Date
17th October 2024
B2B lead generation is the holy grail for marketers. You need a ready supply of new, high-quality leads to fill your marketing pipeline and nurture towards a purchase - but how do you find them?
According to HubSpot, generating leads was once again the biggest challenge for B2B marketers in 2024, along with keeping up with trends in this fast-changing world. There are hundreds of suppliers of B2B lead generation services out there, and more springing into being all the time - but not all of them can be trusted.
Too many B2B marketers are left disappointed by the quality of the leads they've paid for, with dodgy data leading straight to dead ends and nurturing emails that go nowhere.
And with the marketing world currently in a state of flux, it's more important than ever - particularly in the ever-inventive, ever-competitive technology sectors - to find reputable B2B lead generation agencies that are transparent and open about their lead generation methods.
In this article, we’ll explore:
- What is B2B lead generation?
- How to generate B2B leads.
- The best B2B lead generation campaigns.
- How to find a B2B lead generation firm (with examples).
- B2B lead generation tools and resources to download.
How Is B2B Lead Generation Changing?
The shift to greater personalization, and more specific knowledge of your leads’ intent will continue to be the major themes in lead generation in 2025.
Added to that is the big theme of artificial intelligence (AI), with HubSpot reckoning that the marketing world has shifted from the ‘age of information’ to the ‘age of intelligence’.
There’s a great need to balance AI and the human touch. In its 2024 State of Marketing report, HubSpot says that 75% of marketers find that personalized experiences drive sales and repeat business.
With greater personalization, comes the greater need for quality, especially when it comes to lead generation.
You have a couple of avenues to potentially boost the quality of your lead generation: the strategies you use, and the supplier you choose.
So before we get on to how to choose a supplier, let’s look at some B2B lead generation ideas.
5 of the Best B2B Lead Generation Strategies
Strategy #1: Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the strongest B2B lead generation strategies, and many technology businesses produce their own valuable content – whitepapers, eBooks, and case studies – to gain new audiences through B2B lead generation.
Content marketing is also a big part of demand generation, where the idea is prospective leads come to you organically, instead of you chasing them with outbound marketing.
Strategy #2: Demand Generation
Content marketing often feeds into demand generation, a slow-and-steady approach that’s less transactional, and harder to track, but is fantastic for raising your brand awareness and nurturing existing leads.
Content marketing for B2B demand generation usually involves ungated content, such as blogs, free downloads, and social media posts.
Whether gated or ungated, many technology companies who need to generate leads put a lot of time and effort into producing resources such as whitepapers and research reports, but then struggle to distribute their content to the right new audiences and see the results they were expecting.
Strategy #3: SEO
Website optimization and SEO offer some of the highest return on investment for marketers, according to HubSpot.
Getting your website and/or content onto the first page of Google is worth its weight in gold in terms of visibility. Buyers across the buying committee do their own research for solutions to their business needs, and are most likely to start with a search.
We always recommend optimizing content, including blogs and whitepapers, for SEO. We're also fans of budget-friendly search advertising, which can bring a big boost to how many people see your page, even if they don't click on the link.
Strategy #4: Social Media
Social media is incredibly useful for nurturing leads and for demand generation, but slightly weaker for top-of-funnel lead generation.
Advertising on social media doesn't always bring the results you hope for, especially if you have a smaller budget - after all, LinkedIn is enormous, so its ads are more expensive, while its audience targeting and campaign reporting are not quite as granular as we'd like.
Strategy #5: Content Syndication
The most effective way to generate high-quality B2B leads, we find, is to outsource your lead generation through content syndication.
Content syndication for lead generation is a B2B marketing strategy that involves hosting your most valuable content via a 3rd party provider. The aim is to promote your content to a much wider, and more relevant, audience.
Your content is gated, so the potential lead has to give their content details in order to access it. Your lead gen agency will then feed those details back to you as a list of leads, after a full lead validation process.
Trust, Transparency, and Integrity
It’s getting harder to differentiate between a great lead generation company and a bad one. Lots of apparently impressive lead gen agencies are actually mostly a good-looking website and lots of talk about their high-powered, AI-driven solutions.
But lead generation is only as good as the data behind it, and many of our competitors are sourcing their leads from mysterious 3rd party fulfilment centers.
The only way you can truly trust your lead generation supplier is to know where their data comes from, how they’ve validated their leads, and how they’ve obtained their consent.
“Massive-volume top-of funnel lead generation will definitely start to dwindle, because the yearn for quality is going to get only greater.”
Kevin Flint, BlueWhale Research
How To: Choose the Best B2B Lead Generation Company
When generating your leads through content syndication platforms, you should only work with a supplier who gives you complete transparency into their B2B lead generation services.
For example, you need to know:
- Where do they host your content? For example, which content syndication websites?
- How will they distribute your content?
- Ultimately, how will they generate your B2B leads?
The best B2B lead generation agencies host your content on their own websites.
To use ourselves as an example: at Headley Media we run our technology clients’ content syndication lead generation campaigns on our own content library websites. Our audiences download your educational content in return for their contact details, which they are usually happy to give because the content is uniquely valuable.
Then, if they fit your criteria, we feed their details back to you as a lead.
To find the right agency, look for those that have stringent quality control built into their B2B lead generation process to ensure your leads are highly accurate, validated and relevant. You can use our ungated Quality Lead Generation Checklist to help you find the right supplier for you.
As a further example, take a look at our reader journey, which breaks down our lead generation process.
Furthermore, a good B2B lead generation supplier should be able to deliver your leads using a fixed cost-per-lead (CPL) approach. This means you'll know the exact number of leads you'll get for your campaign's budget.
How many of the leads passing from your marketing team to your sales team are actually high-quality leads, which fit your ideal customer profile?
Gartner reported that only 44% of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) that are passed to sales teams are actually suitable potential customers. And of those, only a small number may actually be warmed up and ready to buy.
This is where a good B2B lead generation company can make all the difference. With a carefully targeted campaign that incorporates personalization and lead nurturing, you can attract the most suitable leads for your products and services.
How to Choose the Right B2B Lead Generation Agency: An Example
Ben is a marketing manager for a US cybersecurity company, MitchCam.
He is researching lead generation companies online. Ideally he’d like to find leads in the cybersecurity and finance sectors, in Europe, as MitchCam is about to open two satellite offices in Germany and France.
He has narrowed his search down to two agencies. Both have highly professional websites and promise local-language lead generation via content syndication in dozens of different countries.
Both claim to be able to reach leads in the sectors he is targeting, and offer intent data targeting so Ben can track and read his leads’ buying signals.
However, Ben knows enough about lead generation to check how these suppliers are sourcing their leads. One of these agencies, when he clicks their “how do we do it” page, makes no mention of where their data comes from – only that they find leads ‘using AI and machine learning’.
The other agency is much more transparent: its website includes links to over 300 of its content libraries, as well as a Reader Journey page, so Ben can see exactly how the process works, from the lead’s perspective.
He chooses the more transparent agency (like Headley Media, as an example).
What B2B Lead Generation Services Do They Offer?
A good lead generation company should be able to offer you a range of sophisticated B2B lead generation services to suit your objectives, content, and budget.
The classic, most simple lead generation method is a Single Touch campaign. This is where prospects are exposed to one piece of your content before becoming a lead.
In a Double Touch lead generation campaign, readers are exposed to two pieces of your content, downloading at least one asset, therefore increasing your brand exposure and warming up each lead.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have the option of running a SoftBANT campaign.
SoftBANT lead generation uses multiple pieces of content to assess your leads' Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe, so you can prioritize follow-up with those prospects that are indicating strong buying signals.
There are also various other services you can use to enhance your campaign, such as:
Account-Based Marketing (ABM).
This is a hugely popular type of targeted B2B lead generation because it’s all about personalizing a campaign based on the audience.
With ABM, you start with a target account list (TAL) of most likely, potentially-lucrative businesses, and find the most relevant people within those businesses.
You then target those individuals with relevant, personalized messages. An ABM specialist can help you build your TAL and personalize your messaging.
Leveraging Intent Data
Intent data targeting is the art of tracking your leads’ product research and intent, and cross-referencing it with 3rd party data, to work out what stage they are in the marketing funnel - and when your sales team should get in touch with them.
A good B2B lead generation company can help utilize intent data within your marketing campaigns more effectively.
Audience Intelligence
When you gate your whitepapers, webinars etc. with a content download form, you don’t have to stop at contact details: you can ask more questions.
Enhancing your B2B lead gen with audience intelligence strategies such as profiling or qualifying questions is one of the best techniques for assessing your leads’ suitability and readiness to buy.
B2B Display Advertising
Most good B2B lead generation firms will allow you to boost your lead gen campaign with display advertising.
B2B display ads give you another opportunity to reach potential leads through well-placed ads across relevant websites, meaning your target audience is more likely to remember you when it’s time to buy.
Lead Nurturing
After generating your leads, it’s just as important to nurture them through the marketing funnel, to ensure as many as possible convert to sales.
B2B lead nurturing and lead scoring are two vital steps if you don’t want your new leads to decay and become cold to your business.
The best providers can provide nurturing as a B2B lead generation service, helping to deliver leads who are already warmed up to your business and products.
Headley Media’s Approach to B2B Lead Generation
The B2B lead generation industry has its fair share of unscrupulous suppliers who are not transparent, outsource their campaigns to 3rd parties and have little or no validation process. So you need to be sure of what you're getting from your lead gen agency.
We all know that sinking-heart feeling when you press 'send' on a follow-up email and bounce-backs start pouring in. It's better to know in advance whether your supplier is using 3rd party databases within their content syndication services, and whether they validate their leads before delivering them to you.
Hannah Lydford Content Marketing Manager @ Headley Media
Our B2B lead generation service is 100% digital – therefore fully traceable – and gives you leads that are engaged with your own content.
The senior professionals who use our content library websites have found your content on one of our websites, willingly given their full business card information in exchange for being able to read it, and are actively thinking about not just the services your brand provides but specifically your brand.
They're primed for contact.
Our 300+ websites span 60 countries and 32 languages
As a B2B lead generation specialist, we've built our portfolio of content library websites over the last 15 years based on the demand from our technology clients and the audiences they need to reach, across the globe.
Our readers come to us for high-quality content in a distraction-free environment. That means you'll find no adverts or irrelevant editorial on our websites, just great content. Putting our audience and their experience first has helped us build a loyal and engaged readership of technology decision-makers across IT, AI, Cybersecurity, Finance, HR, Marketing, and Electronics Engineering.
We’ve got loads of useful stuff on B2B lead generation for marketing professionals. Check out our B2B lead generation resources for blogs, whitepapers, eBooks, and more - how about our Complete Guide to Technology Lead Generation to get started?
Explore Headley Media's Lead Generation Brands:
- IT Corporate's portfolio of 63 websites – helping you reach Senior IT and technology decision-makers across 60 countries in 32 languages.
- AI Corporate's portfolio of 60 websites - helping you reach senior AI and technology decision-makers globally.
- Cybersecurity Corporate's portfolio of 63 websites – helping you reach Cybersecurity and technology decision-makers across 60 countries in 32 languages.
- FinTech Corporate's portfolio of 34 websites – helping you reach senior Finance Professionals and decision-makers.
- HRTech Corporate's portfolio of 34 websites – helping you reach senior HR Professionals and decision-makers.
- MarTech Corporate's portfolio of 34 websites – helping you reach senior Business, Marketing, Sales Professionals, and decision-makers.
- Electronic Pro's portfolio of 35 websites – helping you reach senior Electronics Engineers and decision-makers.
FREE: B2B Lead Generation Planning Toolkit
Download your free B2B lead generation planning toolkit to help you plan every element of your lead generation campaign.
Inside you'll find guidance and editable tools to use to help you with planning your B2B lead generation campaigns, including:
- Identifying all the buyers involved in purchasing your technology products and solutions.
- Running the right kind of lead generation campaign based on your objectives.
- Selecting the right content to promote to your target audiences.
- Planning your campaign messaging and follow-up.
- Choosing the right B2B lead generation companies to work with.
As a long-standing provider of B2B lead generation services, we've poured our expertise into this toolkit to give you a head start when planning your B2B lead gen strategies.
