5 B2B Marketing Lead Gen Tips to Meet Your Goals This Quarter

It's the start of a new year, a new decade, and a new quarter.

Now is a better time than ever to start fresh, and you likely have a new set of goals that you need to work toward—so without further adieu, here are our five favorite B2B lead generation tips marketers can use to reach their goals.

1. Make sure all your content is optimized for conversions (even your videos!).

This should be a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many organizations of all sizes are still giving their valuable content away for free.

Now, let’s be clear: I’m not saying businesses should charge cold, hard cash to access their lead generation content. What I'm advocating is making sure that all valuable content is available at the cost of online currency, such as—you guessed it—a visitor’s email address.

So that infographic you spent months creating? Post it on social media, write a blog article about it, and put screenshots of it on your product pages with a pop-up form halfway down to encourage visitors to subscribe to your newsletter.

What about the 30-minute webinar your boss ran last month? Use something like Vidyard’s in-video form to require an email address to access a video or continue watching.

2. Re-optimize existing content.

Also known as “historical optimization,” re-optimizing blog posts, landing pages, and even webpages you’ve already created is a great way to breathe new life into assets that may have been gathering dust on your site. 

Although it is a good idea to periodically re-optimize all your content, B2B marketers who are looking to meet this quarter’s goal and short on time will get the most bang for their buck by focusing on optimizing the webpages that get a lot of traffic but have below-average conversion rates.

Once you’ve identified which pages meet these criteria, swap out stale CTAs for new offers, make sure your offers specifically address the target persona and the correct stage of the Buyer’s Journey, and tweak conversion path language as much as possible to match what appears on the page.

Voila! Better-than-new content.

3. Repackage existing content.

There are few correlations in marketing as clear as that between publishing fresh, targeted content offers and generating new leads. You need content to convert leads, after all.

Creating new content is always a good idea, but you can rack up some quick wins by repurposing or repackaging some of your existing content into a new offer. Published a series of blog articles that explore different facets of the same topic? Great! Write a couple of transition paragraphs between each article, add a few design elements, and you’ve got yourself an e-book. You can also repurpose internal trainings, checklists, processes, and memos into externally facing content with little additional effort.

4. Seek out new channels.

Whoever coined the phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” clearly never had a quarterly lead goal to hit. Although staying the tried-and-true course has its benefits, marketers looking to grow their databases with qualified prospects should be utilizing at least as many channels as their personas are to share their content. This includes the standard social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, and especially LinkedIn and LinkedIn groups, but depending on your persona, may be able to be expanded to include networks such as Quora and even Reddit. 

Finding new marketing channels to use goes beyond experimenting with different social media networks. To help get your lead conversion opportunities in front of a larger audience, consider adding one of your most popular articles to your email signature or even contacting industry news sources or partners to see if you can get a targeted piece of content in their newsletter.

5. A/B test.

For some B2B marketers, hitting a quarterly lead goal isn’t about having enough content to gate—it’s about making sure those offers are positioned in the most effective way.

This can be especially difficult for newer organizations or companies that are expanding into new markets and may not know very much about their personas’ likes and dislikes.

Using A/B testing, in which two slightly different variations of an asset are tested to see which performs best, can help you identify and use the best positioning possible for each offer. A/B testing the CTAs for a lead generation offer can be a fast and easy way to make sure your offer's click-through rates are as high as possible.

Regardless of what route you take, maximizing your lead generation comes down to three things:

1. Having content that your ideal buyers (i.e., your personas) are interested in
2. Transforming that content into an offer by gating it behind a call to action and landing page
3. Using various distribution tactics to make it easy for the right people to find your gated offer

There are 1 million ways to create and distribute content. But as long as you follow these three steps, you’ll see lead generation success.

This post was originally published in September 2015 and has been updated since.