And now let’s take a deep dive into the top 4 lead generation marketing trends of 2021:

1. Hyper-personalized outreach with buyer intent data

B2B marketing is equipped to identify and attract qualified leads. Sales procure specific insights needed to tailor messaging to different decision-makers with different priorities. For instance, you might consider creating a personalized sales video that mentions how your business can help grow, or you might host a demo addressing specific challenges the prospects face.

2. Conquer with Automation

Automation streamlines your lead generation process and takes your efforts to altogether new heights. Automating the steps and workflows in the lead generation process allows you to connect with targeted prospects. It saves a significant amount of time that can be leveraged to find and interact with potential prospects. Sales teams need to leverage automation for tasks that can be easily automated. They spend more time on high-value tasks: listening intently to their prospects, identifying their pain points, and working together to resolve their business challenges. Machine learning and AI have made automation more human and effective.

3. Optimize your website to promote lead magnets

To generate more high-quality leads, make sure your website visitors can easily find your lead magnets. Develop and design on-site funnels that segment your audience and drive them towards the lead magnets most likely to resonate with your prospect’s pain points and interests. You can do this by promoting your lead magnets around the website.

• By highlighting it as the primary homepage call to action (CTA)
• By promoting relevant lead magnets at the end of blogs and other pages
• By using a lead generation pop-up
• By creating a resource library filled with gated content

4.  Target top-of-the Funnel Keywords

In order to attract targeted prospects and drive them towards your lead magnets, create a plan to target the terms they’re more likely to look for. Keyword research helps discover words and phrases your ideal prospects search for at the top of the purchase funnel. Then, target those keywords in the following way:

• Create content that can be optimized for the target terminology
• Develop a blog strategy around the target keywords and phrases
• Target terms in pay-per-click marketing for better online visibility

Follow best practices for SEO to further your chances of ranking up on page one. The more visible you’re in search, the more interest and traffic you’ll generate from potential leads.

5. Target with Account-based Marketing

ABM concentrates on a set of target accounts- this strategy for growth strategy focuses on classifying best-fit leads and customizing personalized campaigns for specific accounts. The bottom line is ABM delivers results. It focuses sales and marketing resources on a set of target accounts and high-value customers. Research has shown correlations with a great return on investment. Personalized content translates into increased engagements resulting in high ROI.

Wrapping Up

So are you ready to take the big lead? There are different ways to generate leads, including more tried and trusted methods. You can always host a webinar, offer a free ebook download, or buy ads on social media. However, converting leads into customers and creating effective and valuable content are central peaks that every marketer has to climb. One thing’s for sure, generating high-quality leads takes the cake. Lead generation marketing trends come and go. Your ability to go with the flow, innovate, update and continually work to optimize experiences thoughtfully is what will keep you in the lead!

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Why Outsource the B2B Lead Generation?

An outsourced lead-generation department can fetch up to 43% better results than an in-house one. The company might choose to outsource B2B lead generation for a number of reasons that can lead to improved ROI. With the help of outsourced lead generation, the sales department can reduce wasted labor hours and focus more intently on prospects that have already been nurtured and vetted by the outsourced team. The company can also significantly cut the costs of lead generation tools that are expensive. Lastly, this helps marketers gain years of experience and knowledge from a dedicated B2B lead generation firm giving them the bonus to skip the trial and error needed to build a strategy that converts.

If marketers are looking for a few more reasons to outsource their lead generation, the following listed examples should help tip the scales in favor of getting it off their plate.

1. Lead Generation Comes at its Own Cost

The time that is! Marketers taking on their lead generation strategy sounds like they’ll be saving themselves some money; however, in business, time is money.
And lead generation takes time- Lots of time. Time to create content, time to research the audience, and time to promote that content, and then the optimizing that takes place after that. If marketers hand over their lead generation initiatives to the professional marketing agency, they can save some time…which eventually saves money.

2. Outsourcing Lead Gen Leads to Swift Results

When marketers have a team of professionals working on generating leads, they know that the leads will be of high quality. They don’t have to worry about buying lists, doing their optimization, and because of this, their leads will grow faster and be of high quality. People who specialize in lead generation for a living are laser-focused on their best-fit audience. They don’t just want their list to grow in numbers; they want high-quality leads. Also, instead of taking a shot in the dark, they know who to target and how to target them. It’s their job to understand the market dynamics, the competition, and the company’s product or service.

3. Simpler-Smoother Way of Sales

When marketers get pre-qualified leads, the next step of sale becomes relatively easy. The leads arrive at their “front door,” depending on what they are offering them. In many cases, this means prospects are ready to buy the reveal the product or service that marketers are selling. This laser-focused qualification process not only saves marketers some time but it helps them see quick wins in their business, leading to confidence and rapid growth to close the sales.

Lastly, when marketers pair time saved and rapid growth, it’s undeniable that their ROI will increase, and their business will see the growth they’re dreaming of. When they consider the education and content they’ll have to consume to produce results somewhat close to what a professional lead generation expert is expected to produce, they might be wasting weeks, if not months and years, of time. And without any doubt, marketers would instead grow their business much quicker than that.

Wrapping Up

There are steps that marketers can take for their business to improve their lead generation return on investment. Marketers should have dedicated professionals in charge of developing strategies, leading routine database reviews, regulating pipeline efficiency, and constantly evaluating analytics reports. Also, marketers’ time and costs to pay in performing these activities in-house can be extensive. Thus, it could be more beneficial for marketers to focus on lead generation efforts on the latter event, which eventually turns into closing sales leads.

The post Outsourced Lead Generation Driving Higher ROI appeared first on XDBS Worldwide.

Stage 1. Planning and Analysis

1) Potential Clients Analysis

While an ideal customer profile is a map for discovering leads, targeting those leads with a buyer persona is an instruction. It comprises comprehensive psychological traits, buyer behavior, social habits, and the potential customer’s professional experience.

2) Define a Timeline

Marketers should figure out the deadlines for their lead generation campaign. A launch date should be set along with how long the campaign will be carried out. While on the topic of timing, marketers can also decide on the cadence and frequency of their e-mail campaigns.

3) Choose the tools

The most important aspect of the lead generation process is CRM. Also, marketers should define which lead generation tool or software they’ll use, apart from a CRM. It can be a call, e-mail, or a social-media oriented one.

4) Plan Meticulously

Defining the goals of the lead generation process is very important. What will the SDRs be responsible for? Qualified leads, appointments, or both? Next, weekly or monthly quotas for the sales reps should be decided. These benchmarks help motivate, regulate, and, most importantly, be real to achieve the targets set.

Stage 2. Message

Messages that go in the lead generation process are used in multiple channels. A good copy should answer these questions for the person that sees the company name for the very first time: Why me, why this product/service, and why now?

The copy must be in compliance with the buyer persona, short, simple, and most importantly, human. Personalization is essential to make messages feel personally crafted. It increases the response rate. It takes about 5-15 minutes for an experienced sales development representative to look for a specific piece of information about a lead and five to thirty minutes to write a personalized message based on it. Ending with a strong Call to Action (CTA) embedded with a landing page link. This landing page comprises everything a lead has to know, with one more CTA waiting for him.

Stage 3. Landing Pages

During the lead generation process, landing pages can be utilized at least two times:

• to create the e-mail copy &
• to create pre-targeting ads

A landing page with a definite objective is crucial to enable the desired action. For instance, set a discovery call or collect contact information.

So why should marketers use landing pages instead of links to their website? The website comprises a lot of information and various CTAs. The landing page emphasizes one action and removes all the other distracting factors. Similarly, it allows marketers to segment the buyers into micro-groups and send a highly targeted message.

To create a useful landing page, marketers have to make sure these are included:

• Clear headline
• Custom CTA
• Responsive and relevant design

Stage 4. Phone Calling and E-mail Sequences

These 2 stages of the lead generation process are integrated because, most often, they happen simultaneously. Marketers should start the calls straight after the first wave of e-mails.

1) Check, Research, Upload

The leads are usually handpicked by the company’s researchers and handed over to the sales development representatives. If the lead flow is significant, one or two unfit leads may slip through, so marketers should check again. Then, sales development representatives look for information on leads that can be used as a personalization point. Later, when everything looks OK, the leads are ready to be uploaded to the CRM.

2) Send, handle, follow-up

Before pressing send, sales development representatives segregate and group contacts by the time zones. This way, marketers’ first sales pitch arrives at the most appropriate time possible. A CRM comes in handy here. For instance, in Hubspot, marketers can set the time and day of delivery for any group of leads.

3) Prioritize, call, qualify

Cold calling is a highly effective lead generation technique, particularly when combined with cold e-mailing. After the first e-mail is sent, a CRM shows if the e-mail was opened, the number of times it was viewed, and if the links inside were clicked. This information gives sales development representatives an idea about who to call first. A lead that shows more activity must be in the call priority list compared to the one that hasn’t shown any action and hasn’t opened up the e-mail at all.

Stage 5. Reporting

Marketers must have noticed that reporting is present at almost every stage of a lead generation process.

It’s good to fill in the stats along the way to have a detailed report at this stage. The general report includes:

• Researched leads
• Time used upon research and average time per one prospect
• E-mail templates
• Sent e-mails
• E-mails that are bounced
• Auto-replies
• E-mails opened + open rate
• Rate of opened e-mails per sequence
• E-mails that have never been opened + rate
• “Unsubscribe me” requests
• Positive responses + rate
• Negative responses other than “unsubscribe” + rate
• Follow-ups + time necessary to write them
• Calls + average time

Stage 6. Planning and Analysis

Stage 6 is a repetition of the first, and from there, the cycle starts once again. This process might seem like a circle, but in reality, it’s a spiral. Marketers should go through their marketing and sales KPIs, needs in additional recruitment, and strategies that worked or didn’t work. Analyze, plan, and improvise.

That’s the lead gen process continuously moving forward. And just like a spiral, it can become wider or narrower. It’s up to marketers if it grows or shrinks and in the direction, it goes. A properly structured and organized sales lead generation process will be profitable, giving a more anticipated and consistent flow of new leads and prospects to your sales funnel.

Final Thoughts

A well-structured and organized sales lead generation process will be successful and profitable with an expected and steady flow of new prospects to your sales funnel. The system for getting clients and customer is straightforward. Marketers require a way to attract prospects and learn about them through their focused marketing efforts, and then they need to develop a robust relationship with them that will hopefully lead to a sale. After all, the end objective is to identify qualified prospects that can sail through your sales process and convert into business leads.

The post Sales Lead Generation Process: A 6-Stage Guide to Attract New Clients appeared first on XDBS Worldwide.

Before B2B marketers go about their multiple marketing strategies, they have an audience in mind. If that’s not the case, then they need to rethink their entire strategy and devise a roadmap straightway as they are doing it all wrong. The deal is: The prospect list is one of the most significant assets of a marketers’ entire marketing campaign. From seeking permission to joining the opt-in list to segmenting the prospects – are the reasons to build a B2B prospect list.

But here’s the catch – developing the B2B prospect list is hard. That been said, here are some tips that help build a B2B prospect list.

1) Human Resources and Software Alignment

To execute just about any marketing and sales stage, the right software is essential; however, human ingenuity is required to make data actionable and for the systems to work together. Even with extensive research on leads, there are data sets that software tools can’t structure – behavioral patterns, current mergers, significant technological stack, and more. Human-driven research machine-powered is the best method to get all the seemingly hard-to-find data and get the most thorough leads lists.

2) Data Collected Should be Thoroughly Analyzed

The leads that turn out to be a prospect and the leads that do not are sources of information for the marketers’ marketing campaigns in the future and optimize their leads lists. CRM platforms have become the primary tool for maintaining complex, enormous contact and customer data. Analyze it, use it, and involve the knowledge for the listed building carried out next.

3) Validating Data Is A Must

The lead data that is found on LinkedIn profiles by the marketers aren’t always accurate. Some additional resources are required to double-check to be sure that leads can be reached. ZoomInfo or a contact’s website helps marketers verify the company information. Additionally, to validate each email found by the researchers, an email verification tool is needed. However, marketers have to be careful, as there are plenty of email verification tools that are not that accurate. For better understanding, research is needed, along with going through the reviews.

4) The Most Important Is To Keep The Quality-to-Quantity Ratio

Every lead has a price, even when the research is performed in-house or outsourced.  Quantity does not mean quality every time. The budget of leads comprises a tech stack, training, researchers’ salaries, and much more. The numbers of marketers’ leads depend on their resources. The higher price has to be paid for the more hard-to-get data that marketers require. Still, quality leads tend to get a high conversion rate.

5) Existing Data To Be Enriched

Data that marketers already have should be thoroughly examined. A majority of it may be outdated or incomplete. To avoid wastage of leads, the ones that marketers already have in their CRM should be updated. Also, to identify which contacts need attention or remove the duplicates, an optimized CRM makes the process easier.

Changes are always made during sales decisions, and in that case, the old contacts shouldn’t be deleted; they should be re-grouped. If some of them seem uninterested at that moment, and if they already had a solution.

It is a challenge to apply and fine-tune CRMs to sustain and scale growth. If bringing in a 3rd-party CRM implementation expert is considered by the marketers, they should validate their expertise.

6) Experts Opinion Needed

To build an accurate leads list, there are various tripwires present. Any outbound messaging becomes irrelevant due to the lapse at the contact data stage. In the end, how can marketers deliver the perfect message if they’re approaching the wrong audience?

A growing number of businesses outsource their outbound top-of-funnel to both scales and sustain growth, as prospecting is resource-intensive.

If a list is purchased by the marketers, it should not be rented or used earlier by other companies. Additionally, before making any purchase, marketers need to dig into how they find the leads and validate those leads.

To build a leads list from ground zero, outsourcing has proven to be a more effective alternative and more cost-optimized.  Companies that focus on contact data acquisition deliver their customers with high quality, fixed costs, and expertise. Firms can let their salespeople do what they do best, close deals, and create relationships with the company data partner and right contacts.

Final Thoughts

Across the industry, the most critical questions that stay constant to perplex marketers are: Should they build or buy their leads list?

Well, the answer lies in their marketing priorities and budget. Various marketers believe building leads lists has always turned out to be better than buying them. Regardless of their choice, what eventually matters is the quality of their outbound marketing campaign’s data and process.

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