What are the biggest obstacles small businesses face when it comes to lead generation?
In a survey of 845 B2B companies, more than 350 companies (42.1%) answered that the biggest challenge they face is formulating strategies and tactics to attract the attention of potential prospects. And it's not surprising. Everyone is extremely busy today, and there are plenty of other types of marketing that are competing for attention. So how can small business leaders get the attention of these valuable prospects?
There are no one-size-fits-all lead generation tips for small businesses because no two businesses are the same size, revenue, or industry. However, there are many different approaches that can be adjusted and adapted to suit many small businesses. Therefore, we've carefully selected these 7 “move before execution” approaches for small business owners looking to expand their marketing activities.
The first critical step towards effective lead generation is getting into the minds of target leads. In other words, it means creating a buyer persona.
Buyer personas can help you understand where potential prospects go online, what challenges they face at work, and what they're looking for. The more you document your target audience's pain points, the more likely it is that your lead generation strategy will reflect them and attract attention.
“Detailed buyer personas can help us determine where to focus our time to attract the most valuable visitors, prospects, and customers.”
Buyer personas are critical to any lead generation strategy. Just ask 71% of companies that surpassed their lead goals with documented personas. If you want to create your own templates to save time and get free ones, check out our blog post on creating B2B buyer personas.
Once you've created a buyer persona, don't let buyers gather dust. To keep your message and lead focus fresh, you need to review it regularly. The more you understand your leads, the more affinity you'll feel with them, develop trust, and ultimately create conversation.
Once you've developed (or updated) your buyer persona, the next step in improving your lead generation strategy is monitoring your competitors.
Once you understand the buyer persona and keep an eye on your competitors, you have a chance to find new opportunities. Does your persona have needs that your competitors aren't meeting?
Strategies for finding competitive advantages to utilize in lead generation plans can also be applied to content and services. When researching competitors, consider the following:
If you're offering more useful services and content than your competitors, you're more likely to generate regular leads from that “stolen” interest.
Other than competitors' websites, there are other places to look. You can look at competitors' social media profiles and sign up for newsletters to compare email designs and copy. Are they appealing to the needs of a different persona than yours, or are they providing the same kind of content?
When it comes to newsletters, if you don't have one, that's an opportunity. If your small business doesn't offer newsletters, the time to write a newsletter is yesterday.
One goal of the newsletter is to educate viewers with useful content each month and keep your business in mind at all times. The content you send helps answer customer questions and helps prove that you're a knowledgeable source of information and can solve business challenges when the need arises.
Only 5% of B2B buyers are ready to buy right now. A newsletter acts as a lead generation tool to keep prospects in mind all the time until they're ready.
Our newsletter approach to customers is to provide both curated and owned content. Curated content is media from trusted sources in the industry. Owned content is content that we have researched, written, and published ourselves.
With this mix of content, potential prospects are more likely to derive value from your newsletter and actually read it. No one wants to read a newsletter that's full of promotions and says everything about the company sending them.
Consistency is important for newsletters. If prospects only see emails from you in their inbox once a year, those emails won't work. Sending out a newsletter once a year when competitors send out helpful resources every month isn't perfect for lead generation.
One common pitfall businesses fall into is buying contact lists. Since these prospects don't know your business, they're more likely to delete cold emails. Instead, your best bet is to use a registration form on your website to attract people interested in your business.
This allows you to acquire highly relevant and trackable email subscribers, nurture them with inbound marketing strategies, and ultimately become interested prospects.
Have you ever tried to buy a list and nobody responded and nothing came out? Have you ever posted a traditional ad online, but phone calls and inquiries didn't increase?
This is because they may be putting too much effort into outbound marketing.
Outbound is certainly still effective today, but it works best when combined with inbound marketing. Outbound focuses on “pushing” leads and getting them to look at the business, while inbound focuses on “pulling in” leads with interesting and useful content. In fact, the two might interact.
Since outbound marketing focuses on ads and cold emails or phone calls, you can think of it as “temporary” marketing. If you stop spending time and budget on outbound, outbound will stop! On the other hand, inbound marketing can be thought of as “durable” marketing. It's focused on content creation, social media marketing, and SEO, and that's not going away.
When used together, they can create advertising campaigns that mimic inbound marketing strategies.
No one likes ads. Let's take a look at how Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022 due to rumours of ad development.
There's a way to keep it from getting in the way of your campaign (and be more effective). All you need is an “inbound” approach.
But how can you make your ads more inbound?
Promoting educational materials in newsletters, content, and social pages can attract interested users. The key is framing ads the same way.
Use digital ads to share your knowledge with the buyer personas you've researched! At the end of the day, when you look at buyer persona work, you know that buyers need that knowledge. Promote downloadable content on LinkedIn to ease customer pain and retarget users who visit your website.
Don't hesitate to test different versions of ad copy and images as your campaign progresses and switch content. You might find a new phrase or design that will grab your prospect's attention.
When creating content for use in ad campaigns and other lead generation campaigns, make sure you create content that makes life easier for your prospects.
What industry-related questions can your business answer better than anyone else?
This method is key to creating content that appeals to your target audience and creating something that your competitors can't easily replicate.
Sorting future content into these two buckets can help provide valuable advice to potential prospects throughout the buying process. B2B buyers consume around 13 types of content before making a decision, so it's essential to have content in various formats for lead generation.
One of the easiest ways for potential prospects to find that content is by looking at social media profiles.
Social media is a place where businesses can become fun and interactive and start conversations with their viewers. Try to interact with your audience instead of talking to them.
There are a million other companies that talk about their company and provide helpful content, so why should leads follow your brand? To get their attention and show that you're a useful content source, combine thought leader articles and articles from sources other than your own and post frequency.
Keep the platform interesting and try to grab (and keep) the lead's attention by scrolling. Here are a few recommendations that we think have been successful.
Let's take a look at how Salesforce is doing B2B-focused social posts. They interact with viewers, share useful articles, focus on employees, and have a friendly tone.
Social media marketing is a time-consuming task, but it's one of the only virtual windows for prospects to get into the business.
You can hire an experienced marketing strategist who can help with lead generation efforts and use their team of specialists to support your business. Plus, they'll take care of most of the work from you!
If you've read this entire article, you'll understand the benefits these tips can provide for small business owners looking to grow their business. Taken together, the seven recommendations above provide the following benefits for lead generation strategies:
We understand that these tips might not seem like “easy” lead generation tips for small businesses. It takes time and effort to get started, and most of it is never truly completed.
However, the growth of small businesses, which is the final implementation track record, is well worth the effort. Finding new prospects takes time, and taking just one of these actions can shorten that timeline. Start with what you can manage, then expand your efforts as you get used to the “marketing” movement.