting their ego up against each other on who's going to take action first. In addition, it would give us an opportunity to interview and weed out prospects who aren't serious about growing their business or just don't have the investment ready on hand to make waves and beat their competition.
Chris Porteous, My SEO Sucks
Much has already been written about tried and tested B2B lead generation strategies like classic email marketing, sound backlink building, and clever content marketing through webinars and white papers. But I often find that it's not just about picking the right lead generation tactic itself, but more importantly, it's also about how to execute it to work for your brand. Take CTAs for instance -- basically, every digital marketing or SEO practitioner knows what they are and have taken advantage of this strategy at one point or another. For me, the most well-executed CTAs are about attention to detail. Sure, the use of action words and urgency words (today, now, hurry) do their part, but the ones that really generate leads are those CTAs that also manages to offer the brand's value or main benefit without being too long or cluttered. That way you're hitting two birds with one stone -- your CTA is not only stirring the reader into action but also subtly and sneakily advertising your brand's unique identity or attribute.Now’s Your Chance to Turn Their Wisdom Into Leads!
So there you have it, 20 unique lead generation tactics for B2B. You may have noticed that these experts have all said something different. You might be overwhelmed. Here is my advice to you. Start with something that you can implement within one day so that you have the least resistance to doing it. As you start seeing results, begin implementing bigger and more complex tactics. You’ll find what works best for you and your business. You’ll be able to develop a strategy that best fits your customer’s pain points which will lead to even better results. Growth Hackers is one of the top lead generation agencies helping startups and businesses develop strategies to generate more B2B and B2C leads. Growing your company is tough and we can help you build more engaging content to better attract customers while building a stronger brand. Consult with us here are Growth Hackers if you want to generate more promising leads and take your business to the next level.
James Menta
I am a digital marketing writer at woopra.com. When I am not writing, I am either hiking or watching reruns of Brooklyn 99.
