B2B Lead Generation Blueprint: killer 12 week campaigns
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Mon, Dec 21, 2009
Money talks
Over the last nine years, I have made a living at helping B2B companies generate leads. Through close collaboration with clients, we've helped produce $2B in qualified B2B leads and $225M in B2B sales opportunities for clients.
Take my client that in 2009 built $1M in B2B leads in 12 weeks on a $25,500
investment, for example. That’s a 3,922% return on investment. Another increased B2B sales by more than half, with less than 2% of its annual revenue invested in B2B marketing. Another grew B2B sales leads 500% in about 12 months, with less than $50,000 invested.
What is (and isn't) a sales lead?
Per B2B sales lead expert Mac Macintosh, "leads are qualified, sales-ready opportunities."
A guy visiting your website isn't a sales lead.
A guy you bump into at a tradeshow isn't a lead.
A guy who subscribes to your newsletter ain't a sales lead, either.
An inbound lead generation campaign is about jump starting real relationships with real business decision makers, while holding costs to a minimum.
B2B lead generation blueprint
To do it, we prepare and rollout a 12 week lead generation campaign focused on developing and promoting an educational guide (or ebook, executive brief, tip sheet, decision guide...). In each guide is a call to action that helps prospects to the next step.
- BUILD CONTENT - First we interview you about topics important to your target audience. Drawing on your comments, we write one executive brief, guide, or ebook conveying important tips, insights, and steps to learn more. We write a search optimized landing page (LP), confirmations page, and email confirmation. We also adapt the content to prepare a search optimized press release. We prepare blurbs you can place on your website, email signature area, and other places.
- ADAPT CONTENT - We optimize visit-to-lead conversions by having hard-working landing pages and attracting prospects to them using search engine optimization, social media marketing and an optimized press release. We adapt the content to other purposes as well, to get more mileage. For example, we help equip the CEO to offer information on the content via email, on his networking platforms like LinkedIn, and – importantly – in person to other executives.
- PROMOTE CONTENT - On an agreed-on date, we publish the guide, issue the press release, send the promotional email, and post links on social networks. We meet weekly to track and discuss campaign ROI.
When we get started with content marketing, it typically benefits the client within weeks.
Your sales leads and experiences
Where do your sales leads come from? What does and doesn't work, in your experience?