How to Build an Effective B2B Lead Generation Engine

Two key ingredients of this effort are content marketing and marketing automation. But first, understand that it’s important to evaluate your lead generation efforts at a strategic level in the context of the B2B buyer’s journey.

So, how can you create a B2B lead generation engine that will position your marketing team to generate high quality leads and drive revenue? Let’s get into it!

A critical step in B2B lead generation is to identify the steps in your buyer’s journey and strategically create targeted lead gen campaigns at each stage of the journey.

Here’s a visual of how our friends at HubSpot frame it.

The ‘Identify’ stage is the point where you begin to pique your audience’s interest to convert them from complete strangers to potential leads. Your web visitors may be learning about your business through blog posts, gated thought leadership content (via web forms) and more.

During the ‘Connect’ stage, your audience knows what your business does and is considering your product/service. You’ll want to continue offering various types of web-form gated content such as eBooks, white papers, how-to guides, templates or webinars that are relevant to your product/services. This is also the ideal point to begin nurturing your leads with email and content marketing.

As your leads continue to engage and download with your content, you’ll further push them along the buyer’s journey and converting them in to higher qualified leads.

At the ‘Explore’ stage, you’ve hooked your audience in as qualified leads but now need to further deepen their interest in your product/service to convert them into an opportunity. Focus on nurturing your leads based on the content they’ve downloaded and buyer journey stage. Deliver personalized, relevant content via email marketing campaigns with the goal of building trust and staying top of mind.

By strategically considering your B2B buyer’s journey, you can better identify what areas you need to address in your lead generation efforts. For example, you might see that there is an opportunity to turn your loyal customer base into brand champions and promoters of your product/services, giving you another channel to generate high-quality inbound leads.

Now that you’ve determined what your buyer’s journey will look like, consider the following strategic questions when evaluating the power of your lead generation efforts:

Agreeing on answers to these strategic questions is foundational to building an effective lead generation engine. With this in place, you can then decide how you’re going to go about generating the leads you need to grow your business and what tools you’ll need to do so efficiently.