Leads aren’t Pokemon – you can’t catch them all. But a robust B2B marketing strategy goes a long way toward filling up your pipeline with qualified leads.
If you’re stuck in a rut, we’ll show you 7 outbound B2B marketing strategies that will grow your pipeline quickly!
Top 7 Outbound B2B Marketing Strategies to Get More Leads in 2022
- Qualify your audience
- Cover multiple touch-points with video ads
- Use a consultative approach to lead magnets
- Add account-based retargeting to your B2B toolkit
- Convert with high-performing nurturing sequences
- Use interactive content in your outbound campaigns
- Work with or feature influencers in your campaigns
- Build a community around your product
Before You Start: Qualify Your Audience
When you target everyone, you don’t speak to anyone. Clarify who your ideal customers are, and then segment them by relevant criteria.
For example, you may have Segment A and Segment B, in which:
- Segment A – VPs in fintech companies
- Segment B – Operations managers in construction companies
(Plus, sprinkle some company demographics information on top. Don’t forget about individual psychographics – what does the stakeholder struggle with? You’re still talking to people with needs, wants, problems, and wishes.)
Create a dedicated outbound marketing campaign for each segment. Start with your customer profile and then reverse-engineer your campaign based on that audience.
1. Match Your B2B Video Ads to the Customer Journey
Video ads really spice things up in B2B! In fact, 90% of LinkedIn marketers say that video is one of their strongest channels.
Video ads allow you to gauge the prospect’s level of interest. Most platforms like YouTube display metrics showing how long leads have watched your videos, which is an excellent proxy for engagement.
Once you get two groups (for example, leads who have watched 15 seconds of your video and leads who have watched it to completion), you can quickly prioritize follow-up activities.
Video for Every Funnel Stage
Align your outbound campaign with the buyer’s journey:
- Step 1 – Increase awareness with a short, benefit-oriented video
- Step 2 – Retarget with a product demo or tutorial video (perfect for getting buy-in from user buyers)
- Step 3 – Close the deal with a testimonial or case study video
Supplement your video campaign with downloadable lead magnets such as case studies. They’ll be more effective once you’ve obtained interest through easily-consumable video advertising.
Creating Custom Audiences in Facebook and LinkedIn
Thankfully you can create custom audiences based on each step within Facebook and LinkedIn. Here’s how you’d do it:
- Launch your step 1 awareness video to a large audience.
- Create a custom audience for those who have watched at least 50% of video one.
- Run your step 2 consideration video only to those in the custom audience.
- Create a second custom audience of those who have watched 50% of your consideration video.
- Run your step 3 testimonial or case study only to those in your second custom audience.
It’s like running a full-funnel marketing campaign all right there in Facebook or LinkedIn.
2. Build a Consultative Outbound B2B Marketing Strategy
We typically think of campaigns as a way to appear in front of our target market. However, customers increasingly expect us to not only be their vendors but strategic advisors.
How to Leverage Consultative Marketing in Your Outbound Strategy
In your next outbound campaign, focus on one specific problem you solve for your customers:
- The problem should be specific, and there shouldn’t be many resources for solving it. Identify new trends, challenges, or responses to the changing preferences of your customers’ customers.
- Don’t tease the promise of value only to require prospects to leave their contact information in exchange for the solution. Gate your content strategically; offer content upgrades.
- Reference your existing experiences and customers to demonstrate your advice can be implemented. Make your case studies actionable and highlight your team’s expertise in your target market’s industries.
Traditional lead magnets no longer work. Gone are the days when you could post a whitepaper online and prospects scrambled to offer their email addresses. Contemporary B2B buyers want you to prove value. Then, they’ll contact you.
Anticipate problems your customers don’t know how to solve. Then, build your B2B marketing strategy around them.
3. Add Account-Based Retargeting to Your B2B Marketing Toolkit
No one’s happier than us to say that retargeting is no longer annoying (and ignorable) pop-up display ads. If you already use account-based marketing, add account-based retargeting to secure buy-in from every stakeholder.
Account-based retargeting allows you to provide a white-glove marketing experience to your key prospects. Instead of trying to attract them with a catch-all offer, customize it to specific pain points.
You shouldn’t spread yourself thin, but some prospects are worth mapping, consulting, and spending more time on.
Who Should You Retarget?
Don’t zero in exclusively on the economic buyer. Identify other stakeholders and dispel their objections before pitching.
For example, engineers are often saddled with a ticketing solution chosen by product managers. It rarely addresses their needs as user buyers. Why not set up a retargeting campaign that proves your ticketing solution meets everyone’s demands?
4. Secure Interest, then Nurture
Instead of pushing for a sale, remember the principles of consultative selling and create an outbound campaign that leads prospects into your funnel.
Then, leverage email marketing, retargeting, and follow-ups to understand their challenges.
Add value at every step:
- Send resources your prospect can share with other stakeholders
- Interviews with customers who resolved similar challenges
- Tactics your team can help the prospect apply
Your goal is to create a nurturing sequence that naturally invites your prospect to book a call.
Don’t overdo it. Email isn’t every prospect’s preferred channel, so if you see low open rates, try different channels or volumes.
Lead Scoring and Nurturing
Once the sales team scores leads, identify the leads that require a personal follow-up vs. leads where you’ll automate the nurturing process. This is a lead flow process you can automate in tools like Sales Simplify, HubSpot and Salesforce.
In light-touch cases, an email aggregating your best resources could work exceedingly well:
5. Utilise Interactive B2B Marketing Strategies
The golden rule of sales is to listen more than you speak. In marketing, we can apply it to the type of outbound campaigns we run through interactive strategies. Chances are, you’ve seen examples on your LinkedIn feed – the lead gen form sneakily disguised as a quiz.
Instead of telling your prospects that you have just the thing for them, try asking them what they need.
(This is a great way to let leads qualify themselves, too!)
Types of Interactive B2B Quizzes
You have plenty of options:
- TOFU – Pop quizzes and knowledge checks
- MOFU – Consultation quizzes
- BOFU – Product and service discovery quizzes
The best part about lead generation quizzes is they invite prospects to commit. In the long term, this micro-commitment leads to growing contact lists. You’ll give your sales team plenty of high-quality leads if you add qualification questions.
Other Interactive Methods to Generate B2B Leads
A great example of authoritative lead generation comes from Content Marketing Institute. Their webinars often cover novel content marketing challenges.
You don’t necessarily need a live webinar. You can pre-record it and have a team member on stand-by for live chat.
(Bonus points if you give leads a VIP offer upon completion!)
Similarly, you can create calculators. The New York Times’ mortgage calculator is a great example.
If they were a fintech company, the calculator would be a hit with their target audience.
6. Include Influencers in Your B2B Lead Generation Campaigns
You’re always speaking to individuals, and their feeds and inboxes are overflowing with thought leaders whose opinions they value.
B2B Influencer Campaign Examples
B2B influencers are trickier to come by than B2C. Most of them don’t offer sponsorship opportunities. Instead, they have their own forms of content and projects, including:
- Podcasts
- Op-ed articles
- Social media
- Conferences
Get in touch with them, explain why you believe your offer benefits their audience, and be open about collaboration.
You don’t always have to pitch your product in a sponsored podcast. Instead, someone from your team can share their experiences as a podcast guest, or you can collaborate on the influencer’s project.
You can feature B2B influencers in your campaigns. For example, Videofruit’s Bryan Harris is an influencer in his own right, so the company featured him in their outbound campaign:
Don’t forget about your own customer base! You may already have brand advocates (customers who love your product and have a significant following).
Not long ago, we connected with a local influencer to create a special pull with a specific community we were marketing too. Learn about how we did it in this case study.
7. Bonus: Build a Community Around Your Product
It’s hard for modern professionals to get answers to their questions quickly. If your prospect doesn’t have a vast peer network, they’ll be stuck in the internet rabbit hole.
Position your brand as a trusted advisor by building a community around your product.
You don’t have to be too ambitious; even a Circle community or a Slack channel can go a long way.
Assemble your brand advocates, assign moderation to one of the team members, and get the traction going. With high-quality content and engaged members, leads will want to join.
From there, it’ll be simple to upsell them to your offer.
Business Doesn’t Work without People
Every prospect that sees your campaign is a person with one nagging problem.
Your mission, should you accept it, is to prove that you can solve it.
Instead of pushing for sales, relate to the person on the other side of the screen. Then, simply choose the right channel.
Soon enough, leads will come to you for advice.
