The Truth about B2B Lead Generation

The biggest challenge in B2B marketing is generating leads. Want to experience nausea? Okay, Google “how to get B2B leads.” You’ll come up with more dreaming drivel than you could imagine. Many B2B marketers are frustrated and ulcer-prone because they have one of the planet’s most difficult jobs — getting leads in a swirling maelstrom of misinformation, mistakes, and mystery. There’s a lot of bad advice out there. Here is the cold hard fact:

No one knows where B2B leads come from.

Hubspot made the chart you see here to tell us where leads come from. We see all the stuff we’d expect — PPC, social media, advertising, etc. — but there’s also a mysterious spike called “other.” Look at the blue bar on the far right. Hint: It’s the highest bar on the whole graph.

Do you know what that means? It means that we have no freaking clue where B2B leads come from.

Basically, even highly experienced and successful marketers don’t really know where their leads are coming from all the time. A lot of getting “leads” has to do with a discipline of consistent marketing efforts, a constant cultivation of industry relationships, and the organic mashup of all kinds of interactions, activities, behaviors, and efforts.

Takeaway: Rather than focus on a single silver bullet, understand that B2B lead generation is a composite of unquantifiable activities and behaviors that just work. I'm guessing this is what you've been thinking all along--you just needed a third party to verify it.

The above is from an excellent Crazy Egg article on the topic. More on this to come!

For a no cost discussion of your situation and the volume of quality traffic we can drive to your website via organic search call 630-363-8081 or email jeanna@smartprcommunications.com.