B2B website: how to manage your contacts and generate more marketing leads

A B2B website without a focus on lead generation risks of limiting its customer reach. Attracting, acquiring and informing potential clients about your products or services are essential aspects of any marketing strategy. Optimizing a B2B lead generation strategy is one of the most efficient ways to build a loyal customer base, however, contact management takes a lot more effort than simply adding a form on your about page — hoping that someone will fill it. In this article, we’ll guide you through the key steps necessary to give your qualified leads the attention they deserve. After understanding how to define your target audience, you’ll learn the best B2B lead generation tricks to start collecting valuable contacts from today.

Defining the target audience of your B2B website for better lead generation

The process of converting visitors into conversions through a contact management strategy involves many stages and changes from business to business. However, despite the differences, it always starts with defining how the target should look like.

Market Research

You can identify the target of your B2B website with maximum precision by conducting in-depth market research. More precisely, before launching your ad campaign, you can: 1) study the customers of your competitors; 2) analyze frequently asked questions in specialized publications or 3) approach potential buyers directly through surveys or interviews to better draw their profile.

Your goal at this stage is to obtain a clear image of your future customers, understanding their wants and needs to offer tailored content and strategize your communication. Through your research, you will be able to sketch the picture of an ideal buyer persona, addressing where and how they can be reached and how your brand can help them.

Analyze Stats & Following

The easiest way to get information about the target audience is to analyze the statistical data about incoming traffic. By looking at user behavior on your B2B website, you can find out what type of person landed on your site, where they came from, how long they stayed and why they left. 

Tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar are your go-to software for understanding user behavior and help you define your target audience. If you are active on social media, the composition of your following can also be a rich source of information. 

A/B Testing With Ads

Finding the right balance between design, content and voice is often a matter of testing, since it’s not simple to predict the preferences of website visitors. With some budget available, a great way to understand what works best for users is via A/B testing.

By setting up a simple landing page where you describe your product on Leadpages or Unbounce, you can start promoting it to different target groups and observe which audience is more active. You can also employ the opposite strategy, creating two or more landing pages with different copy, calls to action or products, and see which one is more attractive to a target audience you have already defined.

Lead generation for B2B websites: 5 powerful tactics for your website

Once you have a clear idea of who your perfect lead is, it’s time to create a B2B lead generation strategy that will help you expand your contact list and create real value for your target audience.

Optimize your pages for better user experience

Before you start asking visitors to leave their email address, make sure your website is fully optimized in terms of user experience. A visitor that encounters obstacles when landing on your B2B website is likely to leave without even looking at what you are selling. 

Your site should be well-structured and simple to navigate. It should load fast (which is also good for SEO), and deliver a clear message. If it runs on WordPress, make sure to limit the use of plug-ins and the images weight that could slow down loading . A useful tool here is TinyPNG.

Keyword Targeting

Collecting contacts is easier if you promise to fulfill a need. SEO helps you to achieve this. Understanding what users searchfor by identifying keywords, themes or questions that the web hasn’t yet answered, can open up great opportunities for lead generation. 

SEO is not an exact science and changes to the Google algorithm are often unpredictable, but a better positioning on search engines is possible if you make good use of meta tags, titles and site mapping. Yoast helps to address on-page SEO issues, but if you want to be sure to avoid penalties avoid keyword stuffing and other black hat practices.

Install a CRM

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and refers to the management tools that small and large businesses use to better understand, anticipate and manage the needs and expectations of current and potential customers.

A customer relationship management software reduces customer acquisition and retention costs by improving automated processes and optimizing communication within the sales team. It helps to keep all information organized and in the same place, centralizing customer data through all means of contact, from customer service, to direct sales, email marketing, and social networks.
With a CRM installed in your website you can keep track of the history of your leads and partners and allow your team to respond from the same platform without running the risk of losing important data. Among the best CRM platforms we find Hubspot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Zoho.

Email Marketing

By building an email list of users interested in your service, you open a communication channel that can reach qualified leads directly. The classic way of collecting customers’ emails is through a call to action placed on your B2B website’s pages, perhaps under a blog post or in a pop-up box.

Once a user inserts their email, this is collected with an email marketing software such as Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign. Virtually every email marketing tool provides information about who opens or clicks on your newsletter or campaign. This will give you an overall idea of what type of customer you are interacting with and what type of message works best.

When working with email marketing, you’ll notice that the smallest details can play a huge difference in the success of your campaign. From the subject line, to the use of images and links, every aspect of your message has to be planned well.

Chats & Chatbots

With every website asking users to subscribe to their newsletter, it can be hard to convince someone to actually leave their email contact. Setting up a chat room on your website is a great alternative to email marketing, as it allows you to answer directly to a visitor’s question and suggest customized solutions. 

Another option is setting up a chatbot, an automated messaging system that answers to a certain input with a series of programmed sentences. Whether it speaks via Facebook Messenger or through your B2B website, a chatbot works as a personalized call to action that acquires leads when the user is most active.

B2B lead generation tricks: how to make visitors fill in your contact form

A simple contact form can be a great way to collect data on potential customers. It’s free, easy to install and everyone knows how to use one. However, there are a few things you should keep in mind to make it part of an effective strategy:

• Keep it short: reduce the number of fields to a minimum and to save your visitors’ time.
• Optimize your contact form for desktop, tablet, and mobile.
• Use drop-down menus, to let users easily select their answers.
• Specify response time: visitors are more likely to contact you if they know they’ll receive an answer in a short time.
• Show that users can trust you: link to a privacy policy or ensure that personal information will be kept safe.

How to get more targeted leads from your B2B website

Getting more targeted leads is a challenge every digital business faces. While large corporations can rely on massive budgets to endlessly refine their campaigns, smaller companies often have to be creative in order to get people’s attention. 

Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder is a useful tool designed to obtain valuable information on users visiting your website. It integrates with Google Analytics and gives insights about your AdWords campaigns, providing you with details about the companies that click on your paid marketing campaigns, even when they don’t convert. If you know what a company is interested in, you can tailor your communication and address their needs directly.

Use Lead Magnets

As we’ve mentioned, when it comes to collecting emails the competition is fierce. B2B lead generation strategies often involve a lead magnet, offered to the user in exchange for their contact. This can be an ebook, a free trial, or a free consulting session, just make sure that what you provide is of real value for the user, otherwise it might be counterproductive.

Train a sales team

The marketing and sales departments should be consistent in the way they interact with potential customers. Keeping your sales team informed about your marketing strategies will help them address questions concerning CTAs or ad campaigns they may not be directly involved in. On one hand, this can help you gather important information about the quality of your contacts; on the other, it will improve the customer experience.

Add a quiz

A playful lead generation method for gathering useful information about your B2B website visitors is through a quiz. While people are not usually too keen on answering personal questions online, when these are asked in a game-like manner, perhaps with the promise of a reward at the end, it gets easier. A quiz can be related to the products you sell and can be used to direct the customer toward one specific area of the website. By answering questions, the visitor becomes actively engaged, making it more likely that they will remember your brand and talk about it with others.

Activate a referral strategy

If you are ready to let someone else take over the marketing, an idea could be to activate a referral strategy, where you allow a group of affiliates to promote your brand in exchange for a commission. Through a strategy of this kind you can quickly reach a wide audience at low-cost, however, you have to be careful as you may lose control over your brand placement.

Conclusion: improve your B2B website lead generation strategy to increase customer loyalty and revenue

Whether you are beginning to write down your business plan or you already have a well-established customer base, it is essential that you set up an effective B2B lead generation strategy to boost sales and reduce acquisition costs in the long term.

In this article, we’ve seen the main tactics you can implement right now to attract more leads and manage your existing contacts. If you need further clarification or want to take your B2B website to the next level, feel free to get in touch.