Over the last couple of years, businesses around the world have been pushed to their limits to find innovative ways to connect with their customers, generate top-of-funnel activity, and fill their sales pipeline.
Now we can physically meet and interact with customers again, you’d think traditional lead generation was back to “normal” levels.
However, the effects of the pandemic on budgets and confidence to invest in particular marketing activities can’t be ignored. Corporate events, trade shows, and exhibitions are good examples of this. Often, they are costly to take part in and attend.
For some, particularly smaller businesses and start-up companies, they are simply out of reach. In 2022 opting for lower-cost, higher-impact campaigns are more of a priority.
There are many ways to bounce back this year with your top-of-funnel lead generation and achieve the following:
- Create low cost, high impact sales & marketing activities
- Begin the sales cycle with prospects to close business in H2
- Build a pipeline full of high-quality leads
- Engage with clients, old and new
- Run innovative and exciting lead generation campaigns
Review your past and current top-of-funnel activities and consider how effective they are.
Assess the performance of your current activity to improve your future top-of-funnel strategies
Businesses surviving the lockdown period is an achievement in itself. Now, everyone is looking to bounce back and break free from its impact.
This includes recovering lost deals, customers, delayed opportunities, and increasing B2B sales outreach, as well as making a profit!
If this year has already been on the slow side, strong top-of-funnel activity in H1 is essential to ensure H2 is more successful.
To plan what activity you need to do in H1 to make sure H2 is successful, ask yourself these questions:
- Do you know your top-of-funnel conversion ratio? From engagement, presentation, to the proposal, negotiation, and through to the deal closed?
- Is there enough in the funnel to recover lost ground from H1, and achieve your H2 target?
- What actions do you need to take based on conversion numbers?
- What is the impact of the activity you planned at the beginning of the year?
- Do you have some results to look at? If so, should you adapt your plan, or continue?
Where complex sales cycles exist, these assessments are even more critical to understand before we hit H2.
To truly bounce back and break the cycle of slow business, you need to build your top of the funnel now to have a genuine impact later.
How to decide what top-of-funnel lead generation activity will benefit you most
For this blog, let’s assume a sales cycle of 6 months from first engagement to signing a deal.
If your sales cycles are shorter than 6 months then this discussion is still relevant but apply the appropriate timelines for your model.
Work out your algorithm from first contact to close, and then take into account what resources, time, and budget you have to work with.
For example:
You might consider working on your SEO strategy (which we encourage as best practice). It is a cost-effective top-of-funnel strategy to drive traffic to your website, increase your online visibility, and generate online leads.
However, the full effects of an SEO strategy can take anywhere from 6-12 months to come to fruition.
Unfortunately, you won’t see your company in position one of the SERPs overnight. If you manage that, please share your SEO secrets with us!
Also, consider, do you have the in-house expertise or tools to carry out the required research and implementation, or will you need to look at your budget and outsource the work?
With a sales cycle of 6 months, the results of your SEO work won’t be timely enough to guarantee a more profitable H2. Therefore, you cannot solely rely on this to generate SQLs and new business.
For a quicker turn-around, you need to weigh up the impact vs time and cost of different top-of-funnel sales and marketing activities.
Examples of great top-of-funnel sales and marketing activity
Preparing your H2 pipeline doesn’t have to cost the earth.
With the proper thought, targeting, and execution, simple campaigns can be incredibly effective.
Inbound content marketing will win you new business.
How?
By communicating great things about your brand, products, and services, without slapping your audience in the face with pitch shock.
Below are a few examples of how to do it.
1. Use blogs to drive organic traffic to your website
Developing a series of thought-provoking blogs allows you to subtly discuss your services while presenting your audience with something useful and interesting.
Position your company as experts sharing valuable knowledge and insights, and you’ll find yourself in the right place for prospects researching a certain area of the market.
Blogs don’t have to be boring!
They are a great chance for you to talk about real-life issues, and changes within your industry, as well as promote and link to your own, and other relevant websites.
Plus, from an SEO perspective, they allow you to get specific and target niche search terms only an ideal customer of yours would type into Google.
2. Host webinars & live events to connect with your audience
If writing isn’t your strong suit, why not interview someone within your business who has a great knowledge of a certain topic, and a personality to go with it.
For example, one way to do this is to host webinars or virtual marketing events.
They are now commonplace and appealing to many prospects, and you can reach a larger group of prospects who may not attend a physical event.
Webinars and virtual events are content marketing generators, and these days video content is king.
Record your webinar, and use video and audio clips later in your social media marketing and email campaigns. Moreover, you can distribute the webinar recording to other prospects who signed up but didn’t attend.
This allows people to engage with your business on their terms when they are ready to do so.
Furthermore, do not underestimate the influence of the human voice. It is incredibly impactful and will have a greater influence on your prospects than any generic social media post ever could.
B2B marketers are also seeing positive results by generating qualified leads through webinars (61%). Reports indicate that B2B buyers engage with webinars more in the earlier stages of the buying process.
This activity has proved to be very successful for our clients when supported by an outreach activity. The follow-up and nurturing is an important step to generate top-of-funnel activity and deliver leads to close in H2.
3. Provide free downloadable content to capture audience data
Use eBooks and Whitepapers to showcase the knowledge and expertise you have as a company. Provide examples of how your services or products have helped a client, or indeed, the world.
They also provide your sales team with content to distribute to their personal LinkedIn networks. This spreads awareness of your brand and elevates the profile of employees online.
Shareable and downloadable content also allows you to capture email addresses to begin nurturing.
For example, creating eye-catching and engaging infographics gives people something to share with their networks. You want to spark the thought; ‘Wow, this highlights a great point or technique that is relevant to my industry, I’m going to download and share this so others can see it.’
Share it on social media. Upload it to your website. Include it in an email. Encourage people to share it.
The goal is to familiarise and warm people up to your company. Provide them with something useful, and your target audience will help this process along.
Successful top-of-funnel activity creates quality lead generation
The key to successful top-of-funnel activity is providing something useful to a targeted audience.
Find your niche to come up with content ideas, and create things that someone who was researching or looking into this area would find:
- Eye-catching
- Interesting
- Useful
- Educational
- Entertaining
Approaching your strategy from this angle should attract the right audience into your sales funnel in H1, so by H2, you have a selection of warm leads and SQLs, familiar with your company, and ready to convert into customers.
At Excelerate360, we believe that great lead generation comes from understanding your business and market, and leading with what makes you stand out.
We invest time in getting to know our client’s business and discovering what elements of your product or services will make your campaign successful. To do this, we work on-site with you to conduct an in-depth business profile and assess where you are with content, target personas, data, and planned marketing activities.
With this knowledge, we then train our team with your input and support so they are ready to start reaching out to prospective clients.
We use social selling, digital, and email marketing as forerunners to telemarketing. Our Marketing Strategist will work with you to develop the right message tone that leverages your key USPs.
With our internal Tech stack specifically designed for lead generation, you have access to a full campaign activity report and trend analysis.
Here you can see how the campaign is performing, and which activity is producing the most results. Generated leads and meetings generated are sent to you in a weekly report, so you can upload them to your own CRM at an agreed process point (subject to DPA adherence).
If you think that your business could benefit from some guidance and support in your lead generation activity to make a true impact on your H2 results, get in touch today.
