How to Generate Digital Leads in the Industrial Sector
To win customers through the internet, you need to put in place a methodology to develop your traffic and generate leads to send to your sales teams. But how do you generate more leads online?
As an industrial business, you have almost certainly been using cold prospecting methods for many years. You attend national and international trade shows, you contact companies by phone or email that might be interested in your products or services, and you may already have used display advertising.
However, like 49% of sales professionals in 2018, you find that finding prospects is more difficult than it was three years ago.
So for some months or years now, you have been trying to change your sales techniques because you are well aware that the internet can offer you a wealth of opportunities. You have a website, you have created a LinkedIn account, and you have installed numerous software tools and CRMs to manage your clients. But you are still facing several difficulties:
- Your website generates no traffic.
- Your website generates no leads.
- Your LinkedIn page does not allow you to interact with clients and you see no direct results.
- You have numerous tools — a CRM, an email tool, advertising design software, a forms plugin, a chat tool…
- You spend more time managing these tools than on your marketing strategy.
- You collect contacts but struggle to centralise them (a business card picked up at a trade show, an email from an enquiry, a LinkedIn exchange…).
What is Inbound Marketing Methodology?
This marketing strategy attracts and converts prospects through content creation. You are no longer the one chasing the relationship — instead, the prospect takes the initiative of their own accord.
Discover the full marketing statistics list
Inbound marketing is a plan that drives traffic, generates leads, and grows your business through content created around the needs of your target audience. The strategic distribution of this content — via techniques such as marketing automation, social media engagement, and blogging — along with performance analysis, allows you to continually improve its effectiveness.
You might say that all sounds well and good, but it means installing even more tools!
— Not at all!
This entire process is made straightforward through a single inbound tool: Hubspot. A platform that lets you manage all your sales tools (email, contacts, appointments, calendar, tickets…) and marketing tools (automation, website, blog articles, CTAs, forms…) in one place.
Discover how to sell differently to convert prospects more effectively
Who Is It For?
In France, 58% of companies that have implemented an Inbound strategy have between 5 and 35 employees. All businesses can adopt this strategy, but the most receptive sectors are industry, SaaS, financial services, and healthcare.
We have identified 6 key points that an industrial business should develop if it wants to prospect effectively online. You can explore each point in more detail via the linked articles.
6 Steps to Generating Leads in the Industrial Sector
The Setup Phase
Define Your Target
The first step is to choose a target that represents your buyers. Once you have chosen a persona, define them according to their age, role, income, pain points, needs, questions, and so on.
You will then need to map out their buying journey and create content based on where your persona is in that journey.
To go further:
Install Hubspot
As a second step, create and configure your Hubspot account. With a single platform, you can manage both marketing and sales while analysing all your statistics.
The Development Phase
Capture Traffic and Convert It into Leads
As a third step, you need to create content and reorganise any existing content. This content must generate interest in your industry, so anticipate the questions your persona is asking. Creating a blog accounts for 25% of the increase in a site's traffic and is considered the best method for boosting a site's visibility. If your content is relevant, prospects will not hesitate to leave their contact details to download more.
Tools for distributing content:
- Industrial blog
- CTA
- Form
To go further:
- How to Concretely Boost Your Sales Through Your Website?
- SMART Objective: How to Create Relevant Content – Inbound #14
- The 4 Steps to Creating Content That Will Attract Your Clients! Inbound #4
- How to Write Effective Content for Your Website
- How Will Maintaining a Blog Bring You New Clients? – Inbound #5
To go even further:
- How to Create a Successful Form and Convert Internet Users into Prospects – Inbound #11
- 5 Tips for Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons That Convert – Inbound #10
- 7 Tips for a Landing Page That Converts Your Prospects – Inbound #9
- 9 Ways to Create Profitable Thank-You Pages – Inbound #8
- 6 Title Formulas That Will Get Your Prospects Reading Your Articles! – Inbound #13
Qualify Leads and Convert Them into Potential Clients
By now, you have email addresses to work with. Some belong to former clients, others to people you met at trade shows, and of course some come from the content strategy you have just put in place. You can therefore segment your contacts to send them the content that is relevant to them.
For example, a lead who downloads a demonstration file for one of your products or services could receive an automatic email a few days later, inviting them to schedule a meeting with your sales representative — via a direct link to their calendar.
The different tools to convert your leads into clients:
- Email marketing
- Workflow
- Sequence
- Meetings
To go further:
- How Will Email Marketing Help You Convert a Lead into a Client? – Inbound 16
- How to Know If Your Mailing Campaign Is Effective?
- Emailing: 8 Subject Lines That Will Drive Your Recipients Away!
Prospect Online
Fifth step: most industrial businesses are primarily on LinkedIn, and that is perfectly fine. Do not try to be present on Facebook, for example, if your target audience is not there.
Develop a genuine social media strategy — meaning not only posting, but also liking and commenting. Engagement will prove far more fruitful than simply publishing content. That is not to say you should not post, but do not neglect engagement.
Feel free to consult the article on LinkedIn below — it takes you step by step through a LinkedIn strategy for the industrial sector.
Hubspot also supports your telephone prospecting with various tools. You can take notes and make calls directly from the platform.
Finally, make full use of digital tools and incorporate video prospecting. A video-based sales approach is more likely to result in a sale than an email — even a personalised one — or a LinkedIn connection request.
Tools for digital prospecting:
- Social media
- Templates / text blocks
- Newsletters
- Phone calls
- Video
To go further:
- 10 Tips and Tools for Successful Community Management
- How to Give Your Site Visibility Through Social Media? – Inbound 15
The Management Phase
Stay in Touch
Finally, stay in touch with your clients. It is important to follow a person throughout their transformation in the buying journey. Personalised, timely support will convince them that you are an expert in your field. Create tickets, organise your pipelines, record as much information as possible on contact profiles so you avoid being intrusive — and above all, analyse your strategy so you can adapt it.
Tools for retaining your clients:
- Inbox
- Ticket
- Pipeline
- Report
- Contact
To go further:
- How to Build Client Loyalty and Turn Them Into Brand Ambassadors? – Inbound 20
- 4 All-Too-Common Inbound Marketing Mistakes You Might Be Making (and How to Fix Them Easily)
- B2B Case Study: What Inbound Marketing Did for RBB Systems, Specialists in Electronics
Our support:
Development and execution of a bespoke marketing plan that includes:
- Buyer persona definition
- Site optimisation
- Hubspot integration: sales / marketing / services
- Driving traffic: blogging and premium content
- Lead generation: building a conversion funnel
- Prospecting: email campaigns and social media strategy
- Data analysis: reporting and adjustments
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