Lead Generation can be stressful work. As with everything in marketing, lead gen has to yield results, or it becomes hard to justify the costs behind it.

The race to deliver leads is real and intense. And that’s why marketing teams chase numbers— it gives them something concrete to hold on to. But this method has a chunk in its armor—the amount of leads marketing teams hand-off to sales has dipped in quality.

Most are irrelevant, and the others don’t want to be contacted.

While marketing teams celebrate the achievements of numbers, they fail to create any real impact.

Marketing teams need to broaden their horizons and hone in on what actually matters- targeted leads.

What Are Targeted Leads?

If you have heard about segmentation, you know the essence of targeted lead generation. Essentially, it means discovering high-value leads over a broad and general market.

These are leads who want what you’re selling or something analogous to it. And then, you go a step further and divide these leads based on behavior, geography, and other factors vital to your campaign and segment them.

You would then assign scores to these leads, and the leads with the highest score would be your target leads. A core component of ABM’s success is to find these leads.

Why Targeted Leads Matter in B2B

Personalization and ABM have become the norm— many organizations, if not most, use ABM to capture high-value accounts by delivering them personalized messages.

This is the crux of targeted leads. They help you understand which leads matter and what campaign you should run on them. In a lot of cases, targeted lead generation will help you find individuals belonging to the same account.

That is why it is a goldmine for marketers.

Targeted leads change campaigns from a disjointed one to one of precision.

How to Identify and Attract Targeted Leads

But, the level of precision will be based on the quality of the leads, and that is the modern challenge, one that has been prevalent since the pandemic. Any organization that can provide quality over quantity will be the last one standing.

The rest will either fall under obscurity or end up failing. With the latter being the most possible outcome- after all, data is changing. In the coming years, it will be safeguarded with ferocity. For now, third-party data and buying lists are all too common, but the shift has already arrived. The only reason these systems are still working is because the organizations that outsource them are desperately trying to showcase marketing metrics.

But then, how do you move beyond this? You identify and attract targeted leads. And make no mistake, you want to attract the right leads.

Let’s begin with the first step.

Attracting Targeted Leads

1. Identifying your ICP

This process might be the easiest of them all. If you want to identify your target leads, all you need is to look at your product/services.

After all, you have identified a gap in the market and are actively looking to solve it. This solution itself will direct you towards your ICP.

1. Addressing ICP Pain Points

Once you identify your ICP, it’s time to get to know what they value— these are called their pain points. These pain points exist on a macro and micro level. The macro ones are usually obvious— maybe their tech stack isn’t working, or the ROI they intended for isn’t matching reality.

Then, there are pain points beyond the obvious— technical issues, downtimes, engineer-specific problems, etc. These issues are almost conversational. They happen in the office room or on social media channels. But once you have identified them:

1. You will have to craft content around these pain points
2. Craft campaigns that address these pain points
3. Speak in a language the buyer understands
4. Be where the buyer/consumer is
5. Use these channels to address the key pain points.

And the reason behind this is to attract the lead. Once people see that you solve their problem, they will be drawn towards you.

They will ask you questions to understand if you’re the right fit— in this process, you will lose some of the leads for the time being, but that’s alright.

Because it’s now time for identification.

Identifying Target Leads

Identification of target leads can sound tricky. It essentially means analyzing behaviors and understanding which leads are standing out for your particular solutions and services.

But what does this identification look like?

You can use scoring models or behavioral cues to figure out what the identifiers are. Based on the campaign, there are many identifiers you can employ. But here are the basic ones that you can cover:

1. Behavioral Cues: First, let’s understand that on-site behavior is limited. You cannot understand the buyers’ thought process with such a small data set. Whitepaper downloads, e-books, and webinar viewing are good signs but leads that do this are not Sales-qualified. Today’s buyers are complex, and so is their journey— while these behaviors are positive indicators, marketing folks should not make them their guiding compass.
2. Social Listening: A lot of identifiers can be gleaned from social media— once a segment has shown consistent interest in your offers, you can start observing them on socials and communities, listening to what they have been saying. This method will help you know which leads are actively looking for solutions and what they are looking for.
3. Segmentation: Based on behavioral cues, you must divide the leads into segments. These segments will niche your leads and empower you to personalize their experience.
   1. Through segmentation, you can continuously monitor the behavior of the leads— which gives you more behavioral data, strengthening your personalization. This is called a positive feedback loop. An action that helps reinforce other positive actions.
   1. Segmentation also empowers marketing teams to identify which channels the leads prefer. Some leads may prefer LinkedIn, while some may prefer emails, and for some, it’s advertising- through this closed loop of understanding behavior, segmentation, crafting personalized messages, and delivery through preferred channels, you can understand which leads are the ones you need to target.

If you think that, at some point, you need to use intuition, you are correct. Data can only help you get a clean list of sorts. The actual identifier will be your own experience and understanding of the product.

And remember, no matter how polished your message is, it must reach the audience it’s meant for. By understanding the channels and how to use them, your personalization efforts will come to fruition.

Channels for Targeted Lead Generation

Let’s go through the list of channels that are available to you at any given time. While this list will only touch on the basics, our blog on lead generation channels is a masterclass of the topic! Once you know the channels you want to use, give that piece a read to know how to use it effectively for growth.

So, you usually have 7-8 available channels based on your budget. Like life, marketing channels are free-to-play but pay-to-win.

You can and will get results with “free” marketing campaigns, but that takes time and a lot of patience.

The channels are:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is the golden child for all marketing teams. It helps you rank and attract traffic almost free of cost. Of course, there are tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Moz, but they can be used for free with limited powers. And so can the Google Adword tool. SEO is the peak of organic marketing. The idea is to create content and optimize your web pages for the user, elevating their experience. Once you do that, your pages (hopefully) will rank on Google and other search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing.

But ranking is complex and takes a while to get right— teams with budgets should focus on more than SEO.

Advertising (PPC)

This brings us to SEM and advertising. These are paid campaigns that charge you for every click based on the keyword’s price. Usually, these show up as sponsored links on Google and other search engines and display ads on other websites. But the idea behind it is the same. It’s digital advertising, shown to your ICPs through the internet.

Email

Email is a powerful channel. It has a great ROI. But there is a catch— it is also one of the few to get right. Either email blast 1000 people and end up in spam or build a reputation for yourself as a value provider. Email is what you should be mastering at all costs.

Social Media

There are leads who will prefer LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook, et. al. as their preferred channel. This means you will have to showcase your expertise, content, and marketing messages on this channel. Every segment will have its channel and require adaptation, from language to design. But the core message has to be the same.

Events, Webinars, and Conferences

Are your target leads attending webinars and events? If yes— which it mostly is— you must use this channel. Events and webinars are easy to understand. They are a gathering of people interested in services similar to yours. You can host or attend these to observe how your potential buyer interacts.

Outreach

Outreach is an effective channel. It entails sending cold emails, calls, and messages to your ICP. For targeted lead generation, this essentially means calling your prospects that you think are high-value. Note: Outreach is not necessarily cold. You can also do warm outbound.

How to Qualify and Nurture Targeted Leads

Qualification and Nurturing need nuance— something often missing from novice teams. That is, they must understand what their buyer wants, how to deliver value, and which channel to use.

Qualification of Target Leads

To qualify a lead, marketing, and sales teams must align themselves and define what MQLs and SQLs mean for them. Once you have the definition down, it comes down to lead scoring.

This lead scoring model must map the customers’ journey and reflect in-real scenarios, not ideal ones.

The leads with the highest scores should be segmented and matched to the definition you have set.

Nurturing

The most famous or rather infamous channel for nurturing is email and for a good reason. People, especially on the top, check their emails quite often. But as we’ve said, this is not an immutable truth and is subject to change based on the lead segment. Maybe they prefer LinkedIn.

But all nurturing must provide value and give something to the potential buyer— and this giving must be selfless. This value can be from a newsletter or through appropriate sales enablement content.

Targeted lead generation is about observing behavior.

A high-value account can only be identified and marketed by understanding its behavior. There are always markers that signify. But there is a crucial step missing between identification and marketing, and that is overreliance on metrics that don’t matter.

The error marketing teams make while observing their potential buyer is to over-optimize everything and forget that they are not tracking metrics but real people with real motivations and emotions.

These things cannot be quantified completely. There are gaps in behavior that only an observer can fill. These observations are born out of experience- instinct. What these metrics should do is provide a rough draft and signifier for these observations.

Why does the buyer buy? A hypothesis can be set, and data will prove a definitive answer.

But to reach that point, you need trial and error. Without experience, all marketing campaigns will remain noise.

Targeted lead generation might promise to set you apart. All you have to do is try.