59 B2B Lead Generation Ideas to Steal: Tips to Drive More Sales Leads

What is Lead Generation in B2B?

B2B lead generation is the process of finding and attracting potential customers for a business. It's one of the most important steps in creating a sales pipeline and keeping it full of leads and increasing revenue. Those leads represent one of the most important sources of current and future cash flows.

Learn How to Master B2B Lead Generation. Here's 59 Proven Business Lead Generation Techniques, Tools, and Systems To Help You Hit Your Lead Gen Goals.

What does B2B stand for?

BtoB, or Business-to-Business (commonly written as B2B), is a type of commerce transaction that exists between businesses, such as one involving a manufacturer and wholesaler, or a wholesaler and retailer. B2B is also used to describe electronic commerce transactions between businesses. Businesses can be of any size, from small to large enterprises.

What's the Difference Between B2B vs B2C

The main difference between B2B lead gen and B2C lead gen is that B2Bs are usually much more complex than B2Cs because they involve multiple decision makers within an organization who may have different objectives.  That's why you may also hear it referred to as B2B corporate lead generation by B2B lead generators.

How Do You Generate B2B Leads?

There are many ways to generate leads, but some 

lead generation campaigns and methods are more effective than others. Here are 59 common and not so common B2B lead generation campaign ideas that you can steal for your business:

1. Affiliate Links
2. Blogging - Own Blog
3. Chatbots - Driven by AI (Artificial Intelligence)
4. Cold calling/emailing lists
5. Content marketing
6. Content Marketing - Assessment Tools
7. Content Marketing - Business Case Builders
8. Content Marketing - Case Studies
9. Content Marketing - Catalogues
10. Content Marketing - Checklists
11. Content Marketing - How to Guides
12. Content Marketing - Interactive Online Tools
13. Content Marketing - Operating Manuals
14. Content Marketing - Videos
15. Contests
16. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
17. Educational Webinars
18. Email marketing campaigns
19. Event sponsorship
20. Facebook Ads
21. Gamification
22. Google AdWords
23. Google Discovery Ads
24. Google Lead Forms
25. Google Performance Max Campaigns
26. Google Search Ads
27. Google Shopping Ads
28. Google Video Ads
29. Guest blogging
30. Instagramming - Depending on Industry
31. Internal Linking - Strategic Approach
32. LinkedIn Ads
33. LinkedIn groups
34. LinkedIn Live Events - Video
35. LinkedIn Post - Company Page
36. LinkedIn Post - Personal Page
37. LinkedIn Product Page
38. LinkedIn Service Page
39. Networking events
40. Offer Simplification
41. Paid Product Placement - In Video
42. PPC advertising across channels
43. Pricing Strategies
44. Press releases
45. Product Demonstrations
46. Product Education Offerings
47. Product Placement - In App
48. Product reviews
49. Product Simplification - Improvement
50. Provide Online Calculators
51. Provide Online Quoting Tools
52. Quantity Based Discounts
53. Rebates
54. Revenue Based Discounts
55. SEO optimization (Search Engine Optimization)
56. Social media marketing
57. Telesales
58. Trade shows
59. Vlogging - Video Blogging

What is the Best B2B Lead Generation Method?

There is no single "best" B2B lead generation method. The best approach is to use a variety of methods to reach the widest audience possible.

Some common B2B lead generation strategies include content marketing, educational webinars, email marketing campaigns, event sponsorship, and Google AdWords ROI.

What's the Most Effective B2B Lead Generation Approach?

The most effective B2B lead generation strategy is one that is tailored to your specific business and target audience. There are many different ways to generate leads, so it's important to experiment with different methods to find what works best for you.

How Do You Learn B2B Lead Generation?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the best way to learn B2B lead generation depends on your specific business and target audience. However, some common methods for learning B2B lead generation include attending trade shows, participating in webinars, reading blogs and whitepapers, and subscribing to email newsletters.

Start with the Free Hubspot Inbound Marketing Certification Training

Most people are not aware that even if you are not currently a Hubspot customer, you can still take their initial Inbound Marketing Certification training.

Hubspot Inbound Marketing Certification Training

The Hubspot Inbound Marketing Certification Training is a great place to start because it covers all aspects of inbound marketing, from creating buyer personas and developing content strategy to setting up lead capture forms and running email marketing campaigns.

Google AdWords Training

Google AdWords is a great way to generate leads for your business. The Google AdWords training covers all aspects of using Google AdWords, from setting up your Google Ads account to creating effective campaigns. You'll learn how to target your ads to the right audience and get the most out of your budget. After completing the training, you'll be able to set up and manage your own Google AdWords campaigns.

Google Display Network Training

The Google Display Network is a vast collection of websites that allow businesses to place banner ads on their pages. The Google Display Network training course provides an in-depth look at how to use the network to generate leads and

Advanced Google Adwords Targeting

Google AdWords is a pay-per-click advertising platform that allows businesses to create ads and target them to specific audiences. The Google AdWords training course provides an in-depth look at how to use the platform to generate leads and sales. The course covers everything from creating your first ad campaign to targeting specific demographics and using advanced features like remarketing and conversion tracking.

Google Analytics Training

Google Analytics is a free tool that allows businesses to track how people are interacting with their website. The Google Analytics training course covers all aspects of setting up and using Google Analytics, from creating goals and conversion tracking to understanding your audience's demographics and interests. After completing the course, you'll be able to use Google Analytics to measure the success of your website and make data-driven decisions about how to improve your marketing strategy.

Facebook Blueprint Advertising Training

Facebook Ads are a great way to reach potential customers who are already interested in your products or services. The Facebook Ads training course provides an in-depth look at how to create effective Facebook advertising campaigns. You'll learn how to target your ads to the right audience, create custom audiences, and use powerful

Facebook Advertising Training

Facebook Advertising is another popular pay-per-click advertising platform. The Facebook Advertising training course covers all aspects of creating, launching, and optimizing campaigns on the Facebook Ads platform. The course includes modules on setting up custom audiences, targeting interests and behaviors, and using power editor to create more complex campaigns.

LinkedIn Ads Training

LinkedIn Ads are another great way to generate leads for your business. The LinkedIn training and certification course covers all aspects of using LinkedIn Ads, from setting up your account to creating effective campaigns. You'll learn how to target your ads to the right audience and get the most out of your budget. After completing the training, you'll be able to set up and manage your own LinkedIn Ads campaigns.

Twitter Advertising Training

Twitter Ads are a great way to reach potential customers who are already interested in your products or services. The Twitter Ads training course provides an in-depth look at how to create effective Twitter advertising campaigns. You'll learn how to target your ads to the right audience, use hashtags and keywords, and measure the success of your campaigns. After completing the training, you'll be able to set up and manage your own Twitter Ads campaigns.

SEMRush Training and Certification

SEMRush is a powerful tool that allows businesses to track their website's search engine rankings and measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. The SEMRush training course provides an in-depth look at how to use the tool to get the most out of your marketing budget. You'll learn how to track your website's ranking for specific keywords, spy on your competition, and find profitable long-tail keywords. After completing the course, you'll be able to use SEMRush to improve your website's search engine ranking and increase traffic and leads from your marketing campaigns.

What are the Benefits of Lead Generation?

Lead generation is a process of attracting and converting strangers into prospects and customers. The benefits of lead generation include:

• Increasing sales: By generating more qualified leads, you can increase sales for your business. Lead generation can help you reach new customers who are interested in your products or services.
  
  
• Cost-effective marketing: Lead generation is a cost-effective way to marketing teams to reach new customers. You can generate leads through online and offline channels, making it a versatile marketing strategy that can be tailored to your budget.
  
  
• Qualified leads: Only sales qualified leads will be interested in buying from you, so lead generation helps you focus your marketing efforts on the most promising prospects.

If You Can Only Do One Thing Today to Generate Leads - Do This!

If you are just starting out, and your budget is limited, there's one thing you can do today to jump start your lead generation process - get the free version of Hubspot and set up your first lead magnet.

Why the Free Hubspot Solution?

Hubspot is a powerful lead capture and marketing automation tool. The free version includes basic features, such as the ability to install the Hubspot tracking code on your website and track leads. You can also create landing pages and thank-you pages, and use the built-in email marketing tool to send automated emails to leads. The paid versions of Hubspot include more powerful features, such as the ability to create and manage sales pipelines, track website visits, and measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Get Started with HubSpot Today

If you're ready to start generating more leads for your business, sign up for a free account at Hubspot.com. You can install the tracking code yourself or we can do it for you. It's very simple to do and requires only a few minutes.

Site Visitors Leave a Trail - Even When They Don't Convert

Even if a website visitor doesn't convert, they leave a trail of digital information that you can use to target your ad campaigns. This information includes the websites they visit, the keywords they search for, and the products or services they are interested in. By tracking this data, you can create targeted ads that reach potential customers who are already interested in your products or services.

How to Track Website Visitors

There are a number of different ways to track website visitors, depending on the type of website you have. The most common methods include using a tracking code, cookies, and pixels. A tracking code is a small piece of code that is inserted into the HTML code of your website.

Google Hides - Hubspot Reveals

While the Google Analytics system provides a wealth of information, due to ever increasing limits placed by Google on Personally Identifiable Information (PIA), it is less and less useful to the average user. That's why Hubspot is such a powerful tool, even if your website is not fully hosted on Hubspot (which it should be). Hubspot tells you what each individual contact did on your site from before they identified themselves until they become a customer.

Hubspot Content Marketing Turbocharges Your Sales Process

Sales and marketing teams are tasked with generating leads via all channels, not just digital channels. Sales and marketing teams are tasked with generating both more leads as well as more high quality leads. Marketing automation platforms such as Hubspot are productivity enhancing systems that are essential to successful marketing campaigns.

Why Sales Teams Love Hubspot CRM

Generating leads is great. It is what marketing lives for. But generating a sales qualified lead is what ultimately leads to increased revenue. Effective lead generation results in a shorter sales cycle, a happier sales rep, and ultimately a higher marketing ROI.

Filling the sales funnel is just the first step in the B2B lead generation process. Closing sales leads into paying customers is the ultimate goal. When your marketing team is capturing leads at a high rate, your sales team will be extremely busy. Using Hubspot and Google Analytics, you'll be able to measure your sales funnel performance and make adjustments to your marketing campaigns, including to your google ads campaign.

Know Who to Call When and What to Say and Do

If you have a well crafted sales funnel, and are employing advanced B2B lead generation strategies as I've laid out here, your sales reps will have the content they need to close deals at a high rate. Most companies we work with don't have this to start with. That's why most companies actually reach out to us - to help them design and implement an effective end-to-end B2B lead generation strategy.

We Provide Sales Coaching as Well as Inbound Marketing

Customer success is our only goal. Given our extensive background in complex B2B sales, we are often engaged to provide hands-on sales coaching. Hubspot's CRM platform provides both the tools to conduct high-volume inbound sales and it also provides a digital marketing measurement platform that allows us to formulate and deliver customized sales coaching 'in the moment' and get real-time results.

Sales Coaching Driven by a Closed-Loop Feedback Loop

The beauty of Hubspot's closed-loop feedback system is that it gives sales reps near instantaneous feedback on the effectiveness of their outreach. A BDR team can quickly see which leads have been contacted and whether or not a follow-up was attempted by the sales team as expected and within the time parameters agreed to within the SLA.

Closed-Loop Feedback Improves Sales Rep Productivity

In order to be effective, sales coaching needs to be delivered in a timely manner. Hubspot's closed-loop feedback system ensures that Sales Reps receive coaching 'in the moment' so they can make adjustments to their outreach strategy on the fly. This results in higher Sales Rep productivity and more closed deals.

Hubspot's Integration to Google Ad Campaigns - a Key Differentiator

One of the key differentiating factors between high-performance sales teams and average performance sales teams is the ability to engage prospects within their target market with the right content and messaging at the right time.

Hubspot's integration with Google Ads, as well as with Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads, allows marketing and sales teams to take prospective customers on a customized buyers journey. When sales closes leads in Hubspot CRM, that piece of information can be fed back to Google (and Facebook and LinkedIn) in near real-time, allowing the Google Ads AI to find similar audiences for targeting and for advanced retargeting strategies. Among the many benefits this provides, it can stop you from needless ad-spend on already closed or lost leads.

Automation Drives Highly Targeted Messaging

While traditional advertising is spray and pray, digital marketing is like having a surgeon's knife, very precise, and used only where it is needed. You can 'sort of' do this targeting manually, using spreadsheets and other methods, but it generally breaks down overtime. When you have a common digital marketing and sales platform, like Hubspot, you can be sure every action is recorded and the signal that it generates is sent to the ads platform as soon as it happens, every time.

Highly Measurable Marketing Campaigns - Make Them Pay!

Marketing works, generally, with a concept called marketing campaigns. From a content marketing perspective, which we consider a subset of the Inbound Marketing Methodology, a marketing campaign consist of a piece of downloadable content, or a piece of user generated content, behind a form on a landing page. Blog post are written with a call to action (CTA), encouraging new leads to visit the landing page and provide their contact details in exchange for the content or the answer provided by the online tool.  Paid advertising is also a key part of the mix.

High Quality Content Drives Organic Traffic

High quality content becomes lead magnets. Done right, potential leads find your lead magnet via organic search results. They may also find it via any number of social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or Pinterest, as well as many others.

Google Ads Can Be Used to Generate High Quality Leads

If you have an effective lead magnet, receiving decent organic traffic, you should incorporate Google ads in your marketing funnel to drive leads. B2B lead generation strategies can also incorporate the targeting of a specific job title. This is especially true when using LinkedIn, the king of B2b lead generation.

A Real Life Example Using LinkedIN

One of our clients in the education space was having trouble filling their classroom seats. Their training offer was among the best in the world, even being accredited. Using a combination of Google Ads, Hubspot Ads Integration and LinkedIn, we were able to design and implement a highly effective campaign that drove an approximate 44X return on investment.

First, We Had to Define What a Marketing Qualified Was

The client's past lead generation efforts had resulted in fairly decent lead flow. But they had no real definition of either marketing qualified lead nor of sales qualified lead. Luckily, they had had some sales success in the past, but unfortunately, were suffering from seriously declining sales results.

Data Quality

After working on their data quality within Hubspot and conducting thorough market research analysis of their sales team's results, we were able to objectively define what activities each contact who had become a customer had taken prior to closing as a customer.

Predictive Lead Scoring to Hit the Right Target Group

Initially, we implemented manual lead scoring. This simply means we came up with a manual lead scoring system, and set it up in Hubspot. After we got enough lead flow through the system, and upon our recommendation, the client upgraded to Hubspot Enterprise Suite, which unlocked Predictive Lead Scoring - essentially a block box AI/ML system.

Trust Your Instruments

As a pilot, you're are taught that your survival depends on learning to trust your instruments. This is a key skill, often ignored, with fatal results. When it comes to successful lead generation, especially when you're scaling up your Google Ad-Spend, you have to learn to trust your predictive lead scoring results.

Until You Can Tell Google Who Bought, You're Flying Blind

Google states that when someone performs a search and hits click, they are able to analyze approximately 70,000,000 data points before deciding what results to present to the searcher. That's a lot of analysis happening with just a single click. That's why it is best to let the machines talk to each other, but for you to know what they're talking about and to make sure the conversation is going your way - profitably.

That's why it is imperative to have a digital marketing platform and to integrate with Google Ads, where about 92% of all searches take place.

You don't have the bandwidth to manually feed all the information a user is generating back to the ad platforms as they traverse your system.

Google Analytics Should Inform Your Lead Generation Efforts

I've already explained to you why you need Hubspot - it shows while Google hides. But that doesn't mean Google Analytics isn't useful. It just means you have to thoroughly understand it in order to take advantage of it. This takes time, which you are in short supply of.

It does, however, have a lot of information available about audience, market intent and searches. Those should go into your content marketing planning.

Social Media Accounts Are Visible in Google Analytics

Though every social media platform provides it own analytics capabilities, you should also be aware that you can, with the proper setup, see the results in Google Analytics of your social media campaigns.

Create Content to Nurture Leads Across Channels

Whether you're hosting online events or just looking to pull leads through your funnel using email lead nurturing, you need to create content that resonates with potential buyers. Potential buyers may spend only a few seconds on one landing page of yours, while others may dwell a long time. Google Analytics can often point you in the right direction to figure out why prospects are bouncing and what content you need to create to rectify the situation.

Effective B2B Lead Generation Strategies Depend on the Right Content

We covered a lot of different B2B lead generation strategies and ideas in this blog. We hope you come away with some useful ideas and a realization of what it will take to set up a lead generation system that yields however many leads you need to hit your sales goals.

How Many Leads Do You Need, Anyway?

Before you go, we would like to point to our leads required calculator. It's the quickest, free way available to determine just how many leads you're going to need to generate to hit your sales target.  You will find out how many website visitors you need and how many leads you need to generate to hit your target.

More reading:

Get What Is Inbound Sales In A Unified Sales And Marketing System [Ebook]

What's Your E-Mail Marketing Strategy?[Tutorial]

Why 10,000 Retailers using SAP Need Inbound Now!

BusinessObjects Explorer Best Practices

The Ultimate Guide to Developing a Lead Nurturing Strategy