How to Set Up an Effective B2B Lead Generation Funnel

In B2B marketing, as in pretty much every other aspect of business and marketing, a one-size-fits-all approach simply doesn’t work. What works for, let’s say, a health clinic, might not be a good fit for a B2B SaaS company.

That’s especially true when it comes to B2B lead generation. If you’re looking to generate new leads for your business, you need to make sure you’re there where your potential clients are. In fact, in B2B, leads are not just some random potential customers – they are businesses highly likely to be interested in your services that are just a step away from becoming paying clients.

With that in mind, generating highly-targeted quality leads has to be a backbone of any promising B2B marketing strategy. If you manage to establish an effective lead generation tactic, closing the sale should be much easier thereafter.

Before we delve into how to set up your B2B lead generation funnel, let’s briefly examine some of the main differences between B2B and B2C in terms of generating leads.

How Does B2B Lead Generation Differ from B2C Lead Generation?

Even though B2B and B2C marketing have a lot in common and share some of the fundamental tactics, strategies, and goals, there’s still one major difference – the target audience.

That being said, a B2C marketer is more likely to focus on customers’ personal traits, while a B2B marketer creates their strategy around their target audience’s specific professional goals and needs.

When it comes to lead generation, B2B differs from B2C in terms of potential lead sources and lead magnets too. For B2B lead generation, you’re more likely to consider corporate channels and materials. For example, when targeting a B2B audience, it makes much more sense to use LinkedIn as a lead source than, let’s say, Instagram.

How to Set up an Effective B2B Lead Generation Funnel

Even though they may take many different forms, most of the best B2B lead generation funnels contain the following components:

1. Enticing lead magnet

It must have happened to you as well – you’re browsing a website when out of sudden a window saying “Free ebook” pops up. You’re curious, intrigued and tempted at the same time, probably asking yourself “Okay, I’m getting this potentially helpful ebook on a topic I’m interested in and all I have to do is enter my email?”

Where’s the catch?

There’s no catch… per se. If you check your email, the ebook should really be there. So, you really get the free ebook, but of course, the website owner also gets something in return. Something of real value to him. A lead. A potential customer.

In this case, the ebook served as a lead magnet. But what exactly is a lead magnet?

In simple terms, a lead magnet is a “bribe” you offer to your visitors to get them to perform a certain action (be it to get them to leave their email address, like or share your content, watch a video, and so on). Its main goal is to get you highly targeted leads – visitors who are actually interested in what you offer and have a chance of becoming customers at one point.

Lead magnets come in many shapes and forms. Those can be newsletters, webinars, free courses, white papers, checklists, ebooks, quizzes, popups, and so on – the possibilities abound.

Our experience has shown that online quizzes are an extremely effective lead magnet. That’s due to the fact that they’re fun, enjoyable, engaging, and have the ability to hook people in quite easily.

Moreover, due to their share-worthy nature, quizzes are practically best buds with social media – which is key to their lead generation potential (unlike white papers and ebooks, which you won’t see liked and shared nearly as often). Once it starts getting shared, leads start multiplying.

Many businesses and entrepreneurs use quizzes in their lead generation efforts.

Dr. Kellyann Petrucci, for example, used quizzes as a lead magnet to grow her email list massively before the launch of her book, Dr. Kellyann’s Bone Broth Diet.

Within a short period of 5 months, she generated 40,145 leads at a $0.38 cost per lead. Ultra-targeted leads who could help her book reach the NY Times bestseller list.

This is the power of using lead magnets effectively. There are several others who grew their email list effectively through quizzes.

If you’d like to learn more about online quizzes and how to use them as a part of your B2B lead generation efforts, check out this detailed quiz maker guide that covers everything from A to Z relating to quiz creation and promotion.

2. Compelling landing page

Many marketers claim that landing pages are the cornerstone of online sales. Whether you’re aware of it or not, you probably visit a landing page or two every day. So, what exactly is a landing page?

Essentially, it’s a specially designed page on your site where you send your website visitors with the aim of generating a lead or closing a sale. An optimized landing page is an essential part of any quality B2B lead generation funnel as well. Here are some of the things a quality landing page should include:

• A clear value proposition
• A strong call to action
• User testimonials and other social proof
• How your product/service benefits your users (instead of just listing features)

If you need help creating a B2B lead generation landing page, there are platforms and services like Unbounce and LeadPages that can facilitate the entire process for you. Or you can learn more about the marketing psychology behind landing pages that convert.

In case you decided to use online quizzes as a lead magnet, quiz result could be an excellent place to pitch your sales copy (whether directly or using an external URL).

3. Lead-nurturing email campaign

After you’ve successfully collected your leads, one of the best ways to nurture them is by sending out personalized email-based sequences. The fact is that email marketing is still one of the most important and most effective marketing techniques.

When it comes to B2B lead generation and nurturing, businesses often use sequences that contain educational or informative content, such as videos, blog posts, actionable advice and recommendations, strong calls to action, and so on.

If, for example, you used quizzes as a lead magnet in step 1, you can use the data obtained to segment your audience (based on the answers they provided) and then send customized email sequences to each of the customer groups.

It’s even easier to do so if you integrate your quiz with an email automation tool such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact. LeadQuizzes, for example, enables you to use one of the available native integrations to easily pass the gathered data on to your CRM software or any other tool you might be using.

Even if there is no native integration for your preferred email marketing tool, a platform like Zapier enables you to send your data to more than 1,000 tools and apps.

Email integrations enable you to send different follow-up emails to different leads on the basis of the answers they gave or the quiz outcome they got. Let’s say you’re using quizzes to sell cars. Based on your quiz taker’s income data, for example, you can determine whether to pitch them an offer for a high-end luxury vehicle or a slightly more affordable family car.

Conclusion

Above, we’ve presented you with the three most important parts almost every B2B lead generation funnel has. Of course, even though the specifics may significantly vary from case to case, based on specific business needs, still the basic concept remains.

In addition to setting up your funnel, in order to effectively generate leads, you’ll need to be using different lead generation software solutions and other tools. If you decide to use quizzes to generate leads, LeadQuizzes is just one of the solutions in the market, of course, but here are some general things to pay attention to when choosing a quiz creator for lead generation.

We at LeadQuizzes do our best to make every step of creating a quiz simple, straightforward, and most importantly, effective.

Just click on the image below and try it for FREE!