B2B Lead Generation & SEO

Negotiation

At this point, the final price and terms are being discussed and agreed upon between your team and the company’s legal team or decision maker. During the negotiation page it is important to continue to nurture your relationship with the key account, step of the sales pipeline in great detail. This can be done

follow up, and keep your business top of mind.

Closed-lost or Closed-won

If the prospect has signed the dotted line - you have a closedwon and can continue to the onboarding process. On the opposite end, if the prospect declines your offer, you can mark

In Summary

When it comes to B2B sales, you need to track every them off as a closed-lost lead.

through CRM solutions such as HubSpot Sales Hub. This kind of insight helps you understand your target market in greater detail, allows your team to identify warm leads, and in turn, leads to greater sales and business growth.

B2B Lead Generation & SEO - How One Leads to the Other

By: Toni Becker

Search Engine Optimisation is the practice of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or web page from the search engines. All too often, SEO is viewed as a single and isolated digital marketing effort when in fact, SEO is vital for every part of your marketing endeavours, from content creation and social media to lead generation. When it comes to B2B lead generation, SEO needs to be considered as part of the process, and is one of the most effective ways to drive potential clients to your business and capture them as leads. However, most B2B marketers do not view these two processes as united, and these teams only collaborate when new content needs to be developed - if at all.

The problem is that most people only view SEO as a way to help a website - not a business in its entirety. However, websites generate massive leads and while lead generation may be different from SEO, lead generation needs SEO in order to thrive.

As the digital age progresses and changes, marketers and salespeople have had to find new ways to reach their audience, and because of this, lead generation has also had to evolve. From email campaigns, social media ads and lead forms, lead generation has had to take a new face in order to meet new expectations. But there is one element that many marketers overlook at their detriment - and that is the benefit of Search Engine Optimisation alongside lead generation.

SEO to Reach the Right Audience

Before we take a look at how SEO and lead generation can work together, it is important to understand what SEO actually is. We all know about SEO keywords and content creation - but lead generation specialists need to understand User Intent in regards to SEO.

“User Intent” is the name of the game when it comes to SEO and there are two types of user intent that lead generation marketers need to understand if they want to work alongside SEO

Inform: SEO content is created to inform an audience about a topic they are looking to learn about. For example: SEO content will be created around topics your desired target audience will be researching online.

Purchase: SEO is also created for when a user is actively seeking your services or to make a purchase.

SEO is about understanding what words your audience uses when they are searching for your business offerings. This is an important part of SEO and will help direct users who are either looking to learn about your business or skill set, as well as users who are looking to purchase your services.

Essentially, SEO experts will create content using keywords that the users are using to find your business offerings. The pages that rank highest for a specific keyword will represent the type of content a user is searching for.

By understanding what users with the intent to purchase are searching for, and by understanding what users in the research phase are searching for online, you can steer them to content that meets their needs through SEO practices.

Lead Generation and User Intent

Before the age of instant information, buyers were not as informed as they are now, in fact, they are now able to self educate and drive themselves further into the sales funnel. They no longer require a strategically crafted buyer journey that you have put together as they can now enter the buyer funnel whenever they choose and they are able to move through it at their own speed and in their own time.

Obviously marketing experts have had to acknowledge this and adapt to it, especially when it comes to lead generation. Today, lead generation experts are focusing their efforts on developing helpful, intent based content to drive a user to take action or engage with the business. This is a great step, however, they need to concentrate on reaching buyers with the right content, at the right time. Of course, creating content and sharing it across platforms is important but lead generation experts also need to understand that most buyers turn to search engines such as Google when they want to research a service or offering, or make a purchase. This is especially true when it comes to B2B sales. With this in mind, content needs to be created for every stage of the buyer journey and this content will then have to be optimised to suit the unique buyer intent. And SEO, as we know, is all about understanding buyer intent and crafting content around a variety of intents through the buying funnel.

Therefore, in order to generate leads and guide them to the relevant web pages - lead generation specialists will require the help of SEO specialists.

Search Engine Optimisation for Lead Generation

SEO drives users to your website, which in turn gives you the opportunity to convert prospective clients into leads through lead generation tactics.

These two tactics need to work alongside each other to ensure business growth and below, we outline how your lead generation efforts and SEO strategy work together to achieve this goal.

Rising up the Google Ranks

In the past, SEO used to be about stuffing content with as many keywords as possible. This made the users online experience frustrating as they would be led to pages that didn’t actually answer their questions or provide the content they were looking for. Businesses simply used industry related keywords to drive traffic to their website in the hopes that a few of the visitors would convert into customers - and let’s not forget, they completely disregarded where the user was in the buying cycle.

Today, Google is smarter than ever before, and so is the user. Google ranks pages based on the quality of their content and how much the content relates to a users query. Of course, keywords are still relevant however, they should never be used for the sake of keyword stuffing. They should be woven into relevant, high quality content that informs user intent.

SEO specialists and lead generation experts need to find keywords and keyphrases relevant to every part of the buyer›s journey and create content that speaks to every stage in the journey. SEO specialists will use tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner, or Google Trends to ensure you find the right keywords for your industry and users.

Lead Data for Lead Nurturing

It is vital that you create quality content designed to reach every stage of the buyer’s journey, from informative helpful in a variety of ways ie: when a contact is added to a list, clicks

blogs that provide insight into the benefits of your offering (perfect for the research phase), to downloadable e-books and e-guides, to sales related content and product and services pages.

With strong, optimised content, your webpages will rise up the Google ranks. This means that quality prospects will click on your webpages and you need to take advantage of the window of opportunity when you are at the top of a prospects mind. This is the perfect opportunity to create website lead forms, e-book downloads or newsletter sign ups. By adding this Call to Action on your web pages, you are able to capture relevant lead data which allows your lead generation team and marketing team to nurture relationships with these leads through email marketing In order to pull this off seamlessly, you should consider investing in automated email workflows as this tactic ensures you don’t miss any opportunity for nurturing or engaging with a prospect. For example, HubSpot offers a Workflow app that creates personalized and automated emails that are triggered

campaigns and remarketing campaigns. a link in an email, submits a form to your site, views a specific page on your website or is marked as a qualified lead.

In Summary

The digital landscape is constantly changing and marketers need to grow alongside these changes in order to keep up with the target audience. SEO and lead generation work alongside and help businesses attract and acquire only the highest quality leads - the priority of all businesses and marketers.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy in 2021

By: Toni Becker

When you say “digital marketing” you may instantly think of marketing a website to the public, and this sounds simple enough however, we live in the digital age and digital marketing has evolved rapidly, going from being about promoting a website to becoming one of the biggest lead generation tools available for business today.

There are a variety of ways to use digital marketing to get your website to your target market, acquire leads and convert those leads into loyal customers and there are so many options when it comes to beginning your digital marketing strategy that it can quickly become overwhelming when deciding where to place your budget. From search engine optimisation and paid advertising to social media marketing and email campaigns, digital marketing has many variables and it all comes down to what you want to achieve through your campaign.

So, where do you begin?

The Six Pillars of Digital Marketing

As stated above, there is more than one way to market your brand online but you do not have to be overwhelmed in the decision making process, you can divide all these options into different marketing categories and discover which tactics will work well to achieve your specific digital marketing objectives and grow your business.

Digital marketing can be categorised into 6 primary disciplines:

Content Marketing: This refers to the creation, publication and distribution of helpful, informative and quality content that is strategically designed to educate, engage, and maintain, and convert your target market.

Native Advertising: This is the use of paid ads that match the aesthetic of the media format in which they appear. Native ads are often found in social media feeds, or as recommended content on a web page.

Pay Per Click (PPC): This is a paid marketing strategy that involves online ads and a fee will be paid every time a user clicks on the advert.

Search Engine Optimisation: Also known as SEO, this is the practice of optimising a website in order for it to be search engine friendly and recognised in search results.

Social Media: This refers to promoting a business via social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or SnapChat.

Email Marketing: This is a marketing strategy that makes use of email as a way to nurture leads and stay in touch with existing customers.

Once you know what each pillar is, it is time to create your digital marketing strategy, and the below 10 steps will form the foundation of your strategy.

Know your Audience

In the beginning of the digital marketing take over, marketers would collect quantitative and qualitative data about their target audience, and this included age, interests, occupation and location. However, this kind of targeting has been taken to new heights in the age of social media and we are now able to understand the “buyer persona” in more depth. Every marketing strategy needs to begin by knowing your buyer persona and how to reach them effectively.

The buyer person describes a businesses ideal customer, and is a user-centred approach to digital marketing. For example, a marketer will build a fictional character that represents a buyer type that would probably engage with a site, product or brand. Marketers will work with personas as well as market segmentation, where the persona is constructed to be representative of specific segments.

Identify your Digital Marketing Goals

This is without a doubt, the most important stage of the digital marketing process because without understanding a businesses goal and objective, a strategy could easily fall flat and not get the results required. Ensure that the goals developed for the digital strategy are suitable for the business and they should always be measurable to ensure objectives are being reached.

Content Creation and Blogging

High quality content is vital for any digital marketing campaign, and this means that every piece of content on your website needs to be helpful and inform your audience. Blogging is one of the most important content marketing strategies because it performs certain critical functions which include bringing more traffic to your site, reinforcing your brand presence, providing content for your social media platforms, positioning you are a thought leader in your industry above your competitors and helps you rank well in the search engine results which ultimately leads to more sales.

Look at your Existing Digital Marketing Channels

Examine the digital channels and online assets that you are currently using such as your social media platforms, website, native advertising or blog etc. And then take a look at how effective they have been for your business and how you can optimise them for greater reach.

For example, if your social media platforms have great engagement, make use of it and improve your social media content to reach your objectives - essentially, amplify what is working for you!

Automate your Process

You have probably heard about digital marketing automation and you have heard about it for a reason - it works and it works well. Technology is consistently getting better and today’s leading digital marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot, can do amazing things for your strategy such as making it easy to automate your content, lead generation, email marketing campaigns and social media marketing.

Another bonus is that this kind of software can be integrated with your sales CRM, improving your sales process and increasing your bottom line.

Optimise for Mobile Devices

There is a big chance you are reading this blog while on your phone, and it is vital that you create your digital marketing campaign for mobile as well as desktop use. You can optimise your website for mobile easily, ensuring the user has a good experience with your brand on all devices. Make sure to review your mobile responsive design, from your website to your email templates, you do not want to alienate your target audience because they are using a different device.

Ensure Customers are able to Reach your Business

The reason digital marketing is so effective is that it reaches your target audience on a more personalised level therefore, your strategy should always make it easy for leads and website visitors to get in contact with your business. For example, creating a lead form on your page, having a chat pop up on your page and having your contact details readily available is vital (this is why strong call to actions are key), while responding quickly to clients via social media is also a necessity. We live in the age of instant gratification and your target audience will expect you to respond timeously to them.