8 Ways to Generate Leads for B2B Businesses

Did you know that 68% of businesses struggle with B2B lead generation? That means there are a lot of businesses that don’t have an optimized lead generation strategy. Learning new ways to generate leads for your B2B business is always a top priority so let’s explore those ideas.

Luckily, there are a few tried and true methods for generating leads in the B2B world. If you want to learn the best ways to generate leads for your business, try using one or more of these winning strategies.

1. Use Targeted Advertising

Targeted advertising is a good go-to strategy. It’s straightforward and allows you to hone in on your audience using your understanding of your customer. 

With targeted advertising, businesses should use data about their target market to create ads specifically designed to appeal to them. You’ll reap more benefits by collecting data returned from these advertisements as well. 

Many digital platforms give you the ability to identify who to serve your ads to based on location, demographic, job title, and even interests. Try Google Ads and paid social media ads to take advantage of these features. 

If you know which trade publications your audience is likely to read, run an advertorial or ad in those publications, which will also help with SEO. If you target a very regional area, consider print ads in hyperlocal magazines. Your options for targeted ads are nearly endless.    

2. Attend Trade Shows and Events

Trade shows are incredibly valuable lead sources, especially for new businesses. Though trade shows have reduced in numbers due to the pandemic, they are starting to show up again. 

At a trade show, you get the opportunity to meet potential leads face-to-face and establish a relationship in a forum meant for just that- networking and relationship building. This is something that advertising alone can never accomplish. 

Even if you are not able to get enough attention at a trade show, you are often provided with a list of attendees and their contact information from the trade show organizer. If you get this list, you can add hundreds of contacts to your marketing-qualified prospect lists and use a combination of telemarketing, email marketing, LinkedIn connect/awareness program and direct mail to stay in front of them. 

3. Host Webinars and Podcasts

Hosting webinars and podcasts is a way you can engage your audience, establish your business as a thought-leader in your industry, and generate high-quality leads. 

This kind of content can be batched out easily. If your business operates in a rapidly changing industry, you may want to craft content on a monthly basis. Alternatively, with one month of consistent effort, you could make enough content for a whole year and schedule it out ahead of time. 

Webinars and podcasts can be promoted online, which allows you to reach a wider audience and expand into new markets. Users who find you through your webinars or podcast will have a high level of trust with you as you have established your expertise and credibility, so the leads you generate are more likely to commit to you instead of a competitor. 

4. Use Social Media

Another great tool for generating awareness and leads for a B2B business is social media. Use social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to connect with potential customers and build relationships with them. LinkedIn is the most likely go-to B2B platform so at least start there.

Generating good leads from social media will require engaging content. This can’t be understated because a social media strategy cannot work when it relies on low-quality or unhelpful content. In fact, a bad social media strategy can actually hurt your lead gen more than it helps.

If you do this well, you’ll have a delighted and enlightened audience with a deep level of trust in your brand. Many will come directly to you after engaging with your content. 

For those who don’t, you can use retargeting ads to deliver ads directly to your engaged audience to push them to enter your lead funnel. 

5. Leverage Customer Referrals

Tapping into customer referrals can be lucrative. When existing customers refer new customers to your business, it helps you generate new leads and build trust and credibility with those new leads.

Additionally, customer referrals can help you to save on marketing costs since they arrive simply by you putting forth quality work.

If you have an email marketing campaign in place, send emails to your customers to inform them of your referral program so that your customers can turn into your marketers. You can also use your client list on many social media platforms to target them with messages from social ads to continue reminding them. 

6. Purchasing Contact Lists 

You might consider purchasing contact lists when looking at the best ways to generate leads, particularly when you don’t have a prospect list, or when you’re starting in a new industry or geography. Contact lists are an easy way to get started with lead generation. You can target specific industries, geography and staff size minimums to help you reach the right people faster. 

This is VERY easy to do wrong, so it’s best to leave contact list acquisition to experts who have learned where to find the best contact lists for your business. With that said, contact lists from 3rd party list brokers nearly always require “elbow grease” to bring it up to the level of accuracy needed to get leads from it.

For more than 20 years, MarketReach has acquired contact lists for their clients to kick off their telemarketing and appointment setting campaigns. If you are seeking to acquire leads, sales appointments, and closed deals – let’s talk about your objectives. 

7. Telemarketing

Telemarketing is an indispensable tool for B2B businesses. Good telemarketing not only generates leads, but it can also close deals on-the-spot. 

Telemarketing also serves to help you qualify your leads so you can prioritize them according to their likeness to commit.  When you qualify correctly, you can now expect all sales meetings to be qualified and for it to represent “good business” to land.

All you need is a list of relevant phone numbers to get started! 

You can quickly increase your reach by adding in-house lead generators or hiring outsourced telemarketers who can work in different time zones if that is desirable. It’s also easier to scale back if needed without any losses on your investment.

If you don’t have an in-house telemarketing team already, consider meeting MarketReach to hear about how we’ve helped businesses like yours succeed with our proprietary telemarketing tactics. 

8. Appointment Setting 

Similar to telemarketing, appointment setting adds another level of lead qualification and information collection into your lead gen & sales system. Appointment setting tends to fare better in taking a consultative approach.

When telemarketing campaigns are built as appointment setting campaigns, you not only generate more leads, you also get more detailed information on them – allowing you to close more big deals.

With appointment setting campaigns, your first call to a prospect is mostly to collect information about them as a person and as a business – to qualify their ability to meet certain criteria that makes them a true target. This ensures time and money are being spent on the right segmented group. This human-to-human engagement allows you to understand needs and pain points, which will inevitably set the salesperson up to close the deal if those pain points can be addressed and improved with your service. 

If you have a good sales team and a marketing budget, you can scale your appointment-setting campaign and bring in more leads for your business. MarketReach has done it for hundreds of businesses for over 20 years, and we’d be happy to do it for you too.

Looking for New Ways to Generate Leads?

There you have it! Eight proven ways to generate leads for B2B businesses. Implementing even one or two of these methods can significantly impact your business’s lead-generation efforts.

If you’re looking for a partner who can help you generate leads and new business sales appointments, contact us to see how we can grow your business! If you are looking for your in-house prospecting team to get trained by professionals, talk to us about affordable virtual and in-person training opportunities conducted by the expert management team at MarketReach.