What if you could gain more leads for your B2B company than ever before? There are many different strategies for B2B lead generation. However, the modern strategy that has the most potential for your own company involves analytics. Simply put, analytics offer a powerful way for you to regularly generate high-quality leads.
Unfortunately, the B2B companies that would benefit the most from this approach often don’t know how to make the most out of analytics. Fortunately, that’s where we come in. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about transforming analytics into solid B2B leads.
Why Use Analytics For B2B Lead Generation?
Our guide is going to focus entirely on using analytics for B2B lead generation. Before we really dive in, though, it’s important to answer your burning question: why should you rely on analytics for leads in the first place?
First, the whole point of analytics is to gather as much info about current and prospective customers as possible. Historically, this has provided invaluable information to help companies fine-tune their approach to sales and marketing. But with analytics, you can use all of the customer data to help narrow things down to the most relevant leads (which is very important since LinkedIn has lead conversion rates three times higher than the competition).
The second reason is related to the first: chances are that your company is already tracking and analyzing analytics anyway. Therefore, our guide doesn’t focus on getting you to start some ambitious new endeavour. Rather, we are focusing on ways to generate more B2B leads using the data you have already collected.
Finally, you can apply these lead generation techniques to popular platforms such as LinkedIn. You are probably already using LinkedIn to stay on top of developments in your industry and scout out prospective talent. Why not combine platforms like LinkedIn and lead-generation strategies based on analytics for the ultimate synergy?
Company Update Info On LinkedIn
Sometimes, B2B leads are more difficult to generate because generation strategies are very different between B2B and B2C companies. However, LinkedIn provides an easy way for you to work on B2B leads by learning more about other companies.
Your LinkedIn lead generation strategy starts by checking out your own Company Update section on LinkedIn. This section provides invaluable data about the way your followers on LinkedIn interact with your brand.
For example, you can track how many impressions a post got, but you can also track how many clicks you have gotten via company name, logo, or content (such as your posts). This alone can give you a rough idea about which content is resonating more with prospective leads and which is resonating less. Even better is monitoring interactions, which keeps track of the engagement you have gotten on each post in the form of likes, shares, comments, and reactions.
Speaking of engagement, LinkedIn lets you monitor your overall level of engagement by dividing interactions by impressions. This gives you an even better idea about what content your followers want.
What does all this have to do with generating leads? On LinkedIn, the content you post is the single best way of gaining new followers while turning some of your existing followers into loyal customers. But you won’t get high-quality leads if you cannot provide what your followers consider high-quality content.
To really make this work, you need to experiment with different kinds of posts. For example, posts that encourage interaction with your followers are usually a success. And like other social media platforms, the posts on LinkedIn typically do better if they feature high-quality photos and/or videos as part of the content.
Understanding Your Followers
Above, we noted some of the ways you can glean valuable insight into your followers on LinkedIn. However, you should know that this platform offers you even better ways to gain such information.
For example, LinkedIn provides a separate follower section where you can check out which industry your different followers belong to. This is useful when you are trying to target very specific industries. And if you are open to targeting industries you did not target before, these analytics can help you get some ideas.
LinkedIn also provides information about a person’s seniority relative to their current company. This allows you to target different people based on different needs. Without this section, you might not easily be able to separate managers and executives from sales professionals and assistants.
One of the more useful bits of information that LinkedIn provides about your followers is the size of their companies. Your own B2B strategy might involve generating leads for small businesses, enterprise-sized businesses, or both. With this analytics data in hand, you can develop a more effective strategy.
A simple metric on LinkedIn helps you determine how many of your followers work for your own company and how many don’t. It may seem flattering when the majority of your employees follow you on LinkedIn. But these particular followers are effectively meaningless when it comes to your different B2B lead generation strategies.
Finally, the followers section on LinkedIn helps you identify the different kinds of jobs that your followers work for. On a broad level, this helps you determine if you are making effective inroads with the industries that you are targeting. On a narrower level, knowing the job functions that everyone is fulfilling can help you evaluate the effectiveness of the content you post.
Speaking of which, the followers section on LinkedIn is a good place to dig into relevant demographic data. While you are there, you can analyze how your number of followers has risen and fallen over time. This provides one more way that you can get a better idea of the content your followers truly wish to see.
Using LinkedIn Visitor Data
By now, you have plenty of invaluable LinkedIn data to help with LinkedIn lead generation. But the platform provides one more section you will find very interesting, and that’s the visitor data section.
At first, this section might sound redundant with regard to the other sections. But while the other sections provided information about your specific followers, the visitor data section provides info about those who clicked on your pages but who may or may not be followers.
With this section, you can examine how many times your company page was viewed during a specified date range. While the previous data is useful for discovering what your followers like (and don’t like), this data is a useful way of discovering what is prompting outsiders to actually click to find out more about your company.
One of the handier features of this section is that you can learn how many unique views that your profile has gotten. True to their name, “unique views” are views from different people, and this count will not include multiple clicks from the same people. It may sound simple, but checking out the unique views means you get a more realistic idea of how many clicks you are getting once you rule out those (primarily yourself) who have clicked multiple times.
Finally, this section includes information on visitor demographics. Previously, we touched on the importance of learning and analyzing the demographics of your followers. But learning about the demographics of your visitors has its own specific benefits.
For example, it’s important to see how well the demographic of your followers and the demographic of your visitors lines up. If there are major differences, this means you may need to tweak your content and your strategies in order to better reach your target audience. Additionally, surprising info about who is visiting your page (including the industries they work for) can help you potentially market your business to entirely new groups.
Publishing Authoritative Content
We have focused quite a bit on collecting demographic information about followers and visitors. When done right, this helps you learn quite a bit about your followers’ preferences. But what can you do with this information that can help generate more solid leads?
With the help of LinkedIn’s own publishing platform, you can create plenty of content to establish yourself as an authority in your industry. Such content includes e-books, podcasts, white papers, and more. The trick is to use the analytics to identify specific B2B customer pain points and then generate content that provides the solutions they need.
For example, you wouldn’t write and distribute a podcast about just any random subject. But if you identify that many of your followers are worried about subjects such as employee retention, you can create a podcast (either limited or ongoing) focusing entirely on this topic.
When you post links to the podcast, you will likely get plenty of engagement from your followers (assuming you used analytics and focused on their pain points, of course). As they engage with your post, those who follow your followers will see your content and potentially engage with it. This can go on for quite a while and bring many new visitors to check out your company, ultimately generating more leads (and better leads) than you were getting before.
Give Old Content a Renovation
Sometimes, creating content for LinkedIn feels like you are throwing darts at a moving board. Why is that? Simple: the content that hit the mark months or years ago may no longer be hitting the mark.
One solution to this dilemma is, of course, to create new content. And based on the analytics info that you have collected, you could certainly do so. But what if there were a better and far easier method of using content to generate leads?
While creating new content is important, it is just as important to give your old content the renovation it deserves. Oftentimes, this is a simple matter of doing minor updates. For example, your “audience retention strategies of 2020” article is now out of date. But with some light research and revision, you can easily transform that into a “strategies of 2022” article.
Part of what makes this strategy so effective is that it extends beyond LinkedIn. Good, SEO-driven content will help to bring more people to your profile based on Google searches. And that can help you ultimately grow both your followers and your leads.
Unlock the Power of Groups
Some of our analytics-powered LinkedIn lead generation strategies are simpler than others. And one of the simplest strategies is to join relevant groups all across LinkedIn.
Chances are that you have already joined some industry-specific groups. These groups can help you network, generate leads, and generally stay on top of different developments within the industry.
But as we noted before, LinkedIn’s analytics are a great way to discover different industries that your followers and visitors belong to. This is usually a powerful clue that you need to get outside of your comfort zone and market your company to other industries.
However many groups you join, don’t forget that it is important to interact with people. This means starting and responding to different discussions, asking and answering questions, and so on. The more you position yourself as an engaging and authoritative source of information, the more easily you can generate leads.
LinkedIn Automation Is the Key
All of the LinkedIn strategies we have outlined above are effective ways to generate additional B2B leads. There is just one problem: many of the most effective strategies can also be very time-consuming.
Fortunately, you can save plenty of time by using the LinkedIn Automation Tool. This tool can save you many hours a day on actions such as sending invites, sending emails, personalizing messages, and so on.
Most importantly, this tool helps automated your daily prospecting for leads. With all the time automation will save you, there will be plenty of time to engage in more of the strategies outlined above.
But why simply read about it when you can experience it? To discover the difference the LinkedIn Automation Tool can make for your own business, come request a demo today!