The Digital Lead Generation Blueprint
For B2B Marketers
Introduction — Navigating the Digital Marketing Minefield
With the ever-increasing range of digital channels available to us as digital marketers (each in its own ever-evolving state), it can be daunting to know where to start when putting together a digital lead generation strategy. When adding the opinions & demands of other internal stakeholders into the mix, the whole process can feel somewhat overwhelming!
As a B2B marketer, you need to be able to leverage the appropriate mix of digital channels to maximise the number of leads generated for your business, whatever the size of your marketing budget – but where to invest first? Search? Content? LinkedIn? TIKTOK!?
In this guide, you will find a range of tips & tricks to help you to better understand the digital landscape, where to find potential customers, how to prioritise tasks & budget, and making the most out of every website visitor to ultimately drive MORE LEADS through your digital marketing activity.
Matching Acquisition Channels to the Funnel
When thinking about the various digital marketing channels available to you, it can be useful to consider where those channels sit in the context of the overall marketing funnel – some channels lend themselves particularly well to generating awareness of your brand & interest in the services your business offers, whilst others are more suited to catering for existing interest and targeting users that are at the point where they are actively seeking out the specific services that you offer.
Services: SEO, PPC, Organic/Paid Social – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Google Display Network, Remarketing (GDN/Social), Content Marketing, CRO, Video Advertising, Email Marketing.
Whilst it is possible to get your business in front of those bottom-of-funnel users through a video ad on Youtube or a well-timed ad placement on the Google Display Network, the channel that is most explicit and gives the most control over ensuring that the users you are targeting are ready to enquire tends to be Search (both organic and paid) – through Search we can ensure that when someone is searching specifically for the products or services that your business offers, you are there! There is, of course, more nuance to Search, and you may wish to target users searching for more informational content, but by identifying the keywords that suggest the appropriate intent, you are able to take steps to mop up that bottom-of-funnel search demand.
Slightly further up the funnel may sit Remarketing – these are users that have already engaged with your business and browsed your products/services, and you have the opportunity to re-engage these users through a range of mediums… Google Display Network, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. If you wanted to get really sophisticated with Remarketing, then (as long as you have sufficient volume) you could segment these users and show them ads specifically relating to the product/service that they viewed on your website, thus increasing the likelihood of them clicking your ad and revisiting your website.
Towards the top of the funnel, you will likely find that some of the more disruptive, audience-based channels sit – raising awareness of your SaaS solution through an explainer video advertised on sector-specific YouTube channels, displaying animated banners showcasing your Fulfilment services to an “In-Market” audience segment on the Google Display Network, or using LinkedIn to leverage thought leadership to attract contacts for your professional legal services. These channels can be campaign-based with ad budget behind them to amplify your presence, or they can take a slower-burn, organic approach to reaching these audiences.
Tracking & Attribution — Know Your Data!
At the foundation of any successful digital marketing campaign is comprehensive, accurate(!) data – the more touch points you are tracking, the better you are able to optimise your efforts towards what’s working. It’s all very well generating thousands of cheap clicks through your Google Display Network prospecting campaign, but if those clicks are all coming through Mobile Apps and the average session duration is only a couple of seconds, then really those clicks are just a vanity metric (maybe try excluding Mobile Apps!).
To keep things as simple as possible, run everything through Google Tag Manager – set up any tracking codes/pixels, as well as any events you’d like to track, such as button clicks, Google Ads Website Call Tracking, Contact Form Submissions, etc.
In Google Analytics, make sure you set up goals for your most important conversion actions. Not only will this make your GA reports easier to navigate, but it will allow you to feed conversion data into Google Ads, which can then be used to optimise PPC campaigns.
It is worth considering, particularly for upper-funnel activity, that whilst a user may not immediately convert after clicking your ad or organic listing, for example, it may still have played a part in a future conversion – there may in fact have been multiple touchpoints ahead of the session that saw the conversion… The user may have seen a Google Display banner, then a video on YouTube, then clicked on a Facebook ad, before finally returning through a branded search term and converting. If we were to attribute the whole conversion to that branded search term, we would potentially be discounting the impact that those previous touchpoints had on the conversion – this is where things like “View-Through Conversions” and “Attribution Modelling” come in.
The weight that you place on each touchpoint or a view-through conversion will be dependent on the mixture of activity that you are utilising to drive conversions – this will enable you to choose an appropriate attribution strategy.
Note: By default, Google Analytics uses a “Last Non-Direct Click” attribution model, whereas Google Ads allows for a “Conversion Window”, which can be manually set.
Low Hanging Fruit — The Bottom of the Funnel (Passive vs Active)
As a B2B marketer, your main, overarching objective is likely to be to increase the number/quality of leads generated through your marketing activity – for this reason, it is essential to ensure that you incorporate an always-on baseline of bottom-of-funnel Search activity, to ensure that you are capturing those users that are self-identifying as being in the market for the products/services you offer.
Start by undertaking substantial, comprehensive keyword research to understand the way in which users search for your products/services – use a range of tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Wordstream, AnswerThePublic… If you have run Google Ads in the past, then export a full list of historical search queries to find out which terms generated conversions and in what quantity. Check out your competitors – both the businesses that you consider to be competitors and the websites that already rank for the service/product level keywords that you’re looking to target… Do they use variations on the terms that you hadn’t considered? If so, plug those back into your keyword research tool, then rinse & repeat!
Once you have those terms identified, use the estimated CPCs (or existing data if you have it) to establish an appropriate monthly budget for your always-on PPC campaigns. Is there likely to be an element of seasonality to the demand for your products/services? If so, use tools such as Google Trends and your own Google Analytics data to phase your budget over the year, taking advantage of those periods where demand is highest. If you know your current website conversion rate, then work backwards to find out how much budget you would need to attract “x” number of leads per month.
Understanding Intent
When considering keywords, it’s important to think about the intent behind a search… If your business provides fire safety training courses, then you may be tempted to target the term “fire safety” – yes, it’s relevant to your business, but what is the user’s intent when typing this in their search bar? Are they looking for a training course, or are they searching for information relating to fire safety? The latter is far less likely to convert into a lead than the former, so if you’re running pricey PPC campaigns and you need users to convert quickly, then this may not be the best term to target (particularly when working with tight budgets)!
Similarly, consider an estate agent looking to attract new landlords – they may consider “estate agent” to be a perfect keyword, but the searcher could be their home, or they may be someone looking to buy a new home. Whilst this keyword is likely to have a proportion of landlords searching for it, there will almost certainly be a high level of wastage.
This is not to say they shouldn’t target this keyword, just that they should test it and keep a close eye on its performance before deciding whether to engage in a longer-term strategy to target the term organically.
Setting Paid Search Budgets
We are often asked how much budget should be put towards a paid search campaign – the answer to this question is made much easier when understanding how much business we are looking to generate. The more familiar you are with the lifecycle of a lead and the various conversion rates from “enquiry to lead”, “lead to opportunity”, “opportunity to sale”, average lifetime value of a new client, etc, the better you are able to calculate the required budget.
For example, you are looking to generate £100k of new business, and a new client’s average lifetime value is £25k – we need to attract 4 new clients. On average, we know that a quarter of the enquiries generated through your website can be qualified as “leads”, a quarter of those would be considered “opportunities” upon further qualification, and quarter of those are likely to convert into an actual sale… This means that for every sale, you need 4 opportunities, 16 leads, and 64 enquiries. Now let’s imagine that your “click to enquiry” conversion rate is 5% – this means that for every enquiry, you need to generate 20 clicks, so for your 64 enquiries, you will need 1,280 clicks. If your average CPC is £5, then the total budget required for each sale would likely need to be in the region of £6,400, with a total required budget of £25,600 for the 4 sales.
Creating Content With (Multi)Purpose
“Content is King!”… This may well be true, but content can take many forms and can serve a wide variety of purposes. Before treating any new content, consider what you are looking to achieve – is the objective to achieve rankings for a particular set of keywords? Are you looking for shareable content to post on your social channels to prompt conversation? Conversions? Is it there to serve existing customers or attract new ones?
As well as serving a wide variety of purposes, content can also take a whole host of forms – perhaps a user likes to read an article, or perhaps they are more likely to engage with a video, or it may be that you are able to get the information across in an infographic. Alternatively, it may be that the content could take the form of a podcast or webinar, for those that like to consume content passively. It is worth considering the format that is most likely to resonate with your audience, drive users towards the action that you want them to take, and don’t forget – the same piece of content can be recycled into multiple forms!
Tailoring Content to Buying Cycle Stages
Marketers know that they need to create content to attract, nurture and convert their prospective customers, but deciding on topics and knowing how to use content to serve your objectives can be a challenge. To help with this, consider the various stages a prospective client might go through in their research for your products/services. For example, if we were to take a business that offers mental health training within the workplace:
- Early Stage: a prospective customer may have identified the need for mental health support within their organisation, or they may be looking into refreshing their employee benefits package. They may search for stats or trends relating to mental health in the workplace or sickness rates amongst employees in their industry.
- Mid Stage: having identified the benefits/opportunities around being able to tackle issues relating to mental health, they may be searching broadly for the types of solutions/support available – perhaps a series of videos, a mental wellbeing app subscription, or downloadable PDFs.
- Late Stage: the prospective customer has considered all of the potential routes and landed on engaging an organisation that can run courses and training internally. At this point, they may search for “mental health training courses” or “workplace mental health training for managers”.
Depending on the stage in the buying cycle that the prospective client is in, they are likely to be served by different types of content (both the format of the content and the content itself).
Create a matrix like the one below for your organisation and use it to jot down content ideas – it will force you to consider where in the buying cycle the user might be and which formats may best serve them at the time.
Stay Front of Mind with Remarketing
If you’re putting a lot of effort (and budget) into attracting users to your website, the last thing you want is for them to have a quick browse and move on without taking one of your desired actions – perhaps the user was pulled away into a meeting and didn’t have time to make their enquiry, or they may have been in the early stages of research and they’ve decided they may come back when they have gathered enough information (if they remember who you are!).
Fortunately we are able to remarket to these users through a wide range of channels, allowing you to stay front of mind up until the point at which the prospective client is ready to start shopping around with intent – since costs for this activity are usually relatively low, we would always recommend that our clients have some level of remarketing activity running to allow them to re-engage with lapsed website visitors.
If your website receives sufficient traffic, you can segment users and create lists of people that viewed a particular set of pages or came through a particular campaign – this enables you to be more granular in your ad creative, communicating specific messages to users based on the actions they did/didn’t take on your site. For example, if you are sending visitors through to a landing page with a guide download available and they don’t download the guide, you can follow up with “Did you forget to download your guide?”, or similar messaging that will resonate with your audience.
Generate “Soft” Conversions through Content Marketing
In an ideal world, your bottom-of-funnel activity will generate a plentiful supply of enquiries from prospective customers that are actively seeking your products/services – sometimes, however, we need to find other ways of adding contacts to our lead lists, and this is where Content Marketing can play a huge part in generating these “softer” conversions.
Much of the content you produce will be freely available, be it on your website, social media channels or elsewhere, but if you have a particularly strong piece of content that addresses one of the pain points of your prospective customers, it can be appropriate to use that content to capture data. This may be a PDF download in exchange for the user’s contact details, or a free webinar that they need to sign up for in advance. These pieces of content can be used to nurture leads through the funnel, taking them from “warm” when they engage with your content and giving your sales teams the ability to follow up and make direct contact.
These “flagship” pieces of content can be marketed using the various available channels, driving traffic to a landing page built to convert – they have the added benefit of not requiring the user to be actively seeking your products/services at the time… With a strong enough hook, you will be able to use more “disruptive” forms of marketing to generate those warm leads.
Feeding the Funnel Through Display, Video, Social and Email
Once you have a strategy in place to maximise bottom-of-funnel traffic, it’s time to consider how you will start feeding additional users into the top of the funnel – there will only be so much search volume and budget available to mop up the paid search traffic, and SEO will build on that traffic over time, so we need to start looking for users to actively go out and target.
We can use the Google Display Network to identify and target in-market and affinity audiences of users that are likely to engage with our products & services, delivering a high volume of ad impressions across a network of over 2 million websites, videos and apps – by tailoring our creative to the audience that we’re targeting, we can increase the likelihood of attracting clicks (which will then add that user to our remarketing list, meaning we can stay in front of them if they don’t perform the action we’re looking for). If we have video assets, then we can use the same audience identification methods to advertise on YouTube, as well as being able to target specific channels and videos.
Pro Tip: Use your own first-party data (from your Email Marketing platform/CRM) to create custom audiences, enabling you to reinforce your lead nurturing messaging across these channels as well as in their inboxes.
Matching Customers and Objectives with Social Channels
When considering which social channels to use for B2B marketing, most will automatically default to LinkedIn. Whilst we would recommend that every B2B organisation uses LinkedIn in one form or another, there are some considerations to take into account (for example, cost), and there are certainly other platforms that can be leveraged in order to generate awareness, interest and leads!
It goes without saying that each platform lends itself to a particular demographic – these change slightly over time, but when looking at usage statistics, we can get a picture of which platforms are likely to be suited to your target audience:
- The largest age group using Facebook in the UK is between 25 and 34, with 11.2 million users in this bracket.
- There are 61 million senior-level influencers and 65 million decision-makers on LinkedIn — but CPCs are likely to be far higher than other social channels.
- The largest share of Instagram users was the 25-34 age group, comprising 30.1% of all UK users.
- Twitter’s global audience was made up of 38.5% of users aged between 25 and 34 years old.
So which platforms should I be using, and for what purpose? Well, this predominantly comes down to who you’re targeting and what you are trying to achieve. For example, if you are trying to re-engage your audience through remarketing, then Facebook may be most appropriate and cost-effective (since LinkedIn requires a minimum spend of $10/day), or if you are prospecting to a more professional audience, then LinkedIn might be your best bet.
Quick guide to which channels suit which approaches: LinkedIn — Brand Awareness, Lead Generation, Lookalikes.
Facebook — Remarketing, Lookalikes.
Twitter — News-led, Political, Discussion, Influencer-Based Marketing.
Instagram — Remarketing.
Maximise Every Session! UX/CRO for Landing Pages
If you’ve got your tracking in order, then you will be able to analyse the performance of your landing pages, allowing you to make sure that when you’ve managed to attract a user, they are as likely as possible to convert. Every website is different, just as every user is different, so whilst there are some best practices, it’s always a good strategy to test alternative variations to ensure you really are maximising your conversion rates – in some sectors, a click can cost in excess of £50, so it’s vital that we give that session the best possible chance of converting there and then.
Use tools such as Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity (both free!) to generate heatmaps and session recordings, allowing you to arrive at educated hypotheses about changes to your landing pages. Then use VWO (or any other A/B split testing tool) to run 2x variations of your page in tandem to assess which achieves the highest conversion rate.
Best Practices Checklist
- Compelling Heading, using Keywords where appropriate
- Include key information above “the fold” (on desktop)
- Fast-loading page
- Avoid large blocks of text – keep it snappy, use bullet points!
- Minimise distractions (excessive links, navigation, etc)
- Social proof – logos, testimonials, relevant case studies, etc
- Clear, persuasive CTAs
- Minimise Effort required for Conversion (do you need all that information in the form submission?)
- Check for Mobile Usability (no overlapping content, etc)
- Test variations, acquire statistically significant data
- Comprehensive tracking of conversion actions!
- Integrate forms with CRM
Let’s Get Cracking
Zero Above has an expert team of digital strategists and channel specialists to help shape your digital lead generation strategy and to carry out the execution of all aspects of your campaign, from asset conception & design through to channel management, optimisation and reporting.
Give us a call today and take the first step towards generating more leads for your business!