04.3.2024 Jeremy Knight
With its rapidly evolving dynamics, fierce competition, technological disruptions, and shifting customer preferences, the business world continues to shape organisations' digital marketing strategies, especially those in the B2B sector.
As these trends continue to unfurl, an effective approach to recognising, attracting, and converting potential customers into valuable leads is vital for sustained success.
When efficiently managed, these strategic interactions can significantly affect any business's operational efficacy and profitability.
Formulating and executing lead generation strategies involves carefully intertwining several elements - equally important across the inbound and account-based marketing spectrum. It requires a delicate balance between creative exploration and data-driven insights, underscored by the necessity to fine-tune messages for diverse target audiences with unique profiles and needs.
An emerging technology that is proving invaluable in navigating this complex landscape is generative AI. Through its ability to analyse vast amounts of data and generate accurate and actionable insights, generative AI offers a pathway for businesses to optimise their lead generation services.
It helps organisations to identify potential customers more accurately, enabling businesses to make informed decisions about where and how to allocate their resources for maximum lead generation effectiveness.
In this review, we dive deeper into the role of generative AI in enhancing five fundamental B2B lead generation strategies. And then, we look at the ‘one thing’ that will render all of this work redundant if it is not addressed too.
These growth marketing strategies include regular blogging, email marketing, social media activity, storytelling, and conversion path optimisation. This piece explains the strategies, their practical applications, best practices, and how generative AI can be integrated to further bolster these strategies within your unique operational context.
Regular Blogging: Harnessing the power of content for inbound traffic, and topic clusters
Blogging is a strategic tool beyond the confines of maintaining an active blog on your website. It represents a tactical approach that can significantly improve your search engine visibility, increase inbound traffic, and cement your organisation's position as a thought leader in your industry. As such, blogging is essential to a winning lead-generation strategy today.
You can greatly enhance your influence and create pertinent, top-notch content by using generative AI to identify important topics, concerns, and queries that connect with your audience.
Generative AI, with its ability to examine large volumes of data and identify patterns, can assist in determining the topics that interest your target audience and align with your business's unique value proposition.
This means recognising the issues and queries your audience finds compelling, understanding their interests and pain points, and creating content that delivers valuable insights, solutions, and answers to their questions.
Furthermore, generative AI can enhance your blog's search engine optimisation (SEO). It can aid in identifying and integrating relevant keywords and phrases, crafting engaging meta descriptions, and structuring your content for improved readability and searchability.
With AI-assisted SEO, your blogs can garner better visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs), driving more organic traffic to your website. And it can also assist in helping identify pillar page and topic cluster content.
Creating and optimising topic clusters is a crucial strategy in content marketing and lead gen. Generative AI can assist in this process in several ways.
Firstly, it can identify core topics and subtopics by scanning and analysing vast amounts of data. By analysing search data, social media trends, and website analytics, AI can pinpoint what subjects your target audience is most interested in. This helps establish the core topics and identify related subtopics, building clusters around them.
Secondly, generative AI can perform a content gap analysis, identifying areas where your existing content could be updated or expanded. This could involve detecting unanswered questions or underexplored aspects related to your core topic, indicating potential subtopics that could be developed to enhance your topic cluster.
Thirdly, generative AI can help identify relevant keywords and long-tail keyword phrases associated with your core topic and subtopics. This can guide your content creation process, ensuring your blogs, articles, and other content forms are optimised for search engine visibility and user relevance.
Fourthly, generative AI can aid in structuring the layout of your topic cluster. Analysing user engagement patterns can determine the most effective way to link your core topic content with your subtopic content, making your website more navigable and enhancing the user experience.
Finally, once your topic clusters are live, generative AI can continue to monitor their performance. It can track metrics such as page views, time spent on page, and conversion rates, offering insights to help you further refine and optimise your topic clusters.
It's important to note that the effectiveness of generative AI depends on the quality and quantity of data it's fed. Therefore, the more comprehensive and accurate the data, the more reliable and actionable the insights generated by the AI.
Another key aspect of successful blogging in B2B marketing is consistency. Regular updates signal your audience and search engines that your website is active, leading to increased visits and better rankings.
By implementing a content calendar, you can ensure a steady flow of fresh content and maintain consistency in your posting schedule. Over time, this regular, high-quality blog content, optimised with the help of generative AI, will draw more qualified leads to your website, generating valuable sales leads.
Email Marketing: Harnessing personalisation for targeted engagement and the role of Generative AI
Despite being a longstanding lead generation strategy in the marketing arsenal, email marketing remains a potent B2B lead generation tool. Its enduring effectiveness lies in its flexibility and ability to deliver personalised and actionable messages directly to your target audience's inbox.
The power of email marketing is further amplified when paired with marketing automation and generative AI, aiding in segmenting audiences, crafting personalised emails, and tracking campaign performance.
To effectively leverage email marketing, the first step is segmenting your email list based on various factors such as demographic information, behaviour patterns, and more.
Generative AI can provide valuable insights for this process, analysing user data to create accurate and meaningful segments. Combined with AI, segmentation enables you to target your messages more accurately, increasing their relevance and engagement rates and enhancing the experience for a sales lead..
AI's contribution to email marketing continues beyond segmentation. It also aids in crafting compelling subject lines and valuable content that resonates with each segment. AI can generate subject lines more likely to result in higher open rates and help create content that engages and retains the reader's attention.
However, the true strength of email marketing, when paired with AI, lies in its trackability. AI-enabled tools can help you monitor crucial email metrics like open, click-through, and conversion rates. The insights gained from this data can inform your strategy, allowing for continual refinement and improvement in pursuit of a quality lead and a sale.
Email marketing becomes a formidable tool in your lead generation arsenal when utilising personalisation and data-driven insights made possible by generative AI. It can deliver targeted, engaging, and effective messages to potential customers, turning a potential prospect into a sales lead.
Social Activity: Nurturing relationships and building communities with Generative AI
For B2B marketers in b2b lead generation, social media marketing is a powerful tool for directly engaging potential customers, nurturing relationships, and building communities around your brand. The intersection of social media and generative AI brings many opportunities to optimise engagement and lead generation.
A strategic approach, further honed by generative AI, is an advantage for success on social media. This approach considers your target audience's needs, preferences, and behaviours, allowing for more targeted and effective engagements.
AI can assist in identifying the social media platforms where your potential customers are most active and provide insights into the kind of content that resonates with them.
Establishing a schedule for posting engaging content that aligns with your audience's interests is an effective social media strategy. Generative AI can analyse audience engagement patterns to identify the best times to post and the type of content that drives the most interaction.
But the interaction shouldn't stop at posting content. Engaging with your followers by responding to comments, participating in discussions, and sharing relevant content from others is crucial in building strong relationships.
Generative AI tools also make social listening possible, enabling businesses to gather insights into their target audience's conversations, interests, and opinions about their brand or industry. These insights can inform your content strategy, enabling you to create posts that resonate with your audience and spark engagement.
Story-telling: Humanising your brand through content marketing and the role of Generative AI
Storytelling in content marketing creates a stronger connection between your brand and potential leads in your lead-generation campaign. The primary aim is to craft narratives that position your prospects as heroes and your services as powerful allies that can help them overcome challenges and achieve their goals.
Generative AI can be pivotal in helping craft these narratives by analysing customer data and generating insights about their needs, aspirations, and pain points.
By leveraging generative AI, you can understand your customers better - who they are, what challenges they face, and what they aspire to. With this knowledge, you can develop narratives that resonate with your audience, effectively showcasing your product or service as the solution to their problems.
A compelling story doesn't merely attract attention; it engenders trust and fosters a stronger connection between your brand and your audience.
This connection is vital for effective lead generation, as potential customers are more likely to engage with brands they feel understand their needs and challenges.
Conversion Path Optimisation: Streamlining the journey from visitor to lead with Generative AI
Conversion path optimisation is refining a potential customer's journey from their first interaction with your brand to becoming a lead. This involves optimising every component of the conversion path, including your website's landing pages, calls-to-action (CTAs), and forms.
Generative AI can be critical in this process, helping test and optimise these components for higher conversion rates leading to better sales development and a superior sales pipeline.
Landing pages play a crucial role in lead generation, as they are often the first point of contact potential leads have with your brand.
You can test different landing page designs and content using generative AI to determine what resonates most with your audience. You can also optimise CTAs to ensure they are compelling and easy to locate, increasing the chances that website visitors will take the desired action.
Forms are the final step in the conversion path and are where visitors become leads. With generative AI, you can experiment with different form lengths, fields, and placements to maximise form completions. Moreover, generative AI can help analyse form performance and identify areas for improvement, leading to higher conversion rates.
Brand Marketing: The keystone of effective lead generation
While the strategies detailed above can significantly enhance your B2B lead generation efforts, it's critical to acknowledge the integral role brand marketing plays in this process. This is the ‘one thing’ that, if ignored, will devastate your lead generation services.
With a strong brand presence and a clear brand message, your lead-generation efforts might yield the desired results. Potential leads may need to comprehend or trust your value proposition fully.
It's worth noting that most of your target market isn't actively seeking your services at any given moment. In most scenarios, only about five per cent of your target audience may be 'in the market' for your services. This means most potential customers must be nurtured through brand awareness and relationship building before they are ready to engage with your sales process.
Your brand serves as the backbone of all your marketing and sales efforts. It tells your business's story, communicates your values, and sets expectations for what it's like to do business with you. A strong brand can help your business stand out in a crowded marketplace, create a lasting impression, and build trust with potential customers.
Creating a robust brand requires consistent messaging across all marketing channels and touchpoints. This consistency boosts brand recall and recognition, positioning your business at the forefront of potential customer's minds when they are ready to enter the market for your services.
Engaging in regular brand marketing activities helps keep your business in the consciousness of potential leads, warming them up for when they're ready to engage. This could include regularly sharing company updates, thought leadership content, or customer testimonials across social media, email newsletters, and your blog.
Lead generation and brand marketing are two sides of the same coin. While lead generation focuses on attracting and converting potential customers, brand marketing builds the trust and awareness that facilitates these conversions. By seamlessly integrating these two elements, you can craft a powerful marketing strategy that consistently attracts leads and converts them into loyal customers.
In summary
This comprehensive review outlines five effective B2B lead generation strategies—regular blogging, email marketing, social activity, storytelling, and conversion path optimisation—all boosted by the transformative potential of generative AI.
Regular blogging can increase inbound traffic and establish your organisation as an industry thought leader. Enhanced by AI, this approach can identify key topics, issues, and questions that resonate with your audience and develop relevant, high-quality content. AI's application to SEO improves your blog's visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs), driving organic traffic.
Email marketing is a versatile strategy offering personalised and actionable messages. Leveraging generative AI helps segment audiences, craft personalised emails, and track campaign performance, turning prospects into leads.
Social media facilitates direct engagement with potential customers, relationship nurturing, and community building around your brand. Generative AI can identify the platforms where potential customers are active and reveal the content type they prefer, optimising your social activity.
Storytelling via content marketing establishes a stronger connection with potential leads by positioning them as the heroes of your narratives and your services as their powerful allies. Generative AI analyses customer data, providing insights about their needs, aspirations, and challenges, helping to craft compelling narratives.
Conversion path optimisation streamlines a customer's journey from first interaction to lead conversion. Generative AI optimises landing pages, calls-to-action (CTAs), and forms, thus enhancing conversion rates.
Lastly, brand marketing is essential for effective lead generation. A robust brand requires consistent messaging across all channels and touchpoints.
Combined with the above strategies, brand marketing can attract and convert leads into loyal customers, creating a comprehensive marketing strategy for sustained success.
