Generating B2B contacts: 7 ideas for 2020

The generation of qualified contacts is the top priority of the marketing strategy for 85% of B2B companies. And when it comes to digital (but not only) there is a single great rule to attract the right contacts: to give value. How to do it, however, is another story entirely.

To create effective strategies to generate online contacts, using various channels, this article will help you a lot. Read the article till the end.

Old but Good: The Company Newsletter

Content is the king, it is said in web marketing. And this maxim never really gets old! Creating useful, interesting and engaging content is always the main way to generate contacts.

We don't just say it: according to the Social Marketing Industry Report, 43% of B2B marketers consider blog articles to be the most important type of content for generating contacts.

Of course, not all corporate blogs are successful in this regard. The variations that determine the success of a corporate blog are in fact many. In our opinion, the most important are:

• The constancy of publication - one article every three months is of little use...
• Effective content utility - are you interesting for your target audience?
• And finally distribution, a really fundamental variable. Fantastic articles that lie hibernated in our blog, without anyone reading them, are, alas, totally useless. Not for nothing content is the king, distribution is the queen.

A corporate blog that respects all these features is a truly powerful tool. And, if the blog is seriously interesting, the newsletter that invites you to stay up to date is not simply an ornament, but becomes a real magnet of contacts!

Premium Content

If free content serves to intrigue and attract the user in the initial part of the customer journey, the natural next step is that of special content.


Valuable information (perhaps unavailable online), insights, answers to common customer questions, tutorials and detailed instructions, "secrets" and "tricks" of the trade, case studies, practical tools to simplify daily activities... all of these are extremely valuable resources, which you may transfer to your potential customers in exchange for their data.


But be sure to select truly valuable and unmissable material for your audience. Nobody willingly leaves their data to strangers.

Seriously, premium content is an exchange lever. In order to function, it must be precisely studied to meet a real and pressing need or requirement of your typical customer. Assignment Help UK is applying the best of these strategies.


How to convey premium content? What format to choose? The possibilities are many and the choice depends, once again, on the habits of your audience. Some examples can be:

• A series of videos
• The classic ebook
• A dynamic resource (e.g. a calculator, a budget estimator, etc)
• Audio resources

In short, the only limit is the imagination - and the knowledge of your target!

Webinar

Providing specific training is a formidable tactic for creating value. What if instead of organizing a classroom course I did it online?

Holding a webinar is a great way to turn simple onlookers into contacts and potential customers. To do this you do not need sophisticated and expensive tools, you just need the video camera of your pc, a good microphone, and the subscription to a special platform - on the web you can find many, even at reduced fees.

Mini-Courses by Email

Remaining in the field of training, the mini-courses conveyed via email work great, both as a lead magnet and, subsequently, to continue to feed the contacts already acquired, but perhaps not yet ready for purchase.

Also, consider this element: all the main email marketing platforms allow you to control who among the recipients opened your email or clicked on any links.

This makes it easier to understand which users are most interested... and which ones could be closer to buying.

Podcast

In the last year, there has been a dizzying increase in the number of listeners and podcast downloads worldwide. And guess what is the most listened to podcast category? Business. In short, we are faced with a market that is still little explored, but with a lot of potentials!


The podcast can be a direct and indirect lead generation channel. Direct if you decide to distribute your audio content through a private channel, which is accessed only by those who leave you the data.

If, on the other hand, you choose to distribute the podcasts on the most well-known platforms - Spotify, Sound Cloud, iTunes - nothing prevents you from inserting a call to action between a sentence and the other... perhaps referring to some other in-depth resource on your site.

Chat and Social Chatbot

Okay, your site has a contact page with its beautiful form for those who want more information. But we know that timeliness is everything in marketing.


For this reason, live chat on the website still remains one of the most effective tools for generating new contacts, as well as being a very immediate and useful contact channel for all users who need after-sales assistance.


Let's put it another way: having an online chat, with a real person who answers you, helps users overcome the indecision and doubts that prevent them from buying or leaving their data.

Quick response in these cases is truly priceless. Just think that, according to a research study, a live chat on the website increases the percentage of conversions by an average of 40%.

Yes, 40%. On Average

The company chatbot, however, are automated systems that allow you to chat with users through social chat. Prospects can be guided along predefined selection paths in order to create real conversations.

The possibilities, here too, are truly limitless. But we can also think of something very simple: a chatbot on Facebook Messenger could be a great way to automate the distribution of content to your fans or, in any case, to those who interact with the chatbot.

The real convenience for marketers? Well, messages on Messenger are always notified. So, please... be careful not to become nagging!

B2B Social Groups

Who said Facebook is a banned territory for B2B?


The social par excellence actually teems with social groups dedicated to professions. There is really everything: from marketing groups to those for engineers, from groups of restaurateurs to those reserved for agricultural entrepreneurs.

For the more established, however, there are Linkedin groups: more serious, very professional places, often of international caliber. Followers are generally more targeted, but spectacular numbers of groups on Facebook are hardly reached.

Social groups are a really interesting "place", where you can exchange knowledge and build value simply by offering your experience and availability. In short, for B2B professionals they are the place to be.

But not only...

Have you ever thought about how it could be advantageous to open and manage a private social group with your company? Attention, because here we go beyond the lead generation: we are talking about building communities!