B2B Lead Generation Strategy Planning 2024
Download your free Lead Generation Planning Toolkit 2024. Inside the toolkit, you'll find:
- Lead Generation Planning Template (choose from Excel or Google Sheets).
- A Quality Lead Generation Checklist to use when planning your campaigns and choosing your suppliers.
- A lead generation handbook, and many more useful resources for 2024 campaign planning!
We all know the best B2B marketing strategies in the digital age focus on personalization and measurable results.
It's not enough to simply place an advert and hope for the best anymore. And with so much data available to B2B marketers, the ones who use it well are the ones who succeed.
B2B lead generation is at the heart of many successful strategies and is a great way to make the most out of your data to achieve measurable results.
Read on to find out how – and don't forget to download your free lead generation planning toolkit!
Download Your Lead Gen Toolkit
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Why Is B2B Lead Generation Important In 2024?
B2B lead generation for technology companies is about finding valuable new audiences for your products and services. Without lead generation, you limit growth opportunities for your business.
Modern technology marketplaces are incredibly competitive, so your methods of lead generation and overall marketing strategy are more important than ever before.
Choosing methods that will appeal specifically to your target audience is vital, as is the targeting itself.
As a marketer, your time can quickly be taken up by researching how to reach your desired target markets and companies. However, with a good B2B lead generation strategy, you can make the process as efficient as possible in terms of cost, time, and ROI.
But it's not enough simply to generate leads anymore. There are many ways to generate B2B leads and nurture them, ensuring they go to your sales team warmed up and ready to buy.
Download Your Lead Gen Toolkit
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B2B Lead Generation Objective Setting
Setting your lead generation strategy goals can be as straightforward as measuring how many leads you want to generate per month. If you employ a B2B lead generation agency on a cost-per-lead (CPL) basis, that's very simple indeed.
You should track different behaviors to measure the quality of the leads rather than just the quantity. For example, metrics such as how much time they spend on your website and whether they open emails from you will help you determine how far along the marketing funnel they are and whether they're a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) or a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).
Once you've drawn the differences between ordinary leads and quality leads, you can draw up different goals, concentrating your efforts on the prospects that are more likely to convert or by adding additional targets to nurture the less 'warmed up' leads in your CRM.
It's essential to have clear, measurable goals. Use SMART targets:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Timely
SMART objectives will make your lead generation smarter, as the name suggests, by helping you focus your efforts while spending your budget more efficiently and, ultimately, achieving more sales. Plus, you can show the rest of the business tangible results of how well your marketing department is working.
B2B Lead Generation Campaign Planning
Good planning = great results. There's a lot to think about, but don't worry: our free Complete B2B Lead Generation Planning Toolkit will walk you through every step and gives you a complete lead generation plan template. There are two stages to forming a great B2B lead generation campaign.
#1 - Planning Your Lead Generation Campaign
Below we've listed out the things you need to consider during the lead generation planning stage:
1. Which Lead Gen Strategy to Use?
Content syndication lead generation is the strategy we focus on at Headley Media. Still, a marketing plan for a technology company can cover various B2B lead gen methods: ABM lead generation, PPC, social media, partnership marketing... the list goes on. Therefore, you should research which methods will show your business the best return on investment.
2. How Do You Want to Nurture Your Leads?
- Do you want leads to be exposed to your brand only once before you contact them? Such as a Single Touch campaign.
- Or do you want your lead gen supplier to nurture your leads for you, warming them up before your sales team reaches out? Such as a Double Touch or Nurture Track campaign.
- Do you have the time and resources to nurture leads in-house? For example, there are several ways to do content syndication for lead generation, and depending on how you want to nurture your leads will impact the type of lead generation campaigns you want to run.
3. What Enhancements to Add to Your Campaign?
Whether you want to precisely target a list of companies with an account-based marketing campaign, understand each lead's behavior with intent targeting, or create a surround-sound effect by combining your lead gen with display advertising, you can get even better results from your campaign.
4. What Goals Do You Want to Achieve, And By When?
To budget most effectively and get the best results, you should have clear, measurable objectives in your B2B marketing plan and a timeframe to achieve them.
#2 - Choosing a Lead Generation Supplier
Transparency and trust are key when choosing a reputable B2B lead generation service and supplier. There is a range of questions any good lead gen specialist should be able to answer happily, including:
- Where will your campaign on content be hosted? On which websites and who will be sharing it, and do you have any control over this?
- Can they show you the entire reader journey? Is there visibility on where and how the Reader downloads your content? Do your leads give consent to share information with you directly?
- Ultimately, how will your leads be generated? Is the B2B lead generation supplier you're talking to completely transparent about their methods? For example, if you're running a content syndication campaign can your supplier show you the content syndication platforms your content will be hosted on? And do you trust that they are delivering your campaigns in-house? And not outsourcing them to 3rd party suppliers for fulfillment?
You'll find the complete list of questions to ask in our free Lead Generation Planning Toolkit (fill in the form above to access your toolkit).
How to Generate More (& Better Quality!) B2B Leads In 2024
Carefully planning your campaigns will help you get the best out of them. We all know it, but we don't always have the time to plan our marketing campaigns as much as we'd like. And things don't always go to plan.
A sudden change in objectives or direction, a reduced budget, or a new manager can all make planning your lead generation campaigns in advance a challenge.
And although it can be hard to carve out the time, you need to dedicate some of your working week to the more strategic tasks, I.e., thinking, planning, and researching.
Researching what goals you want to achieve and what lead generation company to work with will help you achieve those goals.
Spending time researching B2B lead generation services, choosing an agency, and getting the buy-in from management in plenty of time all contribute to a successful campaign with no wasted budget.
Running campaigns with clear objectives makes a considerable difference to your success.
If you put quality into your lead generation marketing plan template, you'll get quality out of it. We're big fans of content syndication for lead generation, but not all content syndication campaigns are created equal.
Lead generation for B2B SaaS and other technology types only gets results if the content you put out is worth downloading.
Make sure it's useful, for example:
- Case studies
- Research reports
- Whitepapers
- And instructional videos are all valuable content.
The aim is to dangle a carrot that's worth good prospects giving their business details, so it needs to be a pretty juicy carrot.
Finally, the B2B lead generation supplier you use will make a big difference to the quality of your leads. Of course, you can agree on a CPL with any company and get back the required number of leads, but how do you know if they're any good?
Choosing a Reputable Lead Generation Company
Lots of B2B lead generation agencies are a little bit shady, which is one reason why lead generation is such a challenge to marketers. Maybe they use 3rd party websites to syndicate content, don't authenticate each lead properly, or simply buy a list of leads that aren't right for your market.
That's why the research stage is so important. You can choose a good B2B lead generation specialist by checking how they work: if they're a reputable, upfront company, they'll probably have the whole process detailed on their website. Plus, testimonials from current clients always help too.
At Headley, we outline our audience's entire Reader Journey on our website to give you an example.
Readers use our content libraries as trusted sources of valuable reports and papers, all generated by our clients. We then track our readers using our sites and obtain their explicit consent to hear from our clients.
Don't be shy: ask lead generation suppliers about the whole process, who owns the data, and what the journey looks like for the leads themselves. A good lead gen supplier won't be cagey about telling you how they work.
