3 B2B Lead Generation Strategies for Small Businesses

Help your small business thrive with proven B2B lead generation strategies

Generating qualified leads is a challenge that continues to excite many organizations. And for small businesses, determining the best B2B lead generation strategies can be overwhelming. But don’t worry, we’re here to take that stress away. By bringing sales and marketing together, companies like yours reach potential customers and drive quality and qualified leads. How? It takes a little research, content marketing magic, and delivering personalized and valuable communications. Let’s see how it’s done.

Simple B2B Lead Generation Strategies for Your Small Business

If you’re looking for more leads, more prospects, and more revenue, you need to do your best. But new customers need some hunting and some goodies too. The best thing you can do to generate more B2B leads is to follow strategies and best practices that actually work. I could share with you many successful lead nurturing tips and templates, but the battle is real when it comes to collecting leads. After several successful B2B lead generation campaigns, we know which steps you need to take to achieve your business goals within a reasonable budget. Implementing these strategies will help you fill your pipeline and actually get your sales team to close deals.

This is what you should focus on.

1. Create a blog

Blogs have been transformed into a remedy for any strategic marketing plan in any industry. It can provide viable solutions for every aspect of marketing, from content creation to SEO performance. In addition, a regularly updated blog can also provide value to your audience, who will appreciate it and hopefully become leads.

In the small business field, a blog can work wonders as it is also a cost-effective and viable option. Creating a blog requires no technical expertise and a dedicated team to maintain. Rather, you can have a team of one person to create insightful content for your blog and keep the organic traffic flowing and your leads coming in.

Overall, a blog can be a useful tool for your B2B lead generation strategy because it:

Increases your organic traffic

There is no better way to increase your organic traffic than implementing a regularly updated blog. Your blog content should act as a magnet for new and existing traffic interested in your field. Meanwhile, a blog can also be used in your upcoming content marketing campaign.

In SEO terms, blogs can act as keyword banks. To illustrate, your blog content should be relevant to your niche while also answering the questions of your potential customers. By creating content around industry-related keywords, you may be able to increase your ranking on those keywords and thereby drive more organic traffic to your website.

Discover opportunities for link building

A quality blog can also provide a solid foundation for your link building strategy. Each blog page provides space for valuable links from other relevant websites. In fact, adding long content opens up even more opportunities for link building. However, what is the impact on your lead generation? Well, links from other websites can increase your referral traffic that comes from them. It’s also worth noting that the more relevant the website you link to, the more likely it is to generate leads for small businesses.

Adds space for valuable lead generation CTAs

Keeping your audience happy with valuable insights can have many positive effects on your lead generation. A blog can help you build a community of people interested in what you offer. So, what is the result of this? Well, you can add the right subscription CTA or signup form and convert them into leads instantly. The higher the quality of your content, the more likely you are to get more leads.

2. Focus on SEO

There’s no better way to cost-effectively fill your marketing funnels with leads than SEO. Optimizing your website for search engines can have multiple benefits for your lead generation. Since SEO is focused on increasing organic traffic, it is important to implement it into your lead generation strategy. Moreover, SEO can also help you increase your local lead generation.

What does increasing your SEO performance mean? Simply put, it means optimizing your website for search engines. By helping the search engines understand your website, you also help your SEO rankings. Some of the common methods of achieving this are listed below.

Conduct an in-depth SEO audit

Assuming you are in the early stages of your SEO journey, performing a diagnostic analysis can provide you with the foundation for the success of your initiatives. An in-depth technical SEO audit is ideal for this task, as the analysis can show you the blueprint of the ideal version of your website. Implementing this first step will ensure that your next SEO practices are on a safe path.

Create content on your blog

As we mentioned above, a content-filled blog can improve your SEO performance. It is worth investing time in building content for your blog as it will pay off in the long run with higher rankings, organic traffic and leads. It’s no wonder we often hear of “content is king” from marketers.

Of course, not all content is good content. When building your content strategy, make sure your content adheres to specific rules that will improve its performance. Such rules include:

• relevance
• Frequency
• uniqueness

In simple terms, your content should be relevant to your industry, frequent, and aligned with your brand. In this way you help search engines to crawl and understand your website more easily.

For more information, read my article on landing page optimization best practices.

Implement a link building strategy

The last and most important tip to improve your SEO performance is to implement a link building strategy. As the term implies, link building is the process of linking to other websites. There are multiple types of links to take advantage of. This can be done in several ways, such as:

Imagine you find an interesting article about an aspect of an industry problem that you haven’t covered. Yet you have an article that can add value to it. Therefore, you can send an email to the author in a professional way and ask for a link. If this method is successful, both websites will benefit from a higher domain rating and organic traffic with high-quality backlinks.

• Contact a link building service

We all understand that as a small business, you may already have your hands full with important tasks that need to be done. In this scenario, doing a link building plan yourself can lead to burnout. To solve this problem and still go ahead with the plan, you can enable a link building service. There are several that offer their services online, and prices that may suit your requirements.

If you want to learn more about this topic, feel free to read our article on the reliability of link building services. We provide insights that can help you in the decision-making process.

3. Use Secure Assets

We’ve already stated (and we can’t dwell on it enough) that “content is king”. However, content doesn’t have to be just the articles you create for your blog. There are multiple forms of content that can help you increase your B2B lead generation. That’s where gated assets come into play.

Gated assets are forms of content that are given to your audience in exchange for valuable information such as email addresses. This information can later be used in lead nurturing and marketing campaigns. Such content may take the form of:

It’s worth noting that the above list doesn’t limit you to “gap” other types of content that you may find appropriate. The general idea is to port content that you think your audience would trade their information to access.

Bonus: More B2B Lead Generation Tactics Your Small Business Can Use

Social media can be a great tool when it comes to getting leads. Creating a loyal community and increasing engagement can ultimately lead to more traffic and more leads. Moreover, social media can also improve your SEO performance.

• Run an email marketing campaign

Email marketing may seem like an old-fashioned way of generating leads. However, this is a mistake as most companies still run email marketing campaigns that populate the lead database.

Another B2B lead generation strategy is to implement pop-up banners on your website. These banners can appear with a CTA that serves your campaign at some point and generate valuable leads. For more information, see the Beginner’s Guide to Advertising with Banner Ads.

Depending on the capacity of your small business, consider guest posting as a strategy. This option means that you create content on other websites and add your link to them as well. Therefore, you can take advantage of referral traffic and potential leads.

Displaying ads is a common strategy of businesses when budget allows. You can help your business generate leads with cross-platform ads. However, make sure that the platforms you are targeting are the ones your market is using.

If your small business offers a service that can host a free trial, don’t think twice! Offering a free trial to your potential customers can have multiple benefits. Not only do you familiarize them with your product (offering cheese to the mouse), but in return you also get valuable information, such as email addresses. Such information contributes to your lead base and aids your future marketing efforts.

Main takeaway

Developing a B2B lead generation strategy for a small business isn’t always the same as going to Mordor on foot. The problem of budgeting, which small businesses often face in this scenario, can be addressed by outsmarting your competition.

There is no “one size fits all” for lead generation. Since every industry is unique, take the time to consider which of the aforementioned B2B lead generation strategies would work best for your business. Identify key touchpoints with your target audience, implement the right small business lead generation strategy, and watch your lead base grow. In the meantime, don’t forget to guide your chosen strategy with proper analysis. It is very important to see what works and what does not work in lead generation.

Leads are the backbone of growth in any business that operates online. Find the right lead generation strategy and give your marketing funnels some life with high-quality leads.