B2B Marketing Drives Lead Generation

It’s true that digital marketing serves many different purposes, and its use will depend not only on the business itself, but also whether or not is B2B or B2C. For B2B, whether it is the main goal or not, digital marketing helps drive lead generation. In this case, lead generation, and then lead nurturing, are crucial functions of marketing, especially when there is a longer sales cycle involved, as is the case of most B2Bs. Here are some of our thoughts as to how B2B marketing drives lead generation:

Focus on Targeted Content Creation

When it comes to digital marketing, one of the main foundation activities is content marketing. Everything concerning digital marketing needs content – such as social media posts, websites, and even digital ads. So, the content strategy needs to be determined until the lens of the bigger picture of digital marketing, with the overall goals in mind. The content also serves to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

Here’s a bit of a visual of how content is used in this circumstances:

Preliminary content, such as social media posts, digital ad copy, and content that is designed for the early part of the sales cycle, is used to grab people’s attention.
From there, they may choose to get in touch to ask questions or express interest, they may also follow your brand on social media and sign up for your newsletter.
After that happens, more content will be served to these people. Since they will be further along in the sales cycle, they will get content that represents the middle or end of the sales cycle.

Use Data to Hone and Refine Existing Digital Marketing Strategies

As you work your digital marketing program, after several months, you should have enough data to begin to assess progress. The longer you let the data collect, the better. We have found that before you start considering making strategic changes, you need at least six months of data. And even then, that is not a lot of time, especially if your sales cycle is longer than that. If your sales cycle is over a year long, you might want to wait a little longer. The answer as to how much time you need to give the data to collect will differ depending on the business and the industry.

In any case, data is your opportunity to really monitor progress. You should absolutely set up conversion tracking from the beginning. If lead generation is your most important metric, this needs to be one of the main things that you track. After that, standard data such as traffic and demographics information can also be used to assess if the digital marketing strategy is effective or not. You’re looking for incremental improvements in things like traffic to your website and engagement on social media. It is best to look at data with a big picture perspective, though, because there are so many variables that affect things, you don’t want to do anything rash.

It’s true that digital strategies can drive lead generation from B2B marketing. You just need to find the sweet spot strategy for your business, and make sure that you really put some thought into your content marketing.