Lead Generation is Not One Size Fits All
All B2B marketers have a dual objective when it comes to lead generation. They want to fill the top of funnel (TOFU) to build the sales pipeline. A healthy sales pipeline produces viable sales opportunities over the long term. But, marketers also have pressure to produce leads that are sales ready now. These leads move to the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) quickly.
When planning inbound marketing lead generation strategies, it’s important to make the distinction between TOFU and BOFU leads. Consider these approaches to both.
TOFU Lead Generation
Engaging prospective buyers early in their evaluation process is less about sales, and more about building awareness for your offering and establishing trust. Great content that gets shared is the most effective way to build awareness and trust.
Create a steady stream of content that offers your prospects choices to engage with you. You’re familiar with the content choices: webinars, white papers, e-books, newsletters, videos, podcasts, live events such as seminars, conference speeches, etc. Focus on the three Es of content marketing: education, enlightenment and entertainment. When you deliver content that is valuable and different, with a call-to-action, you can generate quality TOFU leads. One key to effective TOFU lead generation using this content strategy is social sharing. Unfortunately, this is where many B2B marketers fail. Ask the employees at your company to share your content through their individual LinkedIn and Twitter status updates. Companies whose employees share content through their social channels greatly increase the social sharing and hence SEO value of that content. The marketing team should share content through your LinkedIn company page, Facebook company page and Google+ company page. And, as people engage with your content in these social channels, don’t ignore them. Engage them to explore opportunities to start offline conversations.
BOFU Lead generation
Catching prospective buyers in a ready-to-buy mode isn’t easy, but it’s very possible. You have to meet the buyer where they are. And, yes sometimes you have to interrupt them (oh, shutter the thought)…
SEO and PPC
The first place ready-to-buy prospects turn is a search engine. Develop landing pages with long tail keywords that address your buyer’s pain points. Ensure these landing pages use SEO best practices. Keep the landing pages short and to the point. The sales ready buyer is in a hurry. They don’t want fluff. They want to know if your product/service is a fit now. Don’t hesitate to use pay-per-click advertising (PPC, also called SEM) to capture sales-ready prospective buyers, but focus on long tail keywords to minimize your costs. Consider advertising on your competitor’s names to capture click troughs on your ads.
Pricing Calls-to-Action
Many B2B marketers are unwilling to even discuss this topic. Be open minded about it. While it may not be practical to offer a price quote in some cases, you can capture sales-ready buyers by offering a price estimate. There is a big difference especially if you make the process painless and void of contact with a salesperson. By allowing a visitor to request a self-service price estimate, you allow serious sales-ready buyers to engage with you
online. You will answer one of the most common questions a B2B buyer has about your offering: “Is it in my budget range?” Even though the final price is usually configured or negotiated, the estimate you provide serves one purpose – to open up a sales conversation. Be open minded about this approach. In many cases, it works. But, it’s not for all B2B marketers.
To summarize, avoid a one size fits all lead generation strategy. Create your lead generation strategies differently for pipeline building versus sales-ready conversations. Consider learning more about price estimate lead generation strategies.
10 thoughts on “15 LinkedIn Profile Optimization Tips to Get Found This 2023”
My LinkedIn account was ranking on the first page for best mommys blog keyword quite a few years back and I didn’t have any idea. While working, I stumbled upon the Analytic section of LinkedIn and saw that most of the visitors are coming from search engine later on I realized that in my profile I’ve used “Mommy’s blog” word a lot of time and that is the reason why it was ranking well on SERP. This is how I came to know about SEO and I was also amazed by the fact that how easy it was to rank for competitive keywords back then. Anyways loved your article and please share more tips on SEO.
Thanks for sharing. The number of times you mention a word or phrase is still a factor for sure.
We love hearing tips as well as questions our reader, so keep them coming!
Should I change keywords overtime based on what’s popular on the internet?
There is a lot of value in this article, especially for those looking to improve their visibility on LinkedIn. My favorite of the fifteen tips shared in this article is number nine. I’ve observed that people with custom profile links, seem to get more attention than those who haven’t customized their LinkedIn profile URL. Interesting article, thank you for taking the time to put it together.
Customizing LinkedIn URLs create more visibility for sure! Thank you, Bret.
I agree with the recommendations, they are a very important part of our strategy on LinkedIn, it can give confidence to potential customers (or leaders when someone is looking for a job).
People shouldn’t underestimate keywords on their LinkedIn profile! This helped potential buyers to find me on LinkedIn more easily when they searched for certain products and/or services. Thanks Viveka!
Thank you for another great blog post. For the alt text and/or naming images, do you mean two to three different keyword phrases as a maximum, like this?
B2B cybersecurity content marketing writer , technical writing cybersecurity content , cybersecurity technical writer , David Geer
Or can you add more keyword phrases than this?
Hey David – I honestly don’t know the efficacy of adding more keywords than that. I would stick with what you have above.
All the information is very helpful which can help us to increase our Profile ranking on LinkedIn. Another big interesting article, this blog is very useful for the Optimization of my LinkedIn profile.
I also get much knowledge from this blog.
thank you keep sharing.