HubSpot’s recent “Marketing Research – 2020” states that 61% of marketers rank lead generation as their top challenge. Yes, Lead Generation is a problem for nearly 2/3 of all marketers in B2B.
There are many tried and true tactics but fewer are working going into 2021 because many companies are using them and exhausting the value and effectiveness of many channels and techniques. Your competition is already applying the “tried and true” ones.
The following lead generation strategies are very effective for 2021 – but they are not as easy as the terse bullet points below may lead you to believe. There is a ton of work under the hood if you want to go deep on either of them.
- Upgrade and update your “Strategic Narrative”
- Your marketing and sales messaging are key to your success. Now is a great time to have an internal strategic session to improve your positioning, value proposition, unique differentiation.
- Start by really getting your “ICP” right.
- However, this entire project is harder than it sounds.
- Get a lot more reviews on SaaS Review Sites (like G2 Crowd)
- Find related products in your niche and prospect to their customers
- Build a High-Performance Outbound SDR Team with Hyper-Personalized Focus
- There are many “secret sauce” tactics here that only the Top 1% of SDR Team Leaders know and there is a ton under the hood in order to execute this well but it works better than ever if you do it right
- Also do “Video Prospecting” – this really works well – it works via email and also on LinkedIn (it has its own video option)
- Go deep on LinkedIn
- Do LinkedIn prospecting – design a sequence that works in tandem with emails, phone calls, LinkedIn voice-mail, LinkedIn videos
- Build Your Company’s Brand on LinkedIn
- Start and build a community & do regular posting (1+ per day)
- Post short Videos on LinkedIn, keep them < 2 mins
- Make LinkedIn posts that are different or complement your blog
- Comment on good posts made by industry influencers / VIPs
- Join your niche’s Slack Community
- Contribute and build relationships that lead to organic leads
- Use advanced tactics on Hubspot or Drift live chat
- Freemium works – still works and better than ever
- Re-optimize your PPC and Conversion Optimization
- For many companies, this has not been touched for years and is stale and collecting dust – this is one of the lowest hanging fruits to get great results
- Remarketing / Retargeting – do not drop the ball on these as they are highly effective and many of your competitors are letting this strategy collect dust and have not re-optimized it and have not re-upped their game on this for years
- Fresh New Content for 2021
- Do webinars with modernized tools like Crowdcast.io
- Do regular short videos instead of long webinars
- Launch your new LinkedIn Live sessions
- Across all such video content – give away free unique offers and incentive offers
- Launch a unique podcast – but keep all non-interview episodes to 20 minutes or less, while keeping interviews < 45 mins (most podcasts are too long and there is research suggesting that shorter is now way more effective). On each podcast, always give an incentive offer to drive MQLs
- Be a guest on a podcast in your industry at least once every month
- Post great content on the blogs of related SaaS companies in your niche
- Influencer / VIP Co-Marketing
- Joint Co-Marketing with related SaaS companies in your niche
- One example is to launch a virtual summit event within your industry and invite related companies to – InsideSales.com (now Xant.com) did it a great job back in 2014
- Another easy example is to do a joint webcast
Here is a Bonus Tactic:
You can punt on doing active SEO
- It takes 9 months to see any results
- Instead just do the low-hanging fruit of optimizing the website but don’t over-pay to do external work if you need quick results
- Consider doing more via YouTube SEO tactics as it will work faster than traditional SEO