Lead Generation Ideas for B2B

Acquiring leads is one of the main objectives of any business. Companies dedicate large amounts of resources to lead generation. The truth is, if your prospects are not ready to buy what you are selling, you will find it difficult to make sales.

Good leads are prospects that have an interest in your product or service and are in the market to make a purchase. These high-quality leads can assist companies in boosting sales and ROI. However, many companies still choose to go for quantity over quality when it comes to leads.

With the introduction of modern marketing tools, software, and social media platforms, marketers are able to fine-tune their skills in acquiring high-quality leads. The main challenge lies in determining which of your leads is of high quality and ready to buy.

What is a lead?

A lead is a person or a company potentially interested in your product or service. Every lead consists of information that you have on them. For example, a basic lead would be a name, contact details, and company name/location/job title. 

Types of leads

Now let’s have a look at how to categorize leads. We’ve defined three main ways you can do it: 

Lead type 1: Based on interest

Interest is the first point that helps you define leads and split them into two subgroups:

• Warm, or inbound leads, are the ones who showed their interest by themselves and found you on their own (for example, they came across your blog and subscribed to your newsletters).

• Cold, or outbound leads, are a subgroup of leads generated by you thanks to your targeting strategy and lead generation tools.

Lead type 2: Based on enrichment

The second type is based on the information you have on your leads. Depending on the amount of data you have, you can divide them into two subgroups: 

• Non-enriched leads are thin on information. Most often, they only have a name and an email address or a phone number (one contact method).

• Enriched leads come with a set of additional information you can use for personalization and multi-channel marketing: secondary contact details, company name, location, job position, pain points, etc.

Lead type 3: Based on qualification

This type helps define leads based on their qualification and stage in the sales funnel:

• Marketing qualified lead (MQL) has an interest in you but is still not ready to communicate. Let’s say, they’ve subscribed to your blog newsletters or signed up through your lead magnet, leaving their contact information in exchange.

• Sales qualified lead (SQL) has expressed actual interest in your product and is one step closer to becoming a paying customer. For example, such business leads leave their contact information to get in touch with your sales team to learn more details about your product.

• Product qualified lead (PQL) has taken action to become a paying customer. They are similar to SQLs but with a slight difference: PQLs are typical for companies that provide a free trial. These leads may be using your free trial but are asking you about some of the features available in paid plans only.

Now that we’re done with the lead definition, let’s dive deeper into lead generation meaning and what it entails.

So, What Is Lead Generation?

Any person who has an interest in a company’s product or service is considered a lead. Not anyone and everyone is a lead, as people have different preferences and needs. Many businesses make the mistake of marketing to everyone when they should focus on people who are interested in what the company has to offer.

Lead generation is a process of searching for people who may be potentially interested in your service and getting in contact with them to communicate further and convert. It coincides with the first step in the buyer’s journey – the awareness stage.

When a person shows interest in your brand’s products or services, the steps that person takes towards making their first purchase just seem natural. You just helped them to fulfill a need or solve a problem.

When a person has no interest in what you have to offer, yet you still try to convince them to make a purchase, they may feel like they are being pushed to spend their money. This can make the customer feel like they were forced to buy your product and it can hurt your brand’s reputation.

Attending to your target audience only through lead generation can ensure that your brand is ideally matched with the right customers. 

Most marketing departments measure lead quantity when determining a successful lead generation campaign. Sales teams, on the other hand, focus on lead quality. Leads with a clear intent to purchase your product, have the finances and means to do so, and meet the parameters set by you are considered as quality leads.

If a company focuses on lead quality, the chances of converting a lead into a customer drastically increase. Having higher conversion rates will allow you to confidently invest in your quality leads, increasing your return on investment (ROI).

Source Ascend2

Importance of Lead Generation

The lead-to-customer conversion rate is never 100%. This is why filling in the sales funnel with quality leads is the main lead generation purpose. The importance of getting quality leads is obvious. It helps you:

• Target the right people. You focus your resources on specific customers who are more likely to buy your product or service. This results in saved time and money, streamlining your company’s processes and growing sales.

• Build brand awareness. Lead generation always entails educating your leads on your company and its product — both when they get to know about you on their own or when you reach out to them with the information about your product’s features. Leads can then spread information about your brand by word of mouth, bringing you even more clients.

• Get valuable data. As a rule, generating leads means collecting information about your prospective customers, their wants and needs, and your competitors. This helps you improve your product or service so that it has a competitive advantage in the market.

• Grow revenue. With an effective lead generation strategy, your company can get 133% more revenue than you’ve planned.

Source MarketingCharts

Generating effective ideas for lead magnets can be a long process but these ideas can essentially offer a lot of value that many targeted audiences can’t turn away from.

Let’s just say, the more refined your lead magnet is, the more qualified those leads become as you’re offering just what they need at the correct time.

So, in case you feel a little lost, we’ve compiled 30 highly effective ideas for B2B lead magnets that will lead you on the right path and the best part is, you can benefit a lot by putting your spin on each of these.

30 B2B Lead Magnets Ideas

1. Infographics

Infographics are everywhere, so there's not much to argue on why it makes a well-performing lead magnet. Infographics are known for boosting web traffic by about 12% or even more. Another study by Venngage reports how original graphics (infographics included) prove to be incredibly engaging among audiences according to 42% of marketing respondents.

2. Guides

Guides, at least the travel ones may not be of use anymore. However, in the light of marketing, guides remain as relevant and useful as ever. Take Light Travels for instance that makes use of a free guide based on budget-conscious traveling as their lead magnet.

3. Free Consultations

Free consultations can enable marketing teams to identify and prioritize those highly qualified prospects. Moreover, potential leads can also voice their concerns and gain more insight from industry experts. However, it’s a more expensive approach that involves higher fiction but is less scalable.

4. Webinars

Webinars usually focus on teaching participants how to achieve something and as lead magnets, webinars can provide valuable information and knowledge that participants can make use of. Additionally, webinars typically conclude with incentives like a discount code or something similar to reel participants in.

5. Templates

Templates are incredibly time-saving tools and these are pretty easy to create for your lead prospects. Now, the real catch is that once these templates are created, various businesses may simply download them for comparing notes with your approach and in return, offer valuable information like email addresses.

6. Product Catalogues

As a brand, your product range will continue to develop, hence, many of your leads will want more info on those different products. They may even hope to get contacted once new offers are made available, and so this is precisely where product catalogs mark their debut as the catalogs themselves can be updated and delivered with every season.

7. Free Trial Service

More often, prospective leads interested in the product/service you’re offering will be attracted by trying to figure out what it exactly is. So, instead of explaining the entire model, treat those audiences with a free trial or maybe a taster and in exchange, you can receive their email address.

8. Educational Videos

Some people simply prefer the whole consuming content at a pace of their own bit, so, this is where contents that contain education videos shine the best. Moreover, the videos can be cut into teasers, made into gifs, or even reused as part of a promotion.

9. Discounts

Discounts are known to be quite fundamental in the world of B2C marketing, however, this very tactic is just as useful and effective for B2B marketers. Especially, when you consider the part where customers are required to enter email addresses for receiving the discounts.

10. Surveys

Surveys are great for businesses in general as they help gain valuable insights. When company performances are compared with fellow marketers or even competitors through the use of surveys, it opens up a great path for generating interest, gaining contacts, and harvesting data.

11. E-books

E-books are a classic and perhaps the best bit about this idea is that you don’t have to create one from scratch. You can easily compile your popular blogs into an e-book format, include a fresh intro & conclusion, and voila! You’ve got yourselves a lead magnet.

12. Toolkits

Toolkits combine several resources into a single file for creating more value. As such, toolkits can include a calculator or checklist, a whitepaper, or a concise e-book and even incorporate templates for users – all of this makes toolkits an interesting lead idea.

13. Newsletters

Newsletters are great, particularly for nurturing & retaining a long-term client. They allow you to remain relevant with leads and helps promote a steady and healthy relationship with them. As for the leads, they’re able to offer helpful insight each time they open one.

14. Free Tools

This is an idea that requires patience as tools often take time to develop however, you get to reap double in rewards. Tools that can evaluate company performances, web pages, economic desire, etc. are some examples that can benefit the company.

15. PDFs

Everyone has different preferences when consuming information online and as certain posts can contain over 10,000 words, many readers can’t process that in one sitting. This is the reason why the inclusion of your posts as PDF files is a great initiation.

16. Product Demos

For those that are already interested in the product/service you’re offering, a comprehensive walkthrough of the product/service along with a thorough overview is what will help seal the deal. So, demonstrating your product/service is a great idea, especially for initiating the first contact.

17. Quizzes

You can also host quizzes that challenge potential leads on certain subjects & activities relating to their business. Give it a try and you’d be amazed at the amount of engagement and interactivity generated via a B2B quiz. Plus, you’ll likely get their email addresses as well.

18. Planners

Planners do work in many scenarios but generic planners simply won’t do it today for many people so, try creating planners specifically designed for those within your industry. Better yet, offer in both free downloadable print and digital PDF file format that users can easily fill via their computers.

19. Swipe Files

These work quite similar to templates, however, it doesn’t require the lead prospects to add any personal details. They’re able to simply copy-paste the content, thus, making it a lot more appealing for leads that are less invested.

20. Checklists

There’s a certain flair to checklists and people simply love them as they can provide direction and structure. Companies can easily utilize a checklist in an attempt to replicate or measure the success of other companies/services that they may require later.

21. Pieces/Interviews on Thought Leadership

Company or industry leaders are always desired due to their vision & interpretation concerning recent trends and events. Therefore, assembling such content and providing it to various individuals can help generate an incentive to garner more leads.

22. LinkedIn groups

One way to make individuals feel supported and successful is to create a network of similar professionals and offer them access to it. By starting and moderating such groups around a particular topic gives you an authoritative presence in certain conversations or businesses.

23. Cheatsheets

Numerous customers will often come in need of your expertise in varying degrees, however, a cheat sheet is somewhat of a useful reference that can leave customers yearning for an in-depth expansion or explanation, leaving you with more exposure.

24. Predictions

Reading predictions can be of great interest as they offer the chance to center yourself as an industry leader. So, make sure to put out predictions concerning your industry/product and distribute them as downloadable lead magnets for garnering leads more quickly.

25. Gated Blog Posts

Half-gated blog posts, especially towards the conclusion bit can be both powerful and easy to create as it makes use of your existing content. By gating the second or bottom half of longer blogs, you can easily garner the contact details of any curious parties.

26. Generators

More often, generators are typically used by people in need of creating something quick or those in search of inspiration. Now, this happens quite often and so these come extremely handy every time and serve as a great lead magnet. If you’re prepped to make it one!

27. Resource Lists

For those that are more interested in finding efficient, useful content & resources that cater to their needs, resource lists prove to be huge time savers. Essentially, a shortlist containing helpful resources along with quick reviews can aid companies in saving hundreds of trial, research, and error time.

28. Workbooks

The workbook is a very effective lead magnet, particularly for service businesses. A Workbook typically has a download & complete resource format that assists people in applying your blog post principles to their own service/business.

29. Case Studies

These usually depend on specific content, however, its success can get customers to seal the deal. Now, case studies do require client permission but once approved, it makes an efficient lead magnet for hosting content that shares customer success under your guidance.

30. Podcasts

Podcasts aren't usually used as lead magnets, however, if you can extend any short podcast into an hour-long conversation. Such deep-dive via a podcast works equally well as a video, plus you're getting direct engagement with leads, thus, increasing engagement.

Lead magnets are great because they work for most, if not all audiences, including not just B2C but B2B businesses as well. They’re highly efficient as they can further open the door for expanding communication between the lead and the business.

However, its success greatly depends on how businesses often execute the idea as well, hence, it’s important to adapt and work with it according to your industry and also research on how it can cater to specific audiences.