What is a B2B lead?
A B2B lead is a person who is working for a company and interested in buying your products or services for his or her company.
If this person is only buying your product for himself (herself), he or she isn’t considered a B2B lead, instead, it’s called a B2C lead a.k.a business-to-customer lead.
B2B leads usually are the people who work in executive positions and have the power to make or influence purchase decisions for their companies.
If you’re selling a product or service for businesses, generating excellent B2B leads is an essential task to keep your company staying afloat and help it grow bigger.
The best way to get B2B leads
B2B lead generation has never been an easy task. There are only a few strategies that businesses can use to generate high-quality B2B leads.
Let us give you an overview of the best B2B lead gen strategies, and their pros and cons so that you have a better understanding of how these strategies work and whether they will be the ones for your lead gen effort.
1. Use digital marketing tools & cold emailing to generate B2B leads
A combination of digital marketing and email marketing tools can help your business generate B2B leads effectively.
First off, you will need to use digital marketing tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs and Hunter to generate a list of prospects. Depending on your targeting options, you will need to clean the list more or less in preparation for your upcoming cold emailing campaigns.
When you already have a sizable and good list of prospects, you will need to send out cold emails to your prospects and get them interested in what you’re offering.
This method of getting B2B prospects and leads is quite common among digital marketers, so we recommend trying it.
This strategy isn’t a simple task, it can be very challenging for beginners, so be ready for the grind.
Using marketing tools & cold emailing pros
- Affordable
- Can reach many prospects fast
- Email automation is very helpful
Using marketing tools & cold emailing cons
- Can be a complex task to start
- Your domain can be blacklisted if not done properly.
2. Build a scraper and use cold emailing to generate B2B leads
A scraper is a software that allows you to collect data from web pages. Unlike some other digital marketing tools that provide the similar function, you can totally customize your scraper to get the data that you want.
The cost of creating a scraper isn’t cheap, it varies depending on how sophisticated you want your scraper to be. However, it’s likely a one-off payment unless you change its targeting options.
Similarly to the 1st strategy above, you will need to clean the list of data that you have, then use an email marketing software to run cold emailing campaigns.
Using data scrapers & cold emailing pros
- Customizable to get the data you need.
- Can reach hundreds of prospects in a short time.
- Email automation is useful
Using data scrapers & cold emailing cons
- Usually expensive
- This task can be a challenge for beginners
- Can tarnish your domain if not done properly
3. Use a reliable B2B prospect database & cold emailing to generate leads
Generating excellent prospects for lead generation isn’t a simple task, it can be very challenging for beginners and people who are not into technology. Also, using data scraping tools like the above-mentioned can be very expensive.
If you’re a beginner and concerned about the cost of prospect generation, using a reliable B2B lead database is probably the fastest and most affordable way to generate prospects and leads
A reliable B2B lead database should offer all the necessities for you to have a risk-free experience. However, it’s not that easy to find a good database, you can easily lose some money before you’re able to find a good one.
If you’re looking for a good prospect and lead provider, try to find out if they offer the follow:
- Free trials
- No credit card is required
- Excellent support to help you go about fast
- Refund policies
- Generous discounts for first-time users.
As a leading B2B lead database, Limeleads provides all the points above and more. We make sure to help our users make the most out of their lead gen effort.
You’re welcome to contact our support anytime at [email protected] or via our live chat support. We’re happy to help you with anything.
Use a reliable data provider pros
- An affordable, simple & fast way to generate excellent prospects
- Like the other mentioned strategies, you will need to run outreach campaigns to turn prospects into leads
Use a reliable data provider cons
- There are some cautions associated with cold emailing
4. Use ads to generate B2B leads
Ads are the fastest way to generate B2B leads, however, it’s expensive for most businesses to stick with.
There are a few types of ads that are designed especially for lead generation such as Linkedin lead gen form or Facebook lead generation ads.
These ads will deliver a form to your targeted audience’s news feed and a few other places to entice them to take action. These forms will make it super easy for your targets to fill in their contact information so that they will be contacted later by you.
Ad platforms nowadays provide their users with various targeting options to specifically target the right group of people for maximum performance.
Ads for lead gen pros
- Can reach a lot of people very fast.
- Relatively easy to start.
- Machine learning has become more powerful to help advertisers achieve their desired results.
Ads for lead gen cons
- Most businesses find ads expensive to stick to for the long term (it can be very expensive for high-demand niches)
- When you stop running ads, you stop getting leads.
5. SEO and lead magnets for lead gen
SEO is hands down one of the best ways to generate leads and sales. However, doing well at SEO nowadays is a real challenge.
SEO has been around for more than 30 years and everybody is doing it. The competition in some niches such as lead generation, and digital marketing is extremely fierce, it makes it almost impossible for new blogs or businesses to get considerable organic traffic after 2-3 years of hard work and investment.
Before you decide to take on SEO, you should make a real effort to research your market, otherwise, your effort and investment will result in disappointment.
When SEO is already working, it’s a great channel for generating leads and sales consistently, especially when paired with good lead magnets.
Lead magnets are something for your readers to download for free in exchange for their contact information, usually email addresses.
A lead magnet can be anything, as simple as a useful checklist or as much as a detailed course or ebook.
SEO and lead magnets for lead gen pros
- Help bring a consistent number of leads and sales every month.
- Tend to be less complicated and expensive when working
SEO and lead magnets for lead gen cons
- If you’ve just started working on SEO, it will be one of the most difficult digital marketing channels you decided to take on.
- Requires years of hard-work and investment
Conclusion.
We’ve just mentioned the best ways to get B2B leads nowadays. Depending on your niche, audience, etc, some strategies may work for you and some may not.
However, to save money and generate leads fast, we strongly recommend using a reliable B2B leads database and cold emailing.
At some points, you will need to try ads to generate leads and sales but do so slowly and always remember to coordinate it with other channels to achieve maximum results.
If you got stuck at any stage in your lead gen effort, do not hesitate to contact Limeleads for guidance and advice. We’re a team of lead generation experts that have been updated with the latest best practices and technologies.