In times like these, when we are all faced with uncertainties economically, it has never been more vital for B2B marketers to step up and do what they can to help sales teams start conversations with prospects. 

However, it’s not easy to generate engaged, qualified leads. At Raconteur, we understand this - it’s why over 40 B2B brands came to us in 2019 to help them with their lead generation efforts. 

This guide aims to help B2B marketers hit the sweet spot using the know-how we at Raconteur have accumulated after scores of client campaigns. By the end of it, you should understand how to design lead generation strategies that deliver results, how to avoid the mistakes that so many content marketers make when taking new content to market and, finally, how you can optimise your campaigns to maximise success.

Lead generation isn’t easy. But with the right strategy and content in place, that puts your audience first, you’ll find that the leads will start rolling in and your pipeline will begin filling up.

There are good reasons why content-based lead generation has become the dominant strategy for B2B companies wanting to grow. Done well, it can provide a torrent of leads that can keep a sales pipeline full. In reality, many campaigns fall short.

In 2019, Raconteur delivered over 6000 engaged leads for clients including Autodesk, AXA PPP Healthcare and Blackberry. And we’re on track to beat this record in 2020. Our key learning from running these campaigns: you’ll only achieve success by providing your target audience with genuinely valuable content and optimising every stage of the marketing process.

It is essential to understand the value exchange that is at the heart of content-based marketing. In this post-GDPR, post-Cambridge Analytica age your target group knows their data has value and expects a fair trade: their data for high-value content. A prospect who gets value from your free, top‐of‐funnel content will consider exchanging their contact details for a gated white paper later because your firm appears to keep to the unwritten rules.

If that paper proves valuable, they might be open to spending time talking to your sales team – and if those sales conversations prove useful, they may decide to do business with you.

The crucial thing to realise is that a disappointing experience at any stage of the process is breaking the unwritten rules of the value exchange and will derail the whole operation. Who wants to do business with a firm that breaks its side of a deal?

One frequent weak spot is follow-up content. Some marketers spend their budget on a hero report that generates great downloads. But they then follow up with dull white papers or a disinterested follow-up call from a contact centre where they fail to keep their side of the unwritten rules of the value exchange. 

By contrast, successful lead generation campaigns are grounded in a wealth of authoritative content that demonstrates the brand’s expertise, trustworthiness, and genuinely helps prospects understand the issues that matter. 

To see how a good campaign can come together, look at the strategy of Optum, a unit of United Health, the world’s largest listed healthcare company, deservedly the winner of a Marketing Sherpa award. 

By transitioning from old fashioned “one and done” campaigns to a content‐first marketing model, the company transformed itself into a lead generation machine. Optum’s integrated digital marketing campaigns have generated hundreds of millions of pounds in pipeline revenue, including one campaign that delivered an ROI of 5,100%. 

That is a huge result, and there are three clear factors that underpin the brand’s success. Optum treats its prospects as more than just names in a spreadsheet; it provides them with genuinely useful content; and it has a clear strategy for nurturing leads through the customer journey.

It should be no surprise that companies with mature lead generation strategies generate significantly more revenue than their competitors. Salespeople at companies with a mature process for generating qualified leads typically spend less time prospecting and 28 per cent more time actively pitching their products or services, according to Marketo.

At the same time, the right B2B content marketing strategy will ensure your salespeople are contacting better quality leads. The challenge is that some leads are hotter than others. Only a fraction of the people who interact with your content are in a position to buy from you today. (See our later article The myth of finding the right target)

Companies like Optum realise this and work closely with their sales teams to define exactly what counts as an ideal prospect and what will be considered a sales‐qualified lead before they create a single piece of content.

Then, they develop detailed audience personas to guide their content creation and ensure they can deliver real value to prospects at each stage of the lead generation process.

“As marketers, the traditional role is, ‘Let’s build a campaign’,” Karen Thomas‐Smith, Optum’s VP of provider marketing and reference management told Marketing Sherpa. “I’ve switched it to, ‘Let’s understand the market before we build a campaign’.”

Quality content also helps with distribution: Columbus, a maker of enterprise resource planning software, ran a lead generation and thought leadership campaign that featured articles from a renowned academic, a leading industrialist, and a senior executive from Microsoft as well as their global and UK leadership that generated strong organic sharing on social media, including from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. This helped the campaign generate more than 73,000 impressions on social media, resulting in 6,015 landing page views and 770 report downloads.

Crucially, 90 of those downloads were from senior decision-makers in finance or engineering functions at large manufacturing companies – Columbus’ ideal prospects.

Of course, to get the most out of your lead generation strategy, you need a process for turning initial prospects into sales‐qualified leads.

More than three-quarters of buyers consume at least three pieces of content before they ever speak to a salesperson – and 17 per cent will consume more than seven, according to the Demand Gen report 2018.

So, for its award‐winning 2016 campaign, Optum created a whole suite of content over 18 months to engage its audience and nurture relationships with key prospects.

First, its marketers created a flagship ebook to help healthcare businesses understand the potential of big data analytics. Then, they went on to create more than 1,000 pieces of unique content – including infographics, videos, white papers, podcasts, blog posts, direct mail pieces and more.

Repurposing content in this way can be an efficient way to flesh out your brand’s editorial calendar and engage your audience all year round. But it is equally important to plan the onward journey you want potential leads to take once they discover your brand.

If you want prospects to sign up to your newsletter, send them to a landing page. If you think they should download some research after reading a blog post, close that post with a call to action. If you believe prospects that read your case studies are ready to speak with sales, make sure a link to your contact form is there on the page.

Creating natural paths from your lead generation content to those crucial sales conversations and making it easy for prospects to follow those paths is the key to delivering effective B2B lead generation campaigns.

Key takeaways

• Provide prospects with high‐quality, relevant content. Buyers view the content you produce as a proxy for your industry expertise.

• Not all marketing leads are created equal. Define who your ideal prospects are and what counts as a sales‐qualified lead.

• Build relationships with ideal prospects over time and include clear signposts to guide them through the nurturing process.

Asking customers for their personal details puts the onus on you to prove the value of what you’re offering in exchange.

So, an effective landing page must do two things: 1) it must promise the customer something valuable and 2) it must get them to trust that your content or business will deliver on that promise.

Every element of a landing page should be geared towards those two ends, from the headline to the length of the copy, the design of the page and beyond.

At the same time, it is important to have a clear idea of what your prospects expect when they visit one of your landing pages.

So before getting into fine-tuning, analyse the competitive landscape to get a clear picture of the typical elements that are included in your type of landing page, how they are usually designed and what messaging is commonly used. Keep a record of anything you like and think might be worth testing. You can then use these ideas as inspiration when creating your own landing pages.

When it comes to discovering what combination of elements works best, the A/B split test is your not-so-secret weapon. Use the insights you uncover during your competitor analysis as a starting point. Then, use landing page software like Unbounce to create variations you can test using these three proven techniques.

1. Choose the right design 

It is a myth that short landing pages always work best in B2B marketing. 

For example, in 2017 search engine specialist Moz boosted sales from its “pro membership” landing page by 52 per cent in just a single split test. Over four months, the SEO giant ran a series of tests that boosted its conversion rates by 170 per cent and generated $1 million in additional revenue. The new page was five times longer than the old one.

Moz’s marketers realised that their salespeople would need at least five minutes to sell their paid product in a face‐to‐face consultation. So, it stood to reason that their landing page should be a similar length.

When you’re just asking someone for their contact details, the data “price” is low and you might only need a few sentences to make a compelling case for the trade. But it takes a great deal more persuasion to show someone why they should request a product demo or buy something from you directly.

The journey a prospect takes to arrive on a page will also have an impact on the information they need to see when they get there. Someone who knows exactly what they are looking for may skim the headline and click the call to action straight away. Meanwhile, prospects that still have gaps in their knowledge may need more convincing - and a longer page.

2. Sharpen the copy

Good marketing copy starts by making a bold and exciting promise to the customer, painting a clear picture of how you plan to improve their life. It then provides proof that your promise is realistic and attainable - you are going to keep your side of the deal - before giving the reader the push they need to take the desired action.

If possible, ensure the headline, hero image and call to action are visible when the page loads.

Longer pages will give you more options to use words, imagery and data visualisations to bring key points to life. The aim here is to earn a prospect’s trust before presenting them with a call to action. 

Remember that the headline is the first thing a prospect will read. It is your one chance to grab their attention and get them to read on. There are lots of headline types, from straightforward offers (“Subscribe now and get 30% off”) to sophisticated headlines that tease or intrigue. Whichever you choose, however, the copy that follows your headline should build on that initial promise – highlighting additional benefits, providing proof to back up your claims or conveying why your prospects should take action now.

Consider testing versions of your landing page with extra testimonials or case studies to support the claims made in your headline.

At the same time, be sure to stress how any features benefit the reader. You probably wouldn’t care if a printer brand told you their cartridges now hold 50 per cent more ink. But you might if they said they last 50 per cent longer.

3. Build a personalised user experience

Bespoke landing pages work better than generic ones; they show the reader benefits that are relevant to them. That is why companies with more landing pages tend to see better conversion rates than their competitors.

When HubSpot analysed the marketing campaigns of more than 7,000 businesses, it found that companies typically see a 55 per cent increase in leads when they move from ten landing pages to 15.

Technology allows you to go a step further and target narrow segments of your audience with messages tailored to their specific needs. For example, a research report into global perceptions of risk should have landing pages for each industry to create a more personalised experience. An executive at a tech company is far more likely to be interested in the risks facing the tech industry than she is in risk in general.

This approach is especially crucial if you’re using audience segmentation to serve ultra‐targeted search, email or social ads to your prospects. No one should click on a personalised ad and arrive on a generic landing page.

That is the key to crafting landing pages that convert in a nutshell. The more relevant you can make something to a prospect’s specific situation, the more likely it is to resonate with them and the easier it will be to come up with messages they will find enticing.

Key takeaways

• Use A/B testing and see if breaking the rules yields better results

• The design and layout of any given landing page should reflect the amount of content you need to win your prospects’ trust.

• Personalise pages to speak directly to your prospects and convey the key benefits you are promoting to them.

It’s called “form fatigue”.

Prospects are increasingly reluctant to enter their data into forms, not just because of the inconvenience but also the likelihood that they will receive a sales call a short time later.

Perhaps B2B marketers have spent so long convincing business leaders of the value of this technique (in order to generate a large number of marketing qualified leads) that they are now blind to the flaws:

• Gated content offers a poor user experience and puts a barrier between the prospect and content we want them to read.

• Gating creates problems with SEO and GDPR compliance.

• You’re losing prospects; abandonment rates of 90 per cent or more are not unusual.

Even when a form is completed, the contact details provided are often false, leading to frustration and wasted effort for sales or tele‐qualification teams.

I am not advocating that gating should be abandoned. However, I believe its use can be reduced or limited by taking steps to focus on building engagement and trust first.

A change also allows fresh thinking. Many marketers will be regularly reviewing form completion rates and driving incremental improvements through landing page optimisation. But they may be ignoring the much larger number of prospects that are abandoning content when they hit a form.

As a start, consider whether some content could be ungated to build engagement and trust. Offering more free content, especially at the top of the funnel, will demonstrate your content's authority and value. 

Consider implementing a progressive profiling model using minimal forms with fewer fields at the start of the buyer journey and then using other methods, such as tele‐qualification teams, to gather additional data later.

Customers are increasingly looking for a highly personalised experience. To facilitate this, many B2B sites are structured by solution, industry or even job role. But this often relies on the visitor self‐selecting to their interests.

Better, look to leverage first‐party intent data to provide a truly personalised approach that is informed by each visitor’s behaviour. Demand orchestration platforms can create a consistent taxonomy across all your content (typically using natural language processing or machine learning) and then combine this with behavioural data to deliver “read next” content recommendations from across your content library.

With this kind of capability, it is easy to envisage how a prospect could become much more engaged - and willing to complete a form - because you have demonstrated your authority and subject matter expertise.

One tech provider cites case studies with a 289 per cent increase in content engagement and 219 per cent increase in form-fill conversions.

Even providing highly personalised content, content, the odds of converting a site visitor to a highly qualified lead are slim. This is where third‐party intent data can play a vital role, identifying at an account level which companies are actually in the market for your solutions now. Partnering with an account-based marketing platform allows you to identify and target prospects that demonstrate intent across defined keywords and terms, no matter where they are in the customer journey.

Now your site visitor is highly engaged, do you now push them to a content gate and risk them walking away? Why not try something different and more engaging - a chat session?

True, there are clear cost implications on offering live, human chat to all web visitors. But this technology becomes more viable when it is provided on a targeted basis to those showing the desired behaviour and meeting your ideal prospect profile.

For others, automated chatbots or allowing prospects to book time in a salesperson’s diary for a callback may still offer a better experience than just asking for a form.

What have you got to lose? If the chat opportunity is ignored, gates can still be introduced at the appropriate point in the web session.

In my opinion, form gating is not dead – yet. The need to turn anonymous visitors into known contacts is still fundamental to B2B demand generation. However, marketers that ignore form fatigue and fail to provide personalisation will increasingly lose out to competitors.

 Key takeaways

• Building trust over time is better than simply demanding data for content

• Third-party intent data can make a big difference

• Consider live chat instead of slamming your best prospects into a download form

1. Trying too hard, too quickly

All marketers want to prove they are a star player. Many of us have been enthusiastic about setting quantifiable objectives to help prove the ROI of marketing initiatives. However, it is easy to become hypnotised by the metrics and make hasty judgements about the value of a piece of content.

Publishers – who have created content since before the word was invented – tend to judge the output of their work by qualitative measures. Does this publication meet the brief? Does it communicate our desired message? Then, they listen to audience feedback. Did this article resonate with the readers? Did they send it to colleagues and friends? 

Building a relationship with an audience takes time, but brings bigger rewards. 

2. Assembling the wrong team

You need someone with an editorial eye to recognise first‐class writing, curate the flow of storytelling and deliver high impact data design. 

A project manager will help maintain relationships with the best contributors for the initiative, bring distribution experience to the table and understand page format, layout and word counts.

But the real challenge is often to find the right writer. This task can often fall on someone in communications or marketing. But creating good marketing copy is not the same as creating “hero” content that drives engagement with prospects. It may be worth hiring a content editor or hiring a consultant to help manage the process end‐to‐end.

3. Being unwilling to relinquish control

It is vital to resist the magnetic attraction of making your content too brand-focused. Raconteur’s research into C‐suite reading habits showed that two-thirds believe branded content is boring, repetitive and predictable.

Loosen control and make more interesting, even provocative, content. Whenever you create any content, don’t think: “Might this alienate anyone?” Think: “Will this engage anyone?”

This will truly connect with the people who buy into your vision and that is the right target market with which to have a relationship.