How to set up a winning lead generation strategy

Before buying a product or service, you most likely visit multiple different websites a couple of times to best guide and inform your decision. A strong lead generation (or lead gen, for short) strategy can help your brand capture the attention of potential customers before they’ve made up their minds. In fact, this marketing process can drive your business, help you cut through the noise and build relationships with users and customers alike. Therefore, your lead generation strategy must be on the top of its game.

What is a lead?

Let’s start with the basics. A lead is anyone who expressed an interest in the products or services that you offer but may not be ready to buy yet. This person may have shared their contact information and browsed your website a few times, but you have no idea whether or not they are genuinely interested in becoming a customer down the line.

The next step would be to qualify these individuals and transform them into prospects—individuals who are a good fit for your business and show signs of buyer’s intent.

What is lead generation?

Lead generation is the process of attracting and engaging your target audience to the point that they want to give you their information. You can accomplish this by driving targeted traffic towards your site, capturing their information and nurturing those who fit your buyer personas—enabling you to develop and fill your sales pipeline.

Lead gen is a critical growth driver for B2B businesses. It’s a strategy that aligns marketing and sales teams, gives your sales reps a proven framework to follow and will help your brand generate high-quality leads. So crafting a successful lead generation strategy should be one of your top priorities. But how exactly do you do this?

5 steps to getting your B2B lead generation strategy up and running

Before you can launch into tactics and creating content, it’s important to zoom out and think of the bigger picture, such as goals and audience. Why? Because you’ll be able to create better content and strategies if you know what you’re working towards and who you’re trying to reach.

1. Set lead generation goals

To set up a proper strategy, you need to have goals and objectives to work towards. What do you want to achieve for your company via a lead generation strategy? How many leads are you hoping to attract per year, month and year? Setting up goals makes it easier to track progress and measure success.

For example, a goal could be: To generate 10,000 leads in 12 months from organic traffic. Such a specific goal shows what you want to achieve in the next year, making it easier for your sales and marketing teams as they are working towards a tangible end goal.

2. Define your buyer persona

Before you can implement a lead generation strategy meant to attract users, you need to know who your customers are. So using qualitative and quantitative data about your current or desired consumers, build ideal customer personas. This process will focus your marketing efforts by zooming into who you’re targeting, the key challenges they face, and how your product or service can help them overcome obstacles and achieve their goals.

3. Cast a wide net to attract and capture sales leads

Armed with specific goals and a clear idea of who could use your product, you need to raise awareness for your brand and product. This entails piquing a user’s interest and, eventually, capturing their information (such as email address or phone number). Now, there are multiple ways brands can go about doing this. For example:

• Search engine optimised content,
• Google Ads campaigns,
• Social media outreach efforts,
• Email marketing,
• Content marketing,

Combining multiple solutions listed above will yield the most results. The key during this phase is to cast a wide net based on your buyer’s personas and drive traffic towards your website. Most visitors will not be ready to commit to a purchase at this stage, but this first introduction to your brand is crucial in forging a relationship.

4. Implement lead magnets to obtain a user’s information

Once a user has shown interest, the next step is to make people go from website visitors to leads. To achieve this, use retargeting tactics in combination with lead magnets. Lead magnets are resources and tools that are free yet gated (meaning they require a person’s email address for access) and supply additional value to your visitors in exchange for their contact information. Lead magnets typically provide more depth than the original piece of content that attracted the visitor. This could be:

• A how-to video series,
• A free trial,
• Webinars,
• eBooks,
• Guides,
• Case studies,
• Whitepapers,
• Expert interviews,
• Trainings and courses.

These free-of-charge resources will build consumer trust in your brand and service offering. At the same time, you get access to a user’s email address and permission to follow up.

5. Lead qualification time

Now that you’ve successfully gained information and contact details about your website visitors, it’s time to identify quality leads—companies and people most likely to make a purchase. You do this to avoid spending time and money on users who are less likely to make a purchase.

One way to go about this is to compute and assign a score to every lead. Something that most modern sales and marketing CRMs or lead generation software will allow you to do. Lead scoring assigns a point value to every prospect in your database based on your buyer’s personas, firmographics and the user’s level of engagement across all touchpoints. This score can help you figure out who’s ready to buy. With your hottest leads identified, your business can communicate with these leads confidently, knowing that they are already aware of and interested in your business.

Keeping the ball rolling

Lead generation is every marketer’s top priority. Although the process can seem daunting, with a bit of preparation and content creation, your company can cycle through these three steps in no time. From driving targeted traffic to your site to capturing their information and qualifying the hottest leads, don’t forget to tweak and refine your process as you learn to ensure it’s a winning one.