Talk to each other as B2B – The challenges of effective lead generation
WebMa online marketing agency has been involved in the success of many lead generation and e-commerce websites at project level and in the long term for more than 18 years. During this time we have gained a lot of experience that we thought was worth sharing with our current and prospective clients.
That is why we have launched a series of events aimed at helping our partners at a management level to navigate the complex and ever-expanding online space.
Last week, the first event of the series took place at WebMa’s headquarters in Budapest, at The Spot coworking office building, where the main topic was effective lead generation, with a focus on companies in the B2B segment. The speakers themselves have many years of national and international experience in this field, have been involved in a number of successful projects and many of them are continuously training and mentoring business leaders and have also given numerous presentations at major Hungarian national conferences.
The context
During the presentation, Eva also discussed the importance of sales and marketing alignment and data-driven decision making, as well as typical mistakes such as confusing strategy and tactics. Nowadays, AI is an essential topic to be discussed in a professional lecture, so participants were also able to hear what we think about the rise of artificial intelligence: No, we’re not afraid of it taking our jobs.
The data is the new oil
Éva’s presentation focused on data-driven decision making: to stop making decisions based on the law of “this is how it used to be and how it works” and instead use data-backed, measurable information. This idea was followed up by Henrietta Boncsér’s presentation, where she focused on understanding consumers, collecting their data and through this, providing personalized content and meeting their needs. With nearly 10 years of experience as a business development consultant at Google, Heni knows that for a B2B business to be successful and generate the right quantity and quality of leads for its website, it is not enough to have a website that works well from a user and technical point of view: we need to align it with our business objectives, our PPC advertising, our ads with the information we can extract from our own systems (CLV – Customer Lifetime Value), our marketing activities with the right messages for our target group and our communication. We do all this by choosing the right tool from the myriad of online tools available to us to achieve our objectives and by allocating our budget accordingly.
Choosing the right tools
Ákos Barta, Head of WebMa’s Strategic Business Unit, continued Heni’s thoughts with an analysis of the available online tools. Ákos showed how much this field has evolved since he started working in the online world (2008). I am sure that some of you reading this article will smile when you hear the words iWiW or Etarget and perhaps even remember what we used them for.
Back then, if you wanted to be effective, it was enough to use the most popular tools, as there were not many alternatives. In 2011, there were only 150 channels to choose from, but now there are more than 11,000. The focus has shifted from channels to understanding the different stages of the sales funnel and communicating at those points according to specific needs. The key here is to understand your own territory by analyzing the data you have:
- where are we now?
- where do we want to go?
- what resources do we have?
- what is our available budget?
- how much time do we have?
Let’s not forget. Just because everyone wants to be on TikTok right now, doesn’t mean it’s the most effective way for our company.
The must-have tool: the PPC
The Covid epidemic has made all (growth) companies aware that a quality presence in the online space is essential for success. Not only the aforementioned high quality website, but also proper traffic generation is one of the challenges online. The presentation by Petra Dóczi, head of WebMa’s Performance Marketing team, also focused on data collection and its effective use. Petra pointed out that in lead generation campaigns, it is not enough to focus on the number of inquiries received, but also on their quality. The CLV question mentioned earlier and the frequently asked question “How much is a lead worth?” is a crucial task from the client’s point of view. Knowing this, from the agency side, by applying the latest Google Ads and Facebook (to name just the most popular ones) advertising best practices, we have the opportunity to effectively influence this second factor. With simple mathematical calculations, we can easily model how much effort it will take to reach our target.
Social media: should we? We do.
For lead generation and B2B businesses, a presence on social channels is just as crucial as it is for online shops or B2C sites that communicate directly with consumers. On these platforms, they have the opportunity to build brand awareness and build engagement and loyalty with current and future partners. But this requires the right content.
Viktor Ábrahám, owner of Upfront Media, who has a long history and experience in this field, gave an exciting presentation to the participants. Viktor gave us some useful tips for content production: who to? what? when? how? Through interesting and very instructive examples we could see that although this task may not seem so difficult at first, it is not easy.
- How do we share our professional successes?
- How do we introduce our colleagues and get new ones?
- Who will do all this on a daily basis? How will it be ongoing?
- Will there be time and capacity?
- Do we have the right skills in-house to do this?
- Do we have the tools to analyze the data we collect?
If the answer to even one of the questions is yes, you should consider hiring an external team of experts, as you will definitely need one of the social media platforms to actively achieve your goals.
What is the future? – Industry trends from Google’s Dublin headquarters
As one of Google’s Premier Partners in Hungary, we took the opportunity to invite Gábor Csillag, the expert responsible for the strategic development of our key agency partners in Hungary, to speak at the event. In Gábor’s presentation we heard useful and sometimes shocking data about the latest AI trends.
Did you know that 70% of companies implementing/using some form of AI experience an increase in revenue and around 28% a reduction in costs? *
*Source:
The 3 keys to future growth for lead generating websites, according to the expert:
- offline conversion measurement,
- the correct CLV determination,
- and to know that not all conversions generate immediate revenue.
So it’s crucial that we get to know the leads coming to our site as well as possible, map the entire decision process and focus on continuously improving lead quality with the help of Google’s AI-based tools, because…
The key to success is not revenue, but results.
Summary
If we take away just a few thoughts from this exciting day, let them be these:
- Let’s be realistic about where we are
- Determine where I want to get to and when?
- Let’s have a strategy
- Rely on data, not intuition
- Let’s choose the tools to achieve our goals
- Get expert help if necessary
To be continued…