In this article, I am going to show you exactly how you can start generating leads with B2B SEO and B2B Content Marketing for new websites or any company websites that need a boost in lead generation step by step.

Your website can be the best digital salesperson that can drive leads day and night if you set up everything correctly.

And as search engines are getting smarter and more sophisticated so you should get smarter with your B2B Digital Marketing so you can drive more qualified leads for your business with SEO and Content Marketing.

But of course, I am not saying that you should overdo your website with SEO so it can appear in the top ranking because that is not what Google wants as they made it clear:

“Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.”

So, relevancy is the key and that is the spirit I will be focusing on. Thus, in this article, I am going to show you how to connect relevancy, SEO, and your content to drive a great result for your business.

1. Targeting the Right Keywords of Your Target Audience

The first step to be relevant and provide the content your b2b target audience wants is to find the right B2B SEO keywords that your b2b personas are using to find your products or services.

Think of keywords as just topics, words, or phrases that are closely related to your business that you, subject matter experts, and your customers are using to descript your products or services.

These words or what we marketers call them keywords are the exact ingredient that your target audience is using to search for information about products and services.

And if you want to drive b2b leads for your business you must appear for these keywords so they can find you.

And not only that, on top of that you must appear on the first page of Google because the second page and further pages are only good for hiding dead bodies.

Okay maybe that is too much but according to the latest SEO study from Backlinko, only 0.78% of Google searchers clicked on something from the second page.

Few Google Searchers visit the 2nd page and beyond graph therefore targeting the right keyword is important to effectively drive organic traffic and b2b lead generation. How to use b2b SEO and b2b content marketing for lead generation

So most probably you might be asking yourself how the heck can I get to the first page of Google?

And that is when the right keyword research plays a big part in your digital marketing success as also other parts in your B2B SEO and B2B content marketing that I will discuss later.

Keyword Research

From my personal experience keyword research is the scary skeleton for many webmasters and business owners because they are confused as there are literally hundreds of ways how you can do keyword research for your business, but it’s an essential part of SEO pyramid.

And some are more complicated than others, but I believe that beauty is in simplicity, and therefore let me share with you how you can simply do keyword research for any industry and business.

But to make it more practical from a teaching point I have chosen a B2B Business in ERP system as an example as I know this industry very well and because being or having a subject matter expert in the industry is important to effectively drive b2b leads.

Because Google is searching for content created by experts in the industry.

Find related keywords to your business as you are a subject matter expert and google is searching for subject matter experts. Google quality guideline screenshot. How to use b2b SEO and b2b content marketing for lead generation.

So, to start with B2B keyword research first you need to have a category hierarchy of your products so you can better visualize your keywords you want to target.

In my business example of ERP systems, it would look something like this.

Create a keyword category hierarchy to better visualize your keywords and do better keyword research. How to use b2b SEO and b2b content marketing for lead generation.

Once we have a product category hierarchy, we can easily visualize the main keywords that your business wants to appear in the search result. These are the main keywords and topics, and marketers call them topic clusters.

Usually, it is hard to rank for these keywords, but do not worry as you create more topics around these categories and products you can rank even for those.

So, once you have created this, you can expand and create hundreds of keywords that are closely related to your categories and your target audience.

A good starting point is brainstorming sessions when you write down questions and objections your prospects might have, features, benefits, and capabilities your product is offered.

Also using keyword research tools helps you come up with even more keyword ideas for your products and categories.

Use keyword tools to get more ideas for keywords you should create content about to strengthen your domain authority and show thought leadership.

To determine high-frequency keywords for your website, use generic keywords that you have created with your product category hierarchy graph. This will help you later when you create content around those keywords.

Keyword Intent

The next important part you need to know about keywords is the intent your searchers have when they are using a particular keyword.

There are generally 3 types of keyword intents you should know about:

  • Navigational: The intent is to reach a particular website (e.g. Instagram, LinkedIn, b2bdigitalmarketers.com etc.)
  • Informational: The intent is to acquire information assumed to be present on one or more web pages. (e.g. signs of flu, hotel prices in Malaysia, latest marketing tools)
  • Transactional: The intent is to perform some web-mediated activity. (E.g. Get free ERP demo, buy new iPhone, HubSpot vs Active Campaign)

Of course, if you want to drive leads with B2B SEO and B2B content you want to focus on transactional keywords because these are the commercial keywords with high value to your business as that’s when prospects are in the final stage of b2b buyer journey and making a purchasing decision.

But in an optimal scenario and to maximize your opportunities you want to rank for all three types of keyword intents as each of them brings opportunities to connect with your prospect in a different stage of the customer journey

Keyword Difficulty (KD)

Once you already understand the keyword intent the next important part of keyword research is the keyword difficulty.

Keyword difficulty tells you how difficult it is to rank for a certain keyword that you are targeting and because there is so much competition, some of the highly profitable keywords in your niche can be difficult to rank for.

In our example, we can look at how difficult would be to rank for the keyword “ERP system for Manufacturing”

A keyword difficulty checker from Ahrefs is a great tool to see if you should target the keyword because it shows you how difficult it is to rank for your selected keyword.

As you can see, the keyword difficulty (KD) is only 25 which means even new websites have a chance to rank high for the keyword. I generally recommend going below 35 KD in the beginning.

The reason why I am talking about KD is that if you want to start generating B2B leads then your website needs to show in the top search results.

And of course, if a lot of your competitors are already targeting the keyword it will be hard to rank high for the keyword in the beginning.

Therefore, it is important to start with low-hanging fruit first, because you have a much bigger chance to rank high and start generating organic traffic that has the potential to drive leads for your business.

traffic and conversion rate by keyword length graph. It shows the longer the keyword is the higher the conversion rate is. It is due to the keyword is more targeted and often relevant to a searcher. How to use b2b SEO and b2b content marketing for lead generation

Usually, keywords with low difficulty are the long-tail keywords or phrases with 3+ words. That is why the ERP system for manufacturing has a lower KD as it is a long-tail keyword.

Also, long-tail keywords tend to be more precise and therefore it improves targeting, and they have a higher conversion rate as opposed to the keyword “ERP System” which is broader, therefore, less relevant for searchers.

B2B Local SEO Keywords

The next important part of your SEO is local keywords you want to target and rank for whether you are a global or small organization.

B2B Local SEO keywords are very important as they help drive leads from your targeted location because it tells Google and your users that you are providing your products or services in that location. Additionally, it’s great strategy when you want to sell leads to company.

And you can use Local keywords for targeting any location you want whether it is:

  • Defined part of the city (e.g. Brooklyn, Queen, The Bronx)
  • City (e.g. New York, London, San Francisco, LA)
  • Region
  • State
  • Country

Like this whenever is somebody searching for keyword + location you can appear there and start driving leads from the particular location you are targeting.

And this is not only important for local businesses, but also for global businesses as well as targeting specific locations improves your messaging and conversion rate of landing pages or product page as it will be more relevant for users.

Therefore, think about how people are already searching for your solutions and how you can specifically target those by adding local keywords to increase lead generation from a certain location.

2. Create Relevant Content

The second very important step when you want to use B2B SEO for lead Generation is you must create relevant content on your website to your niche.

Creating relevant content is ultimately what will attract high quality leads to your website that is currently interesting in your solution and is actively searching for it.

Relevant content is an essential key for any highly successful website that is generating relevant traffic and leads for any kind of business.

Because great and relevant content on your website is what will get you find on search engine by users and converts prospects into paying customers.

And because you want to drive high-quality traffic for your website you must make sure you are only creating content around keywords and topics closely related to your products and services.

Thus, you can attract your b2b target audience and rank high in the search results for keywords within your niche.

So, let’s look at one of the most important pages on your website that should be optimized with relevant content to attract the only target audience that is most likely to convert.

Homepage

Your homepage is arguably the most important page on your website as it creates the first impression for your target audience and the homepage gets the most views in many cases.

Since you are focusing on lead generation and you want the B2B SEO to work for you, you must start with the most important page from where it starts, your homepage.

Your homepage does not work like a landing page. Thus, there can be found many CTA to fulfill the different purpose of the certain section.

But most importantly homepage has only two important functions that it provides:

  • Deliver relevant content to the user that he is searching for.
  • Or it navigates users across to pages to get closer to the page that has the content.

Therefore, your homepage should intrigue people to go deeper inside your website and find the relevant information the user is searching for.

So, make sure you are optimizing your homepage with relevant information that your target audience is most searching for and make it super easy for them to find it.

Here are a few stats to help you what are some of the important information users are typically searching for:

  • Once on a company’s homepage, 86% of visitors want to see information about that company’s products/services. (Source: KoMarketing)
  • Once on a company’s homepage, 64% of visitors want to see the company’s contact information. (Source: KoMarketing)

Because your homepage should not have a high bounce rate as it works as a crossroad for users to find relevant content quickly.

Also, your homepage should include the most important keywords you are targeting with relevant messaging too.

Solution/Service Pages

Another very important page that you must optimize with relevant content and keywords to effectively drive lead generation with your B2B SEO and content is your product and service pages or what marketers call it, money pages as that is where most of your revenue should come from.

If your prospect is in a stage where he knows that a certain solution is important for him to solve his pains and needs, then he will be searching for your solution pages.

And therefore, you want to optimize these pages with relevant content so they can find you via search. In our example, if somebody is searching for ERP System for Manufacturing, I must ensure that my related product pages are appearing for this keyword.

So, each solution page must be optimized with keywords and content so you can attract high-quality leads that have already done the research.

Therefore, when I was talking about keywords intent, your solution pages should be mostly focused on transaction keywords because those are the final keywords users are using to make a purchase. Thus, you want to rank for those.

Of course, your product should not be only optimized for keywords, but also for your target audience and include relevant information that your target audience wants when searching for your solution pages such as:

  • Features
  • Pricing
  • Videos

And more than you can find and think that your prospect needs to take the action on your website.

About Us Page

Another very important page on your website is the “About Us” page that not only tells who you are but ultimately helps build trust with your B2B target audience.

Many of your prospects before they take the action will visit your “About Us” page to get to know your brand better and feel more confident in your brand that they are choosing the right one.

Therefore, your “About Us” Page is an extremely important part of the B2B buyer journey when they are narrowing the potential vendors.

So, you must optimize your About Us page with relevant content that your target audience might be searching for such as:

  • Awards and nomination
  • Big Milestone
  • Customer Stories
  • Brand Culture
  • Mission & Vision and more

And more than you can share with your b2b target audience about your brand that will help to increase the trust of your b2b buyers you should include within your “about us” page.

So, include anything and everything that your brand should be proud of and you believe your prospects would want to know when they visit your about us page.

But again, remember that relevancy is key, and you cannot just shove everything on your about us page.

If you want to successfully drive lead generation with B2B SEO then your “about us” page is playing a vital role to persuade your users to take the desired action on your website and not somewhere else.

Other Pages

There are more pages that you will have on your website that are still very important to effectively drive lead generation with your B2B SEO.

And every page that you are going to publish you must make sure that it is relevant to your niche and target audience and contain the right keywords that will drive users to your website.

But you might ask yourself why do I need more website pages and content on my website?

Simply having more pages on your website means that:

  • You are covering more topics related to your niche, which means you are increasing your authority and trustworthiness.
  • You are ranking for more relevant keywords and therefore higher chance to rank and increase your organic traffic.
  • And more pages mean also more leads for your business.

According to HubSpot Study, the number of indexed pages in Google correlates with the number of leads you are generating from your website.

A graph that shows the more indexed pages in Google the more leads the website is generating. Median monthly leads by Range of Google Indexed Pages Graph from HubSpot. traffic and conversion rate by keyword length graph. It shows the longer the keyword is the higher the conversion rate is. It is due to the keyword is more targeted and often relevant to a searcher. How to use b2b SEO and b2b content marketing for lead generation

As you can see on the graph the more pages are indexed in Google the higher number of leads the website is generating. And according to my experiences, I can see that the numbers are matching quite well.

So, you want to create more relevant content on your website to drive more b2b leads for your business. But again, these pages must be relevant to your niche with relevant keywords.

3. Create CRO Landing Pages

The next step in how to use B2B SEO and B2B Content Marketing for Lead Generation in 2022 is to properly optimize your B2B landing pages with CRO strategies so you maximize your results.

Unfortunately, many website owners never properly optimize their landing pages to generate more B2B sales leads with the same budget.

Just increasing your conversion rate from 2% to 4% means twice more opportunities to grow your business with the same budget you are already investing in advertising for example.

Therefore, let’s discuss more CRO Landing Pages and how they fit in B2B SEO and B2B content marketing to drive more leads.

Unfortunately, 40% of B2B marketers are using the homepage as a landing page which is not optimal for high conversion rates.

And the reason is that homepages are not designed to convert but rather navigate users across a website to find relevant content they are searching for as mentioned.

But landing pages are specifically designed with one goal only and that converts whether as a lead, subscriber, or anything else.

And to create highly effective B2B landing pages, you must use B2B SEO to achieve that.

And the way how you can do that is:

  • Create Landing Pages that are specifically made around your targeted keywords (e.g. If I will be targeting ERP System for Manufacturing, I create a landing page exactly for that.
  • Increase your website speed as speed = money on your website. (0-4 second load time is best for conversion rates)
  • Ensure you are relevant and giving users what they need. Also using a tool like heatmaps will help you to understand your users and create more relevant b2b landing pages.

Your landing pages are essential to driving leads for your business and according to HubSpot, the more landing pages you have on your website the more leads you will generate.

And that makes perfect sense as you can create more relevant and highly target lead pages for your b2b target audience.

But you must make sure that you are following B2B SEO recommendations for landing pages with relevant and valuable content for your prospects.

4. Fix SEO Mistakes

Alright, after creating your website with targeted keywords and relevant content, your website is nearly set to start generating organic traffic that is highly relevant to your target audience.

But that is not it, along the way you are adding pages and making changes on your website, you can make easily mistakes, especially in your SEO.

So now we will look at how you can easily fix your SEO mistakes so you do not harm your website and ranking and you can start generating leads for your business.

And there are numerous ways how you can go about fixing your SEO mistakes, but the easiest way I have found is using B2B SEO tools that will show you where you have problems on your website.

And there are countless great SEO tools you can use for your website but I will mention 3 SEO tools that will help you fix most of your SEO mistakes and those are:

These B2B SEO tools are great as they scan a website for you, help you fix SEO mistakes, show SEO opportunities how you can increase your ranking, and a bunch of other cool stuff you can do with it.

SEMrush for Fixing Your B2B SEO Mistakes

SEMrush the great B2B SEO tool to effectively use b2b SEO and b2b content marketing for lead generation.

The first SEO tool to fix your SEO mistakes on your website is SEMrush which comes with a limited free version but of course, they have a full paid version to help you get your B2B Digital Marketing to the next level.

SEMrush is a perfect all-in-one tool that helps you to cover almost every aspect of your B2B Digital Marketing from B2B Content Marketing, Social Media, PPC to Competitive research.

It also helps you with lead generation to generate the most amount of leads from your budget, but we are here to check how SEMrush helps you fix your SEO mistakes.

seamrush site audit to help your fix your B2B SEO mistakes.

As you can see within the SEMrush site health dashboard you can easily find what pages are having issues or are broken and need an immediate fix.

It also shows you errors that you should fix soonest, warnings that you should check, and notices you should check as well.

If you for example click on errors it exactly shows you what is the problem, and how you can fix it also what pages are having these problems. For example, on my client website, you can see that the errors are mostly due to a slow load speed, which we are currently fixing.

So definitely check out this tool as it will massively help to fix your B2B SEO Mistakes and much more.

Ahrefs for Fixing Your B2B SEO Mistakes

Ahrefs the great B2B SEO tool to effectively use b2b SEO and b2b content marketing for lead generation.

The next SEO tool that you might know as well is Ahrefs which is very helpful and super important to have for your website to fix your SEO issues, analyze your competitors, help you with internal linking, and backlinks opportunities, and much more.

Previously you had to pay to use this SEO tool, but recently they have launched a new free version of Ahrefs Webmaster tool that is excellent to use just by itself, but of course, I recommend using the full version.

Just the free version itself helps you improve your website’s SEO performance and get more traffic from search. It helps you monitor your SEO health, Scan your website for 100+ common SEO issues that might be hurting its performance in search engines and give advice on fixing those issues and keep an eye on your website’s SEO health over time.

Ahrefs Webmaster tools also check on your backlinks, as it browses your website’s backlink data, collected by the industry’s favorite third-party backlink crawler, and give actionable insights from your inbound and outbound link profiles with a variety of user-friendly reports and filters.

And of course, much more you can do with just the free version of Ahrefs webmaster tools. But I definitely recommend your company to get the full version as it will get your website to the next level.

SE Ranking to Fix Your SEO Issues

SE Ranking the great B2B SEO tool to effectively use b2b SEO and b2b content marketing for lead generation.

And the last B2B SEO tool I want to mention is SE Ranking which helps you with white label SEO, Lead Generation, and SEO reporting to get quick insights and act even faster.

I have used a lot of SEO tools for my clients, but SE Ranking has stood out for me as it offers more up-to-date data and information which benefits me and my clients.

And with historical data easily accessible I can always go back and see what has changed and if everything goes as planned.

SE Ranking helps me to formulate client strategies and marketing plans and effectively launch them and see results as soon as possible which makes me and my clients really happy.

Also, they provide great customer service to help with almost anything whether it questions about their tool or even about SEO as their experienced support team can help you with both.

So whether you are an entrepreneur, SMB, agency, or enterprise SE Ranking got you cover so make sure to check it out!

All links for these tools you can find in the description and give it a test drive and I promise even the 14-days free trial will bring improvements for your site that you will want to purchase all of them!

5. Increase Your PageRank

The next step in how to use B2B SEO and B2B Content Marketing for lead generation in 2022 is to increase your PageRank in order to increase your ranking positions and generate more traffic for your pages.

The thing is without a strong PageRank it is hard to get rank for almost any keyword even for the long-tail keywords because your website does not have the authority thus Google rather promote more established websites.

As PageRank is Google’s view of the importance of pages and in SEO tools PageRank can be named as:

  • Domain Authority used by SEMrush
  • Domain Rating used by Ahrefs

All these names are the same thing if you are confused.

PageRank is important because it directly influences your ranking on search engines by getting links from another website or also called link juice which means your website is getting a higher authority on the internet.

And of course, links from more authoritative websites are worth much more than links from low authority websites, but the higher the PR is the harder it is to get the link from the website.

If you want to learn more about PageRank and how it works, visit The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine from Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

But I am going to share with you some of the best link building strategies to increase your PageRank to start getting links from websites with higher PageRank.

Blogging

The first and most obvious strategy to increase your PageRank is blogging to attract high-quality backlinks for your website.

Let’s assume you are the subject matter expert in your industry, and you have so much to share with your B2B target audience and people that are interested to learn more about your subject.

So, you start creating high-quality blogs that provide real value to your users and give them actionable insights that they can use. And like this, you can attract other websites to use your blog posts as a resource.

According to HubSpot, companies who regularly blog receive 97% more backlinks than those who do not.

Average shares by content type graph that shows the most popular content people are sharing from the website.

(source)

And to successfully attract backlinks from your B2B blog strategy let me share with you some of the best linkable posts for attracting links with your blog:

  • Always provide extra valuable insights than those who already rank in the top 5 positions. I always like to look at the top-ranking pages for my targeted keyword and provide more information to rank higher and get more backlinks.
  • Create infographics and write blog posts about it.
  • Use list posts as they are one of the greatest ways to attract backlinks and getting the most amount of shares.
  • Create definite and ultimate guides that provide the most amount of value among all. So if somebody will share your guide he will say, this is all that you need!
  • Always try to add unique images created by you as those are highly linkable.

So, these are some of the best ways how you can attract links to your website.

But if you are in the beginning and your page rank is rather weak then it is hard to get even backlinks from your blog and therefore let’s move to the next strategy.

Guest Blogging

The next strategy to attract high-quality links for your website and increase your PageRank and probably the best to start with is Guest Blogging.

Of course, first, you want to start with blogging but in terms of getting backlinks, guest blogging is more effective to increase your PageRank in the beginning.

Just Buffer App has used this method, wrote approximately 150 guest articles, and acquired 100k customers in just nine months!

Guest blogging is probably the best SEO strategy to increase your PageRank, increase organic traffic, increase your ranking, and increase your lead generation by exchanging valuable blog posts for a backlink or two from an authoritative website.

And if it is sounding a little intimidating to start publishing blog posts on other articles, do not worry as it is not really hard to do that and the benefits are just too great to ignore this strategy.

If you are interested to learn more about how you can start with guest blogging, then visit my article where I explain in detail how you can start with guest blogging.

But without any hesitation, you should start guest blogging, especially if you are having a weak PageRank and you need quickly increase it and start driving organic traffic and leads for your business.

Publish Research & Studies

Another great Linking Building strategy to increase your PageRank is to publish research and studies on your blog.

If you are regularly publishing new articles then I am sure you have used some kind of statistics, references, and other resources from studies and research from other websites, and then you linked back to them as the source.

And that is exactly how you can get a lot of backlinks to your website if you will publish original studies and researches done by your company on your website as you will become one of the main sources for your selected topic for bloggers and journalists to back up their opinions with facts.

Also because if you will publish research then these are very unique content on the website that is really valuable to your peers and many people on the website which not only gets lots of backlinks but also a lot of shares and attention.

According to BuzzSumo, 47% of all marketers are using original research as part of their content marketing.

The proportion of marketers using original research 47% graph from BuzzSumo.

(source)

Therefore, the most efficient content types for link building are data/research, then videos, infographics. Whitepapers and lastly webinars.

what is the most efficient content type for link building graph? This graph shows that research and data created by an organization are the most effective link building strategy.

(source)

And to help you out, here are some of the B2B SEO best practices for creating highly linkable research on your website to increase your PageRank:

  • Find trending topics within your niche and publish the research about that. You can use a free tool Google Trends, or you can use a paid tool which I prefer BuzzSumo.
  • Always publish your research as a blog post as it gets more backlinks like this then publish it as a PDF version and worse, let people download it.
  • Provide embeddable graphs and other visuals for people to copy and paste on your website. Mostly bloggers and journalists will use your graphics to embedded on their website.
  • Provide bite-sized information as it gives bloggers and journalists solid information to include within their blog posts.

So, these were the best practices to publish research that gets a lot of links from other website and rapidly increase your PageRank.

I also recommend using interns for your studies and not because they are cheap but they are actually good at it because they are publishing a lot of research all the time so like this both you can benefit from their work.

So when the interns are working with you, let them find trending topics, and write research about it. But do not forget to give the credit they deserve!

Others

And to just give a few more examples of how you can increase your PageRank I will share with you some of the other ways how you can get more backlinks to increase your PageRank:

  • Publishing infographics as a blog post
  • Creating whitepapers or other gated content
  • Conduct an interview of famous people within your industry or subject matter expert

And these are other related content you can create to get backlinks from another website.

I especially recommend doing interviews with subject matter experts because those are relatively easy to do but effective to drive backlinks to increase your PageRank. Thus, increase your lead generation for your business.

6. Capture and Lead Nurture

The next step to effectively use B2B SEO and B2B Content Marketing for Lead Generation is to capture your leads and lead nurture your leads to maximize your results. In doing so, you’ll discover how to generate sales leads without cold calling and make the most of your online presence.

After finding keywords that are important to your business, creating relevant content based on your keywords to attract your target audience, creating landing pages, fixing SEO mistakes, and increasing your PageRank to rank high in search results now is the time to finally collect all your leads.

And of course, that is why you have created your B2B landing pages to collect your leads but it is hard to collect anything if there is no traffic and landing pages usually collect only leads at the bottom of the funnel.

So, I want to share with you strategies to capture in all stages and nurture those who are not ready to buy yet.

Therefore, increase your lead generation potential with your SEO to maximize your results and do not waste your hard work.

Lead Forms

The first and most important part of every lead generation strategy is to use some kind of lead form to effectively capture your prospect details so you can contact him.

There are countless ways how you can create an original design of your lead forms but here are a few pieces of information that you should mind when you are creating lead forms on your website:

Simply said your lead forms are the most important part of capturing your leads. Therefore, I really recommend getting more advanced tools for creating beautiful and most importantly effective forms for your business.

I use LeadFormly to create beautiful and very effective forms to capture the most amount of leads. And they are so effective they even guarantee more leads from your website if you choose their tool.

Blog Newsletter

The next way how you can attract capture leads and start lead nurturing is by having a blog newsletter as this is one of the easiest ways to get started.

For this strategy, you do not need to really go fancy as you can use almost any email automation tool and then use a pop-up or an opt-in form at end of the article.

Newletter blog example from b2bdigitalmarketers.com How to Use B2B SEO and B2B Content Marketing for Lead Generation.

Of course, do not expect any high number of leads coming once you create your blog newsletter, especially if you are not an established brand yet.

But the more organic traffic you will get on your blog posts, the more subscribers you will get. Thus more potential customers you can get.

And as I said, this strategy is not the most effective but because it is super easy, and it helps to increase traffic for almost any targeted page.

Because having a large number of email addresses that you can use anytime you want is essential for you to launch successfully almost any marketing campaign, whether it is a new webinar, promotion, product, or anything else and 81% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters.

Also, according to 31% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads. (Content Marketing Institute, 2020)

Content Upgrades

Content upgrades are probably the best way to capture potential not-ready leads on your website and blog and improve your overall site conversions.

Just Brian Dean from Backlinko, improved his overall site conversion by 185% using content upgrades.

Content upgrades help you to fill up your email list full of prospects that are interested in your products or services but are not yet ready to buy as they are in the middle of research usually.

It is essentially a very specific extra piece of content you offer your audience in exchange for their email. Other types of content upgrades include:

  • eBooks
  • Templates
  • Whitepapers
  • Cheatsheets
  • Worksheets
  • Loads more…

Because when your b2b target audience is doing research they are searching for information on the internet and makes an average of 12 searches online.

And many of the b2b buyers are visiting blog articles to learn more about your solutions and to maximize your opportunity you can offer them content upgrades (free downloadable ebook, guide, whitepaper, etc.) to exchange their details like email address and name.

Of course, there are a few things you should keep in mind when you are offering content upgrades to make it as effective as possible. Thus, here are some of the best content upgrades practices:

  • Always provide a relevant content upgrade to the article. If I write an article about how to write SEO blog posts, then my content upgrade to this article could be Blog Posts Templates or Blog Post Checklist for people to download it.
  • Always make sure it is premium content with a higher value than is included within your blog articles.
  • Spend some time on design and include visuals for people to make it more attractive.
  • Do not worry and include your content upgrades on your product pages or services pages to increase the conversion rate.
  • Make sure you have email automation set up for your content upgrades.
  • If you are starting, first start with the most popular posts on your website. Head over to your Google Analytics page. From there, head to Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages.

And there you have it how you can start capturing leads for your business with content upgrades and let’s discuss more email automation.

Email Automation

A very important part of capturing and lead nurturing your b2b leads is using email automation platforms so you can effectively drive leads day and night.

Luckily nowadays there are plenty of great affordable email marketing automation tools that you can use for your business to set up automation and let the robot do all the work.

And while it might sound a little overwhelming to start with email automation for new marketers, you do not need to worry, as your automated emails do not need to be complicated.

Mostly you must focus on always providing value and help your new subscriber to learn more about your solution. Thus, I recommend sitting with your sales and discuss what information prospects usually request for each of your solutions.

And once you have a clear picture of what are the most important questions and information your typical prospects needs, then based on this information you can create automated emails to answer all those questions.

This helps with moving your prospect deeper into the funnel and generating more marketing and sales-qualified leads.

Studies indicate that companies using marketing automation software are 2x more effective in lead generation than those using only blast email software.

So, do not hesitate and start using email automation just please avoid sounding too robotic and try to make your emails more conversational. Do not worry to embrace your readers to send you an email.

Remarketing

Unfortunately, most of your traffic will not convert on the first time, heck, not even the second time or even on the third time sometimes.

It depends on your solution and the price tag. The more expensive your solutions are the more people need to research them.

For example, in the ERP industry, I can see that prospects will typically visit web pages 5-7 times before requesting a demo.

Which make sense as the prospect want to make sure that:

  • The company have the expertise to complete the job
  • Provide good quality service
  • The company is reliable
  • Getting the best deal possible, etc.

Therefore, to ensure you are maximizing your potential to capture leads you must use remarketing to get those people who did not convert the first time, which is most of them.

With remarketing, you can capture and start lead nurturing those people who are interested in your product and services but are not ready to buy. Just use one of your content upgrades as a remarketing and let your prospects download it.

Once they download it, then you can use email marketing automation to lead nurture them. This almost automated approach works perfectly to maximize your results and drive great results from your B2B digital marketing.

Final Advice

And there you have it, 6 very detailed steps on how you can start using B2B SEO and B2B Content Marketing to Capture More Leads and get incredible results from your B2B Digital Marketing in 2022.

Before I go, I want to share with you one last piece of information to ensure you are getting really the best possible results from your marketing and the most out of your budget.

Remember, that in modern marketing personalization is key and if you can personalize your keywords, content, landing pages, emails, and more to your b2b target audience, you will see much better results.

Therefore, try to avoid generic blast emails or non-personalized landing pages as it will hurt your reputation and your conversion rate and you would be wasting most of your marketing budget.

That is why always ask yourself a question if you would be in the prospect’s shoes, would you want this content or this information or would you get annoyed by it?

Remember, customer experience has become the number 1 reason why people are doing business with a brand and your marketing is a big part of customer experience and people want a more personalized approach from marketing and customer service.

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Disclaimer

Some pictures are coming from Freepik and some of my links are affiliate links, which means if you purchase something, I might get some small commission as a reward for reference. Of course, I am actively using all these services and products, and I only affiliate products or services I have full trust in their quality!

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