5 Steps from Target to Lead in B2B Environment

Relevant & quality lead generation is the backbone of having a great marketing and sales strategy for both B2B and B2C. It is also one of the best ways to ensure a good foundation for your exponential growth, driving traffic for potential high-quality prospects and customers. Although your product or services might be great, without a proper focus on lead generation,

In this blog post, we are focusing on our first 5 steps of lead generation and how you can use advanced tools — such as RiskLeads to get started with your lead generation journey and automating this process, starting with the B2B environment.

Step 1: The Right Target Audience

Companies without a good knowledge of their target audience spend a significant amount of their marketing budget on wrongly targeted or non-targets ads. If you have a good understanding of your target market, you’ll be able to focus your ads more efficiently and cost effectively to reach the prospects that can convert into customers.

The first step to finding your right audience starts with detailed market research. How you precisely position yourself in your niche takes a significant role in this step. You can achieve this by performing a SWOT analysis — to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities and threats.

As a part of this process, understanding your existing customer base or community can be a great help. You can generate surveys, polls or ask for opinions from your customers in general, but you should also examine your social media and website analytics as this can bring much more insight than customer responses. It can help with understanding who is visiting, which pages, content they are consuming and how they are responding. There are various tools such as Google Analytics, or Hubspot. Various social media platforms also provide integrated tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram with extensive information about user responses.

Combining all these steps will help you position yourself based on certain factors. Knowing all of the factors that contribute to your brand’s market and purchase path, is a critical first step to helping you identify the right target audience. Some examples to these factors as shown below:

• Location (local, national or international — which countries)
• Industry (especially crucial for B2B focus)
• Market trends and economic shifts
• Demographics (Both for the target company and person: company size, job titles, age, company revenue etc.)
• Your competition
• Pain points and motivation — This one should be a big focus on its own, as what solution you are providing should directly correlate with the actual struggles or goals of your target audience.

Keep in mind that for B2C, some other factors such as further details in demographics psychographics (values, hobbies, lifestyle, personality, habits, attitude, behaviour) also play a big role.

Pro Tip: Although it is the target “audience” we believe that an approach with “one key fan” will help you position yourself better in niche marketing, which may start with just one customer and grow quite large. This approach helps brand loyalty significantly. An added advantage could be that they become brand evangelists and do some of the work for you. So when considering a target audience, focus on creating and fleshing out this “key fan” rather than a persona. Although these two terms might seem similar, a key fan is -if not already- almost an existing person, rather than a persona that we only know of some various details of. You can have multiple key fans for different solutions you provide.

Step 2: Finding Companies That Fit Your Description

After positioning yourself and finding out the details about your target audience you are ready to start with your lead generation. As with most of the early processes, this is another step where you need to start with some research. Start with companies that you think fit your customer base — or that are already your customers,, and research similar companies, their competitors, and even the customer base of your competitors. This should bring you an initial list of companies to approach.

However, there is one disadvantage to this approach and that is that it will take a long amount of time and will bring limited results. This is where your previous target audience assessment and tools will play a huge role. Using a leadgen software helps minimise the time your company spends tracking down leads. They also automatically update contact information, meaning that you won’t be working with outdated data. For example, the enrichment integration RiskLeads provides can help you find thousands of companies in a specific region, industry and a set company size in a couple of minutes — and it is unlimited. All you have to do is to enter the right filters. As a result, you can get an extensive list of companies with their domain names, websites, size, and even LinkedIn page ID’s — allowing you to check if they are the right fit for you.

Pro Tip: Paying for pre-made lists for company names usually won’t be bringing you the results you’ve been aiming for, since they might not be the right audience for you — and might end up being a total money and time waste. This is why having unlimited access tool which you can combine with other resources is recommended. Other resources we recommend are using LinkedIn — no shocker there — but also finding company lists you don’t have to pay for to access. These could be lists such as “Top 100 x (industry) Awards”

Step 3: Finding the Right People in the Right Companies

Now you are one step ahead than many, you have a good list of companies that you can approach. However, we all know that reaching out to info or generic email addresses for finding the right prospects usually wont work. Usually info emails are cluttered with random promotions, spam, or irrelevant mails — it is hard to stand out or ensure the right person sees it. And this is why you need direct access to your target audience.

If you have a specific job title in mind, perhaps risk manager, marketing, CEO etc. you can try methods such as LinkedIn search bar to find these people based on certain criteria or within certain companies. But once again, this process will take some time — especially if your list is hundreds or thousands of companies. This is where lead generation tools come in handy once again. For example, RiskLeads can save you a lot of time and effort with their enrichment tool to find B2B contacts. This tool allows you to paste the list of company domains, which you’ve received when doing the company search, and filter or limit your query.

Pro Tip: Unless you are specifically trying to reach the C Suite, it is best to utilise keywords search and target executive staff or the senior staff within the job title you’re looking for since you will be able to reach a person that can take an active role in decision making. As an example if your keyword is risk management, try searching for “VP risk management” or “head of risk management” or similar titles that include the level of seniority. Especially if your targets are corporate clients, not reaching the head of the teams directly will slow down the procedure extensively.

Step 4: Different Platforms and Methods to Generate Leads

There are plenty of methods or platforms you can try out to generate leads. But the truth is, not all methods work equally well for different companies with varying goals and targets. Most common methods include content marketing (downloadable, webinars etc.), paid advertising (Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads etc.), SEO optimisation, email marketing, going viral but the list goes on. With the right target audience, and knowing their preferred platforms, you can save yourself quite a lot of resources on picking what method or platform to focus on.

As an example, if your target audience is a business targeting a young audience, fast paced social media such as TikTok or Instagram is most likely where they will be focusing on, hence this might be the place and content you should be focusing on. However, if you’re trying to reach out to risk managers for example, focusing your website SEO and LinkedIn while generating more detailed content such as white papers, webinars, or even podcasts could be more effective. In general, here are some tips from various methods and platforms to get you started with:

• Building an email list; this can be done through lead generation tools such as Risk Leads enrichment tools as well as the link magnet to capture visitors’ contact information (usually by providing something of value to them such as a webinar or e-book or similar).
• For SEO and content marketing (for blogs etc.), targeting certain keywords for each content.
• Creating a podcast to establish yourself as an expert in the field and generate leads through your interviews. — In fact, we have established 2 podcasts in different formats to cater to different types of audiences in our target group.
• Once you are more comfortable with your marketing strategy, you can also focus your marketing budget on paid advertising on Google Ads or social media(s) of your choice.

Pro Tip: Make a spot for experimentation with different methods and platforms alongside your usual marketing activities. For example, you can use your content in various social media platforms where your target audience hangs out most often so that they’re exposed to your offers/products/services and then cross promoting across all channels. When you have an omni-channel marketing strategy in place like this, people are less inclined to feel like they’re being bombarded by your output and they’re actually more likely to engage with your content when it’s varied across different platforms, and get more familiarised with your company. And omni-channel marketing is not only limited to different social media. You can utilise other ways of digital marketing and even physical marketing as well.

Step 5: Patience and Consistency

Although some industries are fast paced, getting from target to lead can be a long journey for many industries, especially in the B2B environment. Growth takes time and patience and consistency are key factors for a successful business. Many businesses have a tendency to change things, if leads don’t come in at the rate they were hoping. Being adaptable to change is good, but doesn’t necessarily mean that the change always needs to be happening.

Let’s look at this example: Let’s assume you’ve just started your company and have 0 following. You’d like to start a podcast and a LinkedIn Content Marketing as your first two methods. It would be a miracle if with one podcast episode you have suddenly grown to thousands of followers, as even hundreds could take a while. Same way, you are posting content from your company page, and you have little to no engagement. This doesn’t mean that these methods are necessarily not working for you, it most likely means your content is not nurtured enough yet. You need to consistently provide more content and set milestones. After a certain amount of time / content amount, you can assess if you need to try a different approach either in the style of content you are providing, or even another platform.

Pro Tip: Adaptability plays a big role alongside patience and consistency. Especially considering algorithms play a big role in your content visibility. This means, make your content flexible enough that it can have small changes in format easily. You can also utilise A/B testing to optimise the responses. This is especially important in e-mail marketing or direct mail marketing, if you have thousands of email contacts you’d like to approach. First, test in small batches before sending to the whole group unless you are sure it has a good conversion rate. Of course, if the test group is too small, this might lead to wrong results as well so find the balance with trial and error.

Closing Words

Target to sale is a long and ongoing journey you’ll need to be focusing on throughout your entire business strategy. It requires a lot of research, trial and error, patience and consistency. However, in this digital age, you have a lot of tools you can use to optimise and automate the process.

We hope that this blog post has brought you further insight on a few tips and steps you can start implementing to reach your business goals.