List Building Strategy: How To Build Your Own B2B List to Generate Leads
Have you ever wondered how businesses generate leads to extend their market share potentially? The answer lies in an effective list-building strategy.
List-building strategies are especially essential for small businesses, startups, and companies looking to bring their businesses into the spotlight. However, there are many tips and techniques that constitute a successful list-building strategy.
It is essential to understand these strategies to uncover the mystery behind generating leads through a B2B list.
Therefore, this comprehensive guide is going to explore all the details encompassing the list building strategy and how to build your own B2B list to generate leads.
What is a B2B List?
A B2B list is a list of companies that you can potentially turn into customers. This is important for businesses that have grown big enough to be able to cater to others.
You cannot just grow a B2B list overnight. Building such a list is not as simple as collecting information on points for people interested in what your company can offer for their business. It takes the following steps to build a list of companies that you want to turn into customers.
1. Research your Target Audience
Characterizing your primary target audience is the most vital phase in your list-building strategy. Picture your ideal customer profile whose requirements consistently match your business’s offerings.
Afterward, characterize industry points of interest, organization size, and geographic inclinations. This transparency will be your directing star as you explore the immense system of potential B2B leads.
The more tailored, the more specific your strategy is, the better potential leads you can attract. Thus, hone your concentration and let the lead-producing dance start!
2. Solving the Problem
When planning your lead generation campaigns, it is vital to remember that the main purpose of your business is to solve a problem. That problem and the subsequent solution you offer should guide everything else.
Your marketing messages should revolve around the solution your product offers. If your product helps people grow their subscription business, talk about topics that can help your leads grow their subscription business, not interesting but irrelevant tech trends.
3. Utilizing your network
You cannot promote your brand without utilizing your network, including friends, family, and past customers. Networking can be implemented through customer referrals and guest posts.
- Customer Referral
Customer referrals are one of the oldest lead-generation marketing strategies out there. If your product or service has satisfied a current customer, ask them to share their service experience with their friends who might benefit from the services.
The quality of your business’s offerings may be good enough to encourage customers to do this for free, or you could set up an incentive system. For instance, give your customers a certain percentage discount from their next monthly retainer fee for every client they refer to.
Customer referrals are a great way to get more leads for your business since it is profitable, and your current customers are doing most of the work.
- Guest Post
Writing guest blogs can be a creative and effective way to generate referral backlinks through content marketing and improve your local SEO at the same time.
Guest blogging provides some of the following marketing benefits:
- Foster new industry connections
- Improves your local SEO by acquiring meaningful, industry-relevant backlinks
- Generates referral traffic from a specific and relevant audience
You can easily find leads for your business by guest blogging for sites that cater to your industry but don’t directly compete with you. For instance, if you’re a marketing company, you can adopt guest blogs for sign companies in your area. These signs make the audience interested in marketing themselves; meanwhile, your services act as a complement.
Additionally, guest blogging for local influencers aligns with local SEO best practices. For instance, writing a guest blog and getting backlinks from a popular content creator in your area can help your site rank more easily in that locality.
4. B2B Content Marketing
Content marketing is the process of generating and distributing valuable content relevant to other potential business clients rather than consumers.
As the buyer’s journey in B2B is typically longer than in B2C marketing, B2B content investment is usually much larger. Your content must answer common questions, show how you can solve prospects’ problems with practical solutions, and demonstrate that you are a credible business.
It’s all about driving sales by producing highly relevant content and using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to improve your credibility, increase website traffic, and attract qualified leads.
There are several unique qualities of B2B content that make it stand apart from other forms of content marketing. Some of these qualities are:
- It’s more targeted. In B2B marketing, you need to appeal to a specific individual or small group of individuals within a business – the decision-makers. For example, if five employees want new tablets, it’s the office manager you want to reach as they make the buying decisions.
- It has a longer conversion process. B2B customers do more research before purchasing. They’ll read more online content and check out your competitors’ content because there’s more pressure to make the right purchase decision.
- It’s more financially motivated. B2B customers are more concerned about improving the business’s bottom line. That doesn’t mean that B2B content can’t have emotional appeal, but the emotional power of the content needs to tie into the business benefits at the same time.
You can opt for marketing automation tools that make it easy to create and set marketing workflows that continuously generate leads and funnel them through the sales pipeline. This accessibility frees up your precious time to attend to more pressing concerns.
5. Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing has long existed; however, it remains a profoundly compelling technique for building your B2B list. According to leading marketing automation experts, 64% of marketers consider email the best revenue generation channel.
- Creative Mails
For a standout email marketing campaign, you must make convincing messages worthwhile to your crowd, sharing industry experiences, educational content, or exclusive promotions. Segment your email lists based on criteria like industry, organization size, or area to customize your messages.
- Assess the Analytics
Likewise, set a predictable timetable for sending pamphlets or updates to keep your crowd locked in.
Urge beneficiaries to subscribe to receive regular communications.
Further, use analytics to follow the exhibition of your campaigns, including open rates and click-through rates, and refine your approach based on the data.
- Cold Emails
You can increase the success percentage of cold emails by structuring your emails in a more creative and informal way, thus making your message stand out from the mundane crowd. It is also essential to consider the frequency of emails to avoid being considered spam while creating a space in the consumer psyche.
6. Social Media
Utilizing social media extends beyond just keeping up with the times. Social media has become much more than just a method to communicate with other people and to build up your brand. If used properly and strategically, it can also help generate leads, drive sales, and grow your company greatly.
It is necessary, especially in today’s era, as the current way of making sales is all about gated content, like video marketing, email opt-ins, and paid ad campaigns to market to your targeted and potential clients.
Social media makes lead generation highly accessible since information always travels, and all your potential clients are always ready to share information with a simple tap on their screens. Furthermore, in this age, people spend more time socializing on social media, making it the perfect place to find your target market.
There are important points to consider before selecting the platform you will use. You do not want to select just any social media platform, or else you will end up trying to acquire leads from the wrong platforms.
Moreover, like all valuable assets, it requires thoughtful, strategic, and proper management. It starts with a comprehensive B2B social media strategy, ensuring that you are delivering the right messages on the right platforms and analyzing the key metrics with the best social media management tools.
Armed with the right management software backing you up, you can effectively launch your B2B social campaign with confidence, knowing your content can be delivered to your targeted audience without getting lost in the noise.
7. Paid Marketing
Paid social media refers to postings or special placements on social media sites funded by advertising dollars, as opposed to organic or free material. Paid social methods are frequently used to boost followers, engagements, clicks, and views by precisely targeting social media users based on their demographics, geographies, interests, and other criteria.
Paid marketing also allows you to contact specific businesses you want to target directly for building your B2B list. Moreover, paid marketing uses different types of strategies to increase your online presence, such as:
Boosted posts
Businesses usually deploy marketing strategies that combine organic and paid social media. Common successful organic posts can be ‘boosted’ on platforms like Facebook or Instagram; a paid budget can be applied to the common organic post, often to extend its reach to new audiences.
In-feed ads
These ads are like regular posts in a user’s social media homepage feed or Story reel on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Pinterest. They’ll often be marked as ‘Sponsored’ or ‘Promoted’ and are usually posted by a branded social media channel. They can be image ads, video ads, collection ads, carousel ads, lead form ads, and more.
Conclusion
A successful and effective list-building strategy starts from thorough research and extending your network. This research and networking increase the effectiveness of content and email marketing by catering to specific audiences.
Moreover, by utilizing paid advertising and social media campaigns, you can extend your network while simultaneously building your brand’s trust.
