B2B marketing is due for a shake-up. The latest big shift was when inbound marketing came onto the scene – back in 2005.
15 years later, it’s become fairly stagnant. Most industries’ SERPs are dominated by the heavy hitters, and everyone is competing for those SEO leads. It’s time to find new ways of bringing in customers.
Let’s take a look at a few things you may not be doing yet that can make a dramatic impact.
How to Find New B2B Customers (In New Ways)
First, let’s look at a couple ways you can expand your inbound efforts.
Turn Your Blogs Into Podcasts
If you’re like most marketers, your company has a blog. Blogs are excellent for SEO, and are a great way to build brand authority in your space.
They also tend to require a lot of legwork and time investment. One way to get a lot more value out of the work you’ve already done is to repurpose your blog posts into podcasts.
While not a lead generator in and of itself, a podcast brings a bunch of benefits. Chief among them is that podcasts are now helpful for SEO, as well as being a popular form of content in general. By repurposing your blog posts, you’ve got a podcast script all ready to go, as well.
The barriers to entry for a podcast aren’t nearly as prohibitive as you might think, either. Check out our article on starting your own business podcast for more information.
Host Webinars
Webinars are an exceptionally useful tool for generating leads. For one thing, people hand over their email address in order to sign up, so you’ve got an opt-in there already.
A well-organized webinar does a whole bunch of things at once. It enables you to showcase your product in detail, so you can highlight all the reasons why it’s the way to go. Of course, that’s what you do in all your marketing, right?
The difference with a webinar is the personal touch. A good presenter makes a webinar feel like a one-on-one conversation, creating a much more warm atmosphere then you get with impersonal marketing like ads or explainer videos.
It also gives people a chance to voice their concerns or ask questions without committing to a sales call. If you’re ready to field questions, you can nurture these leads a lot further down the funnel just by addressing their potential roadblocks right within a webinar.
If your product is a bit more intricate or hard to understand at first glance, webinars can help immensely with getting people on board and on the same wavelength. It also helps establish a personal rapport, particularly if the presenter is the one sending follow-up emails (or at least the name on them).
Generate Leads Proactively with Email
In days past, marketers and sales reps would generate leads by cold calling. That’s no longer an effective solution – all you’ll do if you start cold calling is waste your time and effort, and annoy your prospects.
Instead, try sending cold emails. Cold campaigns may not be feasible in the B2C space due to CAN-SPAM, but they’re an extremely effective way to reach your audience in the B2B world.
The reason for that is because when you do it right, you can reach hundreds of thousands of targeted contacts in the time it takes you to craft one awesome email. Cold email is a seriously powerful tool in the savvy marketer’s arsenal.
Notice how I said “when you do it right”? The trick with cold email is that you can absolutely do it wrong, and if you do, it not only won’t work, it might land your corporate domain on a blacklist.
The first step is to understand that cold email and opted-in email should never be sent from the same platform. The only time a cold contact should enter your opted-in database is when they have, of course, opted in.
That’s totally okay, because your typical email service provider (ESP) won’t let you send to purchased lists. You wouldn’t want to send with them anyway, because even if they did allow it, you’d run into issues immediately.
Cold email is a lot more technically demanding than opt-in, because you have to contend with spam filters. Fortunately, you can save yourself the hassle by using email lead generation software as your sending platform.
Clickback is the way to go if you want to generate leads at scale. It enables you to reach your target audience in vast numbers and deliver email campaigns to inboxes safely, securely and reliably, so you can keep your funnel full of leads.
