Lead generation is an essential task that helps businesses stay afloat and grow bigger. Lead generation is all about finding the right prospects and turning them into leads (potential clients).
Some of the leads will eventually become paying clients if given enough information, guidance, and time for them to trust your brand and products.
Since lead generation directly helps businesses generate more income, every business will need to compete fiercely to gain new leads and clients. The more effectively your business is generating leads, the more money you will be able to make.
Lead generation for manufacturers
Similar to all types of businesses, manufacturers will need to sell their products and make profits. However, manufacturers are usually B2B businesses, meaning they will only focus on selling their products to other companies and wholesalers.
Lead generation for B2B businesses is different from B2C. B2B businesses will need to find B2B prospects and turn them into leads. B2B leads are key people that are working for companies and in positions to purchase products or services for their companies.
B2B lead gen is generally more complex than B2C lead gen since it involves going through more steps, interacting with more people, and dealing with much higher value deals.
Important things to consider if you run manufacturer lead generation
If you’re running a B2B business, be prepared for a long and hard-fought battle. This battle will require perseverance, hard work, a can-do attitude, energy, health, and money!
For an effective B2B lead generation, there will be many things to consider, however, the below are the most important factors that you will need to make sure happen before investing resources in B2B lead gen.
- You need to make sure your product is functioning properly. If your product isn’t working yet, it will be a straight-up waste of money thrown at lead gen and marketing.
- A lot of marketers make the mistake of ignoring the importance of data quality. If you’re targeting the wrong audience or spending a lot of time and effort on generating low-quality prospects, you’ll be wasting your resources.
- One of the most common mistakes is not spending the time researching and optimizing your campaigns. Make sure you thoroughly analyze your performance metrics and carry out A/B tests for optimization.
Lead generation best strategies for manufacturers
There are quite many strategies that can be used for generating B2B leads, however, the most popular ones are email marketing, SEO and paid ads.
1. Emailing marketing for manufacturer lead generation
Email marketing consists of cold emailing, email newsletters, and email automation. However, in this guide, we’ll only dive into cold emailing since it’s the most popular method for B2B lead gen.
While cold calling can also be effective for B2B lead gen, more and more people are finding it annoying. Most professionals will prefer communication via emails to calls.
Cold emailing involves two steps, the first step is to find excellent B2B prospects and the second one is sending cold emails and making them interested in what you have to offer.
Best tips for generating excellent B2B prospects
Generating excellent prospects isn’t an easy task. It can be challenging for a lot of marketers. We’ll list down below some of the best tips to help you generate relevant prospects and excellent data about them.
- Defining clearly your audience is the most important step, if you don’t know what you’re looking for in your potential clients, you won’t be able to generate prospects effectively.
- Prioritize quality over quantity. If you buy B2B prospects and their information from a data provider, make sure you choose the most reputable one. Using a reliable B2B prospect database is highly recommended because it’s the fastest and most affordable way to generate excellent prospects.
- Look for as much accurate information about your prospects as possible since the data can help you craft relevant content to capture your prospects’ attention effectively.
- Look for a B2B database that provides free trials and excellent support.
Click here to preview verified B2B contacts and data based on several requirements
Best tips for cold emailing
Cold emailing can be challenging for marketers, especially when they are sending a large number of cold emails every day. The followings are the best tips for sending cold emails for B2B lead gen.
- Set up DKIM, DMARC, and SPF properly for deliverability.
- Warm up your sending email addresses manually or using a service for deliverability.
- Should start slowly with no more than 50 cold emails sent per day. You can use 2 or 3 email addresses to send out a total of 150 cold emails per day.
- Segment your prospects into groups if possible. This helps with creating better and more relevant email content.
- Personalize your emails as much as possible, this can be done automatically within the email marketing software of your choice.
- Craft a concise message to deliver your proposition values clearly for an optimum conversion rate.
- Schedule your email follow-ups to be sent based on your recipients’ interactions
- Do not send too many emails too often.
- Analyze the performance metrics and optimize your campaigns as you go.
2. Paid ads for manufacturer lead generation
Using paid ads for lead gen is very common nowadays. While it can generate leads very fast, it’s expensive for most small to medium-sized businesses. This issue seems to be becoming bigger since ad costs are increasing significantly every year.
Lead gen ads such as Linkedin lead gen form or Facebook lead gen ads can be effective at generating leads. These are ads designed for lead generation specifically. However, businesses must calculate their ROIs properly. Getting an accurate ROI can help you understand whether or not you’re making a profit from paid ads, which is crucial.
Lead generation ads allow advertisers to choose a certain group of people to target. These ads work by delivering a signup form to the prospects while they’re online and encouraging them to sign up and become leads.
Despite high costs, businesses regardless of their sizes are encouraged to try paid ads since it’s a pretty low-risk strategy, mainly because they can be paused or terminated anytime. One important thing to remember is to get the right cost per lead so that you can decide whether or not the ads should still be running.
3. SEO and lead magnets
SEO is a series of tasks done to attract more visitors from search engines to a website. SEO is becoming increasingly challenging for businesses around the world, especially for new businesses. The main reason for this is that SEO has been around for a very long time and organic traffic is very valuable.
If you decide to take on SEO for your newly created business, it’s a very wise decision to do a lot of research about it and consult SEO experts.
But when it works, it will bring stable and valuable traffic (called organic traffic). Organic traffic is great for lead generation, especially when businesses have great lead magnets.
A lead magnet can be anything from a useful checklist, an eBook to a free software/tool. Users will need to exchange their contact information such as email address and phone number in order to get the lead magnet.
Leads obtained by this strategy can be kept in a list (known as an email list). Email lists are useful for lead generation since they allow you to send unlimited emails to turn prospects into leads and paying clients.
Conclusion
When it comes to lead generation for manufacturers, everything will need to be professional. Businesses should spend time designing a proper lead generation path and continue optimizing them as they go.
B2B lead generation is very challenging as B2B leads are hard to get and B2B sales are usually high in value compared to B2C deals.
While there are several ways to generate B2B leads, email marketing should be the core of your lead gen effort. We recommend reading this guide to learn more about email marketing for lead gen.