The buyer journey often starts with a Google search, or the potential customer learns something new from their personal or professional networks, news-sites, and/or social media. Below are 8 tips for online demand generation - including how to show up among the top-five Google search results without spending a fortune on Google AdWords or other paid advertisements.
8 ways to create awareness to attract new B2B customers:
- Know Your Future Customers - Determine buyer personas, buyer journey, and relevant keywords. Do this to ensure that your content provide value over the buyer journey. Use tools like HubSpot Keyword Tool to identify the right keywords to use for website content and blog posts - this also helps you determine how to become on the top-5 Google research results.
- Provide Educational Content - develop and offer content that helps the potential customers understand the opportunity, calculate the ROI, determine requirements, etc. Make the top-of-the funnel content about them, not you. Publish this content as infographics, ebook, checklists, etc. Require the web visitor to complete a web form for accessing the content asset. Promote the calls-to-action on web pages and in blog posts.
- Blogging Brings in the Leads - According to HubSpot’s recent Benchmarks report, companies that blog 6-8 times per month double their lead volume. Make the blog posts of value to the reader, not a sales pitch. In every post, include hyperlinks to landing pages with content offers and web forms to capture their contact details.
- Search Engine Optimization Gives You a Long Tail - While promoting your offers in many channels is crucial for lead generation, it’s also equally important to make it easy for people to find your landing pages through search engines. To do this, you need to apply search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to your landing pages. Marketing Automation solutions like HubSpot make it easy to optimize web content and blog posts with the right title, URL, keywords, description, etc.
- Publish Once, Share Everywhere - Publish and share valuable offers and blog posts to social media with relevant twitter hashtags, and to relevant LinkedIn and Xing groups.
- Engage With Influencers to Reach New Customers - Identify bloggers, journalists, analysts, and customers that your customers pay attention to. Establish a relationship with them by liking and sharing their content. Become their fan to increase the chance that they will start to also like and share your content.
- Engage and Nurture New Leads - Next step is then to convert the web visitors to leads. Do this with valuable content offers, calls-to-actions, landing pages with web forms, and thank-you pages. Add then lead nurturing and scoring.
- Turn Existing Customers into Ambassadors - Gather customer quotes, case studies, and interviews. Share this on website, in blog posts, and to social media. Celebrate your customers and their success, not your company.
Success comes from having the right strategy, processes, and content, not just Marketing Automation software.
