Quality lead generation is the backbone of an efficient B2B marketing strategy. So, how much money should your B2B company be spending on marketing?
Growth is the biggest challenge for many businesses. To spur this growth, B2B companies dedicate a significant budget share to marketing and advertising. The budget share of B2B marketing has risen consistently over the past decade. On average, B2B product and service companies spend anywhere between 10.4% to 12.6% of the total revenue. And, according to Gartner’s 2019-2020 CMO Spend Survey, 26% of marketing budgets are allocated to a combination of marketing and technology (MarTech).
But as new trends emerge, B2B marketers are revising their approach and finding new ways to improve results. Executives and higher-ups now understand the value of B2B growth hacking techniques. For instance, marketing automation is a growth hack that can optimize marketing efforts by automating tasks. Let us look at some unique B2B growth hacking techniques.
So, creating an impactful SaaS lead generation strategy becomes essential for any business. First, your strategy must attract many people to the website. Then, it must capture their information and nurture them by offering a lead magnet until they are ready to buy. In a nutshell, SaaS lead generation introduces your service to prospects and converts them into paying customers. Following are the B2b growth hacking techniques:
Technique #1: Search Engine Domination Technique
Technique #3: Marketing Automation
B2B Growth Hacking Technique #1
Search Engine Domination Technique
Are you missing out on prospective leads because they cannot find you when searching online for relevant products and services? Do your customers discover your competitors’ websites before finding yours? Is it because your website ranks lower on the SERP? Well, if your business is not discoverable on the internet, your website will barely get any traffic. Devoid of traffic, your business won’t make money. Try the B2B growth hacking technique – Search Engine Domination. It plays a crucial role in winning your website several placements on the SERP. The more real estate your website takes on the first SERP, the lesser the room is for your competitors.
A study from Advanced Web Ranking shows that the top 5 results on the first SERP account for 67.60% of all clicks. So as long as your website ranks in the first five results, you need not worry about anyone else. There are multiple ways of getting your website to rank on the first page.
- Paid Search Result is one such guaranteed way where you can pay for your website to appear in the Ad sections. Do it by setting up an Adwords account.
- Google News is another such way. News results are often placed on the top half of the SERP with 2-3 links related to the searched keyword. Google is prudent in not letting News become a channel for promoting a product or an organization.
- Search engines run on high potency feed such as Search Blogs and Barnacles. They are indispensable for B2B lead generation and effective in optimizing content for search engines.
- Sitelinks can make branded search results appear more impressive.
- Google’s Knowledge Graph organizes and merges information about millions of places, people, and organizations using multiple data sources.
- For business websites, it’s vital to have accurate and updated information on Google My Business and Map results.
- Google Maps shows search results based on relevance, distance, and prominence. Google may give importance to a business that’s far away from a user’s location because it has what they are looking for. Hence, your business information needs to be complete.
- Google places a lot of importance on videos, especially the ones on YouTube. Videos that go viral get ranked higher on the SERPs. Optimizing them with clear links in the video description and tagging them makes it easy for Google to discover and crawl the content and send high traffic to that link/web page.
- It is not fun reading a 2000-3000 worded article without Images. If you use images, ensure that the image title and file names are accurate, with alt tags and appropriately sized.
B2B Growth Hacking Technique #2
Cold Outreach
Yet another B2B growth hacking technique is Cold Outreach. If done right, it can make the biggest of sales for a company. It is not just an isolated tactic. It is a way to connect with new people and help them through your company’s offerings. Cold email outreach is a proven B2B growth hacking technique that drives engagement and yields high sales conversion rates. But measuring success based on conversion rates is only half the story.
Performance can be improved by measuring it. It doesn’t suffice to track conversion metrics alone. It is equally important to know what the metrics tell you and what you can do about it.
- For instance, bounce rate tells you the percentage of emails that never got successfully delivered. It could be because the email address doesn’t exist. Or the receiver’s inbox is too full to receive any new messages. Bounce rate is an indication of your email list quality. Make sure you have a good one.
- The open rate paints a clearer picture of how some aspects of the cold emails are performing. Try A/B testing for variations of Subject Lines or sending emails at different times to see if they can make it to the top of the inbox.
- If you are trying to improve your Response/Reply Rate, you must target the right people with straightforward content about who you are and who you represent.
- The conversion rate metric is the most decisive measure of how well the outreach emails move your leads into the sales funnel. Use an eye-catching CTA that conveys to your prospect exactly what you offer and what they have to do to receive it. Or make a compelling landing page copy and design.
Without these metrics, it is difficult to determine the number of delivered, opened, responded to, or converted emails. An understanding of these conversion metrics helps determine whether the cold outreach campaign was successful or not. Once you have mastered the art of tracking and measuring performance metrics, you can create engaging cold email content to drive results.
B2B Growth Hacking Technique #3
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is one of the most rewarding B2B growth hacking techniques. The foremost benefit of marketing automation is that it lets growth hackers concentrate on meaningful and creative tasks rather than engaging in repetitive and time-consuming ones. What may not be problematic in the early days can cause a severe overflow of responsibilities later on as your business grows. Besides, with lean human resources, which is the case for most startups, it is prudent to maximize the potential of your employees by employing Marketing Automation.
As your company grows, there would be a lot of processes that would require automation. But you have to lend consideration to the fact that communication requires a personal touch.
Investing in lead management tools such as Salesforce, Marketo, etc., can help manage multiple B2B leads. Automated marketing apps can help you send out emails and materials for your campaigns. It allows you to send follow-up emails to push the leads through the sales funnel. Automation enables your team to make better use of their efforts, so they align with each other and your business’s sales goals.
- Marketing Automation enables B2B businesses to deliver personalized campaigns across channels and help leads make customized purchases. The tools include Eloqua, Constant Contact, Hubspot, Userfox, and many more.
- The Sales Automation tools include Prospect.io, Hubspot, Autoklose, Growbots, Freshsales, and Calendly. These tools are instrumental in automating customer engagement, closing leads, and nurturing and managing your pipeline.
- Tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer automate scheduling and posting on social media platforms. Ad Automation automates ad campaigns, analyzes channels, and optimizes advertising campaigns faster. Comprehensive ad automation software includes WordStream PPC Advisor, Optmyzr, Google Ads Editor, and Semrush PPC Toolkit.
- Inbound Automation automates inbound call analytics, inbound leads and gains organic leads with the help of tools such as Ahrefs, Typeform, HotJar, HubSpot CRM, SEMRush, and more.
Key Takeaways
The abovementioned B2B growth hacking techniques not just help your business save millions of dollars. They also attract a new audience to your product and boost your visibility. Partnering with top growth hacking agencies can reduce B2B marketing spend significantly and maximize efficiency. So, are you ready to implement these B2B growth hacking techniques and save money?