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B2B Lead Generation: A Step-By-Step Guide For Content Marketers

MotoCMS Editorial

Lead generation drives businesses toward success in the ever-evolving realm of B2B content marketing. As a content marketer, your job is to captivate the interest of potential customers, entice them with compelling offers that drive conversions, and forge enduring relationships that stand the test of time. Simple, right? But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. You need a content marketing strategy to ensure you are locked in to produce B2B lead generation results. Amazingly, one-third of marketers claim they have a content marketing strategy, but it’s not written down. Let’s be honest. If it’s not in writing, it’s not a real thing.

By the end of this comprehensive guide, you’ll have everything you need to put your content marketing strategy down on paper and into action. We’ll cover:

Let’s dive in.

What Is B2B Lead Generation for Content Marketing?

B2B lead generation for content marketing involves attracting and converting potential business clients through valuable and relevant content. When you have an online business, a key method of bringing in new customers or clients is getting people to visit your website. This can only happen if you create content that is worth ranking on search engines.

A crucial aspect of B2B marketing is creating and distributing high-quality content that captures the interest of target audiences, addresses their pain points, and guides them through a marketing funnel. By nurturing leads with informative and engaging content, businesses can establish strong relationships, drive conversions, and ultimately boost sales in the B2B landscape.

Why Is B2B Lead Generation Important for Content Marketers?

B2B lead generation is immensely significant for content marketers for several reasons. Here are four to keep in mind.

Building a Strong Pipeline

B2B lead generation is a firm foundation for building a solid pipeline of potential clients. You want clients who have demonstrated interest in the products or services offered by a business. A thorough lead generation process helps you find those clients.

Supporting the Sales Team

When content marketers generate leads through effective content strategies, they provide the sales team with quality prospects. These qualified leads are already primed with relevant information and are interested in the offerings. This lets the sales team focus on nurturing and closing these warm leads.

Generating Revenue

With a steady flow of qualified leads, you can increase your chances of achieving sales targets and driving growth. By aligning content marketing efforts with the sales funnel, you’ll strategically deliver the right content to prospects at each stage.

Fostering Enduring Client Relationships

Finally, content marketing lets you provide valuable insights, address pain points, and showcase expertise. It positions you as a trusted industry authority. This trust-building process lays the groundwork for lasting relationships beyond a one-time purchase.

What Technology Can Help with Lead Generation?

Technology plays a critical role in B2B lead generation for content marketers, and knowing how to leverage technology is crucial to success. Customer relationship management software, or CRM, is the most popular tool. Salesforce, Hubspot, and Zoho are just a few you can try to see what best fits your company. Other essential tools are marketing automation platforms and data analytics. These streamline lead nurturing processes and provide valuable insights for targeting potential customers.

Besides tools, having the right services to call upon when needed. When you are just starting, web design and graphic design are the two services you will need help with first. The reasoning is twofold- you want your visitors to have a great visual experience, and search engines want your visitors to have a good visual experience. What does that mean? Good web design and excellent graphics contribute to SEO efforts.

Jorge Argota helped me with graphic design while I focused on other aspects of my business. Having someone help you with essential elements of your business, like website design, that you might not excel at helps free up time to focus on other things.

This is true for any business. For example, Percy Martinez, a personal injury lawyer focusing on medical malpractice law, works with Jorge on web design.

What Are the Challenges of B2B Lead Generation for Content Marketers, and How Can You Overcome Them?

While B2B lead generation is essential, it also has its share of challenges. Here are some common hurdles content marketers face and strategies for overcoming them.

Content Distribution and Visibility

You need more than exceptional content. It must reach the right audience. You may have written the best article on building a no-code app with ChatGPT. But if no one can find it, it’s pointless.

To overcome this challenge, leverage social media and email marketing. Follow hashtags and interact with clients and other companies in your industry. This will create brand awareness. Then, be sure to tighten up your SEO strategies on your website.

Measuring ROI and Attribution

Measuring content marketing efforts’ return on investment (ROI) can be difficult, although not impossible. Content marketing often focuses on building brand awareness, credibility, and engagement rather than immediate sales. These long-term effects are difficult to quantify or attribute directly to specific content pieces.

Employ tracking and analytics tools to attribute leads and conversions accurately to specific content pieces. We’ll talk about the key metrics to track in the next section.

Competition and Content Saturation

The B2B landscape is competitive, and content saturation is a genuine concern. For example, almost 230,000 companies in the United States do web development. To stand out, create unique, valuable, niche-specific content. Statamic is a small CMS platform. Their biggest competitor is WordPress. They aren’t shy about why they might be the best option for developers. Be bold and tell your story.

Long Sales Cycles and Multiple Decision-Makers

B2B products and services are generally more complex and require significant investments. This means that B2B sales cycles can be lengthy and involve multiple decision-makers. Also, because you’re selling to a business, a product or service may need to be customized. The customization process and negotiations on terms and pricing can add to the length of the sales cycle. To solve these issues, address customer pain points at each stage, provide targeted content, and offer both set prices and customized packages for specialized needs.

Developing a strategy for content marketing lead generation

1. Determine Your Lead Metric

Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your lead generation success. For most content marketers, you’ll have more than one. Four key metrics to track are website visits, bounce rate, email sign-ups, and trial subscriptions (or demo requests).

2. Know Your Audience

Your target audience isn’t “everyone.” It’s a certain kind of business. Conduct thorough research to understand your target audience’s pain points, preferences, and behavior. This is called creating a “buyer persona,” and you can do it for B2B.

Anderson Injury Lawyers is an excellent example of a firm that succeeds at reaching its target audience. It has tapped into a niche market of people needing injury law services by writing blog articles that people find while searching the web. Since the firm knows its audience, it has invested time and content into its targeted niche. Knowing your audience is critical to success.

Tailor your content to address the persona’s specific needs.

3. Research Keywords/Phrases

Over 75% of marketers do keyword research. Don’t get left behind. Identify relevant keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for. If you are a real estate firm, a law firm, a restaurant, or a pet shop, you would want to focus your efforts on local keyword research. This means focusing on keywords that people search for when they are looking for services in their particular area.

For example, Great Lakes, a tiny home-building business, would focus on local keywords like:

Optimize your content to rank higher in search engine results, whether running Google Ads, writing a blog or posting on social media. It’s also helpful to research phrases added to keywords like “near me” or “where to buy.”

4. Determine Your Marketing Channels

Distribute your content using the most suitable marketing channels. These may include social media platforms, email newsletters, industry forums, and guest posting on authoritative websites. Social media is one of the most prominent places to find leads. Facebook is still one of the most effective platforms for marketers.

Consider investing in a Facebook lead ads campaign. These campaigns use lead forms native to Facebook and prefilled with profile information, making the whole process seamless for the user. These campaigns work much better for companies than conventional ads.

5. Create High-quality Content

Craft valuable and engaging content that educates, entertains, or solves problems for your target audience. Consistency and quality are key. Write a weekly blog. Don’t give up on the podcast after three episodes. Regularly publish white papers. Take a look at this example in action. Recruitee captures the essence of solid writing in this article about a digital recruitment strategy. Since the brand has a niche market, it tailors content for HR professionals.

Of course, writing regular content can feel scary and overwhelming (especially if you aren’t a writer!). Hiring a content creator full-time or finding a freelancer is an option.

6. Optimize Content for Conversions

Incorporate compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) in your content, guiding readers to take the desired actions, such as filling out a form or contacting your sales team. Shaked Law is a personal injury law firm based in Miami.

Their CTA is clear and compelling, right in the header. The rest of their homepage does an excellent job of taking the user on a journey, helping them feel confident in Shaked Law.

7. Experiment and Update

Marketing is part science and part art. You won’t get it right the first time, and that’s okay. Continuously monitor the performance of your content marketing efforts. Experiment with different formats and channels, and update your strategy based on data-driven insights.

How to Create a Content Marketing Funnel for Lead Generation

You are probably familiar with the four traditional stages of the marketing funnel. But did you realize this funnel is a ready-made template for your content marketing? Let’s quickly look at four areas of content creation for B2B lead generation marketing.

1. Awareness

In the awareness stage, aim to attract potential customers and make them aware of your brand and offerings. Content types that work well at this stage include blog posts, social media content, infographics, videos, and podcasts. Over 53% of marketers say blogging is a priority. And it should be for you, too. Vivion makes ingredients for agricultural and pharmaceutical markets. Blog posts like this one on Vitamin C establish Vivion as an industry authority. It also helps them get found by potential buyers. Blogging improves your website’s SEO quality.

J.Cogburn is another example of a firm that takes blogging seriously to improve its SEO. Jamie Coburn states, “ Investing in content that will introduce prospects to our sales funnel has been a game changer.”

Various on-page SEO techniques in blog posts can boost your rankings on Google, making your site more appealing to people searching for related topics. This helps you better meet the needs of your target audience.

2. Interest/Consideration

In this stage, potential customers have shown interest in your brand and are considering your products or services. Provide in-depth information through content like white papers, case studies, e-books, webinars, and comparison guides.

BBN, a renowned B2B marketing company, published a white paper exploring the impact and benefits of five specific technologies on marketing results.

3. Decision/Evaluation

Potential customers are evaluating your offerings against competitors. To assist them in making informed decisions, offer product demos, free trials, customer testimonials, pricing guides, and FAQs.

Attorney Meri Benoit Link from Malone Law observed that once you can meet with a client and create the connection, it’s much easier to bring them on as a client.

The critical piece to the puzzle is to catch them when they are still in the decision phase and establish yourself as the subject matter expert. Customer testimonials are beneficial in the decision stage. Videos can be a compelling way to share a client’s story. Check out this example from Stripe, which partnered with Lightspeed, a company that helps companies with various business solutions.

4. Action/Purchase

Potential clients are ready to purchase at the bottom of the funnel. To facilitate a smooth conversion process, ensure they can easily access ordering forms, checkout pages, customer support, and post-purchase emails. Each element must be straightforward with a simple and beautiful user experience. Don’t overcomplicate things. Leads will likely be converted to customers if they have a seamless, painless checkout experience.

Finally, the after-purchase stage is a great time to send a survey to gather feedback (and prepare for a testimonial).

Wrapping It Up

Mastering B2B lead generation is essential for content marketers looking to thrive in today’s competitive landscape. This comprehensive guide has provided invaluable insights and strategies to empower marketers in their quest for success. Implementing a well-structured content marketing funnel enables potential customers to move seamlessly from awareness to action. With a strategic approach to lead generation and a commitment to delivering high-quality content, content marketers can forge lasting connections with prospects, driving conversions and fostering brand loyalty.