Do You Invest in B2B Brand Awareness or Lead Gen?

B2B lead generation is rarely a straight path. When was the last time a customer headed to your landing page, clicked a few times and called looking for a contract? Quite the contrary, B2B deals are often months or years in the works. It’s only after multiple interactions with your brand that a prospect transitions to consideration and then eventually purchase. That’s why raising brand awareness is crucial, even if it doesn’t immediately result in sales.

Most B2B companies are not household names, so the first step in generating the right leads is defining your brand and making sure it speaks to your key audiences. Your brand story should be simple, direct and provide a clear solution.

From there, you should map out marketing campaigns that can both raise awareness for your brand and generate top-of-funnel leads. Content marketing campaigns that provide education, tips or thought leadership are effective for gaining attention and building your brand’s profile. These campaigns can be executed across your website, social media channels, in traditional media outlets and via email. Within these campaigns, integrating gated content and subscription-based activities (like webinar attendance or newsletter signup,) can capture leads.

We like this list of the top B2B lead-gen strategies of 2018, many of which also happen to be awesome brand-building activities:

1. Personalize content for B2B audiences
2. Take advantage of intent signals
3. Post more blog content
4. Add more researchable information
5. Send high-yield cold emails
6. Offer incentive for word-of-mouth referrals
7.  Use webinars to supplement live events
8. Branch out to new social channels
9. Answer questions on Q&A services
10. Optimize your site for mobile speed

The most important thing to remember with B2B brand awareness and lead generation: success takes time. Defining realistic goals is critical. Monitoring your company’s reach and building a library of content will not produce immediate results. But it will slowly and steadily increase your brand awareness and before you know it: traffic, leads and customers.