There is no doubt that in a few years B2B marketing industry is in limelight seeking attention from everyone. Mainly this industry is focusing on lead generation and is considered the fuel for B2B Business. During this unprecedented time, the lead generation process could be baffling posing more challenges for B2B lead generation even in this transitional phase.
B2B Marketing & Lead Generation
Earlier, Lead generation was considered a classified advertising tool but at present, the concept has evolved beyond that and has become the business’s soul, particularly for B2B. There are many business strategies that emerged progressing to the extent where leads are extracted directly by reaching the right door and converting other businesses into potential customers in the sales leads form.
With the growing trends and features, the challenges for B2B lead generation have also increased. As per a Hubspot report, leads and traffic generation is called the biggest pressure point claimed by 61% of marketers.
5 B2B Lead Generation Challenges
- Sluggish Marketing Strategy
For a successful streak, a B2B marketing strategy must be active and continuously evolving. A roadmap should be created in the form of a strategy visualizing prospects entering the sales funnel, paying attention to their needs and their conversion into customers.
To follow this process, an ample amount of time and effort is required to figure out the strategy that would work for the campaign but still needs more work to b done. Lack of resources in staffing, budgeting, and time are lead generation’s greatest barriers recognized by B2B marketers. Majorly advertising or paid search is involved in B2B marketing strategy and due to the pandemic impact, the advertisement costs have increased as the business operation has shifted to the digital mode intensifying the crowd as well as offline vendors are reaching the digital market relying on the digital advertisement largely.
Hence the competition over these platforms has increased advertisement costs as well as challenges in content creation making it harder to drive more traffic from the targeted platform. As a result, B2B marketers adopted a stagnant marketing strategy for lead generation.
- Market Demand Identification
Due to niche markets of sub markets, the market demands identification is getting more frustrating. Not having a large target market for the product or service that a company is attempting to sell has more probability as it would be critical to locate all of them. The limited no. of high-potential contacts prospects constraints the marketing process because of its high stakes of squander.
- No Balance Between “Quality Leads” & “Quantity Leads”
The war between Quality and Quantity is on for decades and is perplexing particularly for B2B marketers. Leads are those clients and consumers who have shown interest in business brands, services, or products, and leads who hold a higher probability to be paying clients are called high-quality leads. These leads are called quality leads.
The study says, that 54% of marketers ask for an increased no. of leads generation but 7/10 agreed that getting better quality leads is the most preferred or important aspect of their lead generation strategy. At some point, struggle formulates while striking the balance between strategies giving birth to the linear lead generation model on the basis of simple no. rather than in-depth data.
- No Sync Between Sales & Marketing Teams
The sales team and marketing team coordination is very much important for any company. As sales team has the potential to engage with buyers before it comes to the representative contact having a 56% greater chance for lead conversion. Meanwhile, marketing teams play majorly in the google lead generation process i.e., blogs, articles, etc focused entirely on content marketing, SEO, social media, and so on. Therefore, the lack of communication between these two departments leads to low lead generation. The alignment between sales and marketing teams can lead to a 35% higher customer retention rate and a 38% higher sales win rate.
- Data Privacy Concern
1 out of 5 marketers stated about privacy compliance is the main obstacle across their marketing channels, as per Gartner’s study. It is hard in analyzing the data because of the increased privacy data concern. Therefore, new rules and strategies are the only solutions for assuring data privacy.
- Finding Right Lead Generation Tool
Automation tools use is in the greatest trends in the lead generation as per reports, 80% of marketers opt for automation lead generation tools converting 77% of more prospects. Now the concern is having the right B2B database software that can keep the marketing strategy on track and if an outdated database is followed it will not yield any results instead it will waste time and resources. Data is not sufficient for any sales lead. Having accurate data with verification is also important before passing it to the sales team.
Final Thoughts…
For businesses dealing with B2B operations, lead generation is the driving force. The race to be at the top of the industry is challenging for B2B marketers. The trends they have, the updates verification, etc are some hurdles hurdling the business to grow. To tackle these obstacles B2B marketers need to be updated with the trends and strategies to make it work for the business.
