We evangelise about the 4 major pillars of B2B lead generation marketing from our B2B Lead Generation e-book; blogging, your website, landing pages and social media marketing.

In this post I’m going to summarise the 4 key tips to take from that e-book / webinar or thought leadership and look at how to make them work for B2B marketing.

Blog as much as you can, whenever you can

• Start With 4 posts a month
  For many event marketers this is just a pipe dream as they don’t have enough time to blog daily, so we recommend starting by trying to blog at least 4 times a month which may feel more manageable and will still have a great effect on your lead volume.
• Do whatever you can whenever you can
  It’s better to blog than not at all as over time you accrue credit for the total number of posts you write. In our e-book stats businesses with over 200 total blog articles got 3.5 times more leads than those with fewer than 20 blog posts
• You can't do everything by yourself
  More likely than not your internal product gurus are too busy to give you the blogs they have promised, you can't even start thinking of adding time to write them yourself. So this is the case where you will need to hire a blog writer. When we say hiring a blog writer we don't mean full time, you can pay as you go by piece, for a set or a series etc. They will not cost you much. Give it a go, it will be the best return on investment you will ever get.

Generate a critical mass of content on your site

• Create, create, create
  The more content you create the more traffic and leads your business will see. More traffic provides more leads, in fact businesses with websites that have 401 to 1,000 webpages have 6 times more leads than those with 51 to 100.
• Have a plan
  If you take a scattergun approach to content creation your site can get very big and chaotic very quickly. Having a set site structure and a plan for content creation will combat this e.g. all conference add-ons have 5 pages following the same format.
• Don’t lost sight of value
  Create valuable content on your site, don’t just churn out pages for pages sake. Your blog is your best friend here as it allows you to add value rather than more boring sales copy. Think of content creation in terms of creating answers to your prospective delegates’ questions and you won’t go far wrong.

Have many targeted landing pages with calls to action

• More is more
  Both B2B and B2C companies with over 40 landing pages generated over 10 times more leads than those with only 1 to 5 landing pages. More landing pages indicate a greater variety of links and more targeted messaging on each page.
• It’s all about them
  The message on your landing page should be exactly tailored to the kind of traffic I expect the links to it to deliver (warm, cold etc.), it should add value and meet the prospect’s expectations (i.e. match what they clicked on to arrive there, there’s nothing worse than getting event sales copy when you expected an informative article).
• Provide clear direction
  Ask yourself “Does my landing page have a compelling call to action/conversion mechanism?” If not, it’s not going to be any use for lead generation. For events this doesn’t always have to be “register”, vary your CTA and see what works best.

Have an active presence on social media.

• Use all 3 major platforms
  Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are all proven B2B lead generators; you should try and maintain an active presence on each. Event marketers have traditionally stayed away from Facebook but there’s growing evidence that this is an effective platform for B2B lead generation.
• Build a critical mass of followers
  Without a following it’s similar to talking to an empty room and reaching 300-1000 followers can yield 4 times the number of leads on Twitter and 6.5 times the leads on Facebook than a following of 1-25.
• Engage and convert
  Gaining a follower is the start of a journey, you need to consistently provide value add, engaging content to draw the person down the buying path to the point where they trust you enough to shell out for a ticket.

If you’ve enjoyed the stats above and you haven’t yet seen the e-book we produced in partnership with Hubspot, you can get it here and access all the stats and charts for B2B, B2C, traffic and lead generation across the 4 different pillars.