Whether you are a B2B startup or an established B2B business, lead generation is the lifeblood of a business. Even if you have a good number of clients at the moment, you should never stop working on generating new leads and converting them into long term customers.
Believe it or not, without new leads, you won’t really have new customers and your business can be at risk of stagnation. That’s the reason, lead generation is the most important marketing objective for B2B businesses. Effective lead generation doesn’t just ensure a healthy inflow of new clients, but also greatly helps in generating awareness, increasing sales and profit ratio and decreases the advertising costs over time.
There are tens of ways to generate B2B leads, but there comes a time when you want to get some professional help. That’s when you look for best B2B lead generation companies. So, if you are looking for the best B2B lead generation companies in the UK, let me honestly tell you the fact that the best company for lead generation is your own company and no one can generate you the better leads except yourself.
Before moving to find the best lead generation companies, let’s see what your own company can do.
How to Generate B2B Leads on Your Own
- Take every opportunity to build relations. For instance, if you receive an email that asks a question already answered on your website, blog or in a video, don’t just reply with a link to it. Instead, answer their question and offer a quick call to take the discussion further.
- Send cold and warm emails; do not forget to personalize your message using a better email marketing software.
- Invest in Marketing Automation to scale and nurture your leads.
- Improve your website for engagement with features like live chat, mobile app (or a mobile friendly website),
- Get listed in local as well as international niche directories.
- Get your current customers to leave your reviews and testimonials on your website as well as on third party sites.
- Join niche forums, Q&A sites social media groups and get engaged in conversations.
- Get a digital marketing agency onboard and with their help focus on Pay Per Click ads as a priority.
- Don’t rely on PPC only, invest equally in SEO.
- Explore the content marketing methods and include it in your digital marketing strategy.
- Make use of online and offline trade shows and other industry events.
Your company can generate the most authentic and solid leads for itself because nobody can know your product or services better than you. You may just need a point to start, i.e. here are some really good B2B lead generation ideas that can set you to take your business to the new level.
Now let’s see the pros and cons of finding the agencies that can help you generate more leads for your business. As a fact of the matter, outsourcing your B2B lead generation to a third party can be yet another barrier between your company and prospective clients. But there comes time, when you need someone to share your burden. In that case, outsourcing can be a good choice. But before doing so, you must make sure that you are handing over this sensitive task to experts.
How to Find Best B2B Lead Generation Agency
There can be tens of agencies claiming to be the best ones when you Google the term “B2B lead generations companies in the UK”, however, not all of them might be helpful. To find the one that works best for your business, you need to take some careful steps. Here’s what to do.
Know What Exactly You Want
Lead generation can be “inbound” as well as “outbound”. Technically, most of the digital marketing companies are inbound lead generation companies. These agencies cover a wide range of aspects a business needs to get noticed, i.e. SEO, PPC, UX, web design and development, social media, and branding etc.
Outbound lead generation agencies on the other hand are the ones that have a specialized expertise. For instance an agency specialized in target email or phone number prospecting.
Research & Compare Various Lead Generation Companies
Explore the trusted platforms like Clutch.co and Market Inspector to find a list of B2B lead generation companies. But do not just rely on the data provided by these platforms.
Explore each agency’s website in detail to see what they are offering, check their reviews and see what others are saying about them and then filter the list accordingly.
Know the Limitations & Possibilities
Once you have found a few B2B lead generation agencies in the UK that are really good in their business and have a good clientele, you must know that this still doesn’t ensure that their services will work wonders for you.
At the day end, it’s you who makes the actual difference, so even if you’re outsourcing your lead generation to third party, work closely with the company to get things done rightly!
The Bottom Line:
Your own business website is the number one B2B lead generation tool; make sure it’s optimized for search engines as well has engaging for users. Then come the marketing automation tools and niche specific networking that matters most. If you have put a great deal of effort in these areas already, you should have a healthy inflow of leads, but that should not the be end. If you feel that your business requires just more than that, finding credible B2B lead generation companies and taking them onboard is a good move, however, make sure these lead generation agencies are throughly vetted and are in harmony with your organization’s vision.