How to Generate More B2B Pharma Leads
What is a B2B pharma marketer’s most important objective? Likeliest answer: Leads. This article will help you generate more.
B2B sales leads are people or companies considered potential customers. They start the sales process and are critical to maintaining a stable sales pipeline. You can use pipeline management software to track, manage, and analyse your sales prospects effectively, ensuring a smoother progression of leads from initial contact to final sale. In B2B pharma, due to various pressures and forces affecting the organisation, generating such leads has become a priority for marketers because they are linked to high-level growth objectives.
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But there are various types of leads. As RollWorks explain, a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a marketing sales lead that is likely to become a customer over time where a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) indicates an immediate interest in purchasing your products. In contrast, MQLs are leads that might need more education and follow-up. As marketers, however, we’re looking to generate both.
This article will look to generate both because you are looking to generate both at any given period: You will want the SQL right away so that lead can enter the sales cycle and you also want that MQL so they can become your client in the future, and not your competitors’.
You’ll find many articles on Insights that will supplement this article and aid your lead generation campaigns in B2B pharma. We have articles containing methods of increasing website form conversions as well as 20 ways to build trust with your website visitors which will also help generate business leads. And don’t forget to check out our ideas on building audiences in B2B pharma that sits closely with this article. But let’s turn our focus to today.
How to generate more B2B pharma leads
10 tried and tested methods to develop more subscribers, leads, MQLs and SQLs in the B2B pharma sectors.
1. Run webinars via third parties (then promote the webinar recording on owned channels)
Webinars have increased in popularity over the last 12 months or so, replacing traditional conferences and live keynotes across the B2B landscape. They have been vital during this current COVID-19 era, and they will still generate interest from professionals throughout pharma beyond the pandemic, meaning they will still generate leads for B2B marketers. We would always suggest that the webinar itself be run via a third party, such as a magazine or publication. Your webinar immediately becomes credible as the third party (and/or marketing agency) will manage the webinar, often provide a host, based on previous webinar experience and will promote this to their own audiences. This is what is vitally important - ensuring that the webinar generates adequate registrations.
Once the webinar is over, you are provided with a list of these leads. You’ll also be provided with a recording of the webinar which forms the basis for your next round of promotions as you promote the webinar recording yourself, on owned channels, away from the third party. So, this recording can be gated (we’d suggest that you keep the required data fields for access down to a bare minimum) and then promoted on your website or social media. Over time, you’ll develop another list of leads from this webinar, likely making that campaign highly successful from a B2B lead generation perspective.
2. Set up a live chat/chatbot feature on your website and programme it to request visitor details
Chatbots. When will they become credible in the B2B context? First, read this case study featuring the chatbot on this very website. (Spoiler: Out of the two opportunities mentioned in the case study, one of them turned into a respected client… and there have been others since.) Our experience leads us to believe that, programmed and used correctly, chatbots can help make things easier for your website visitors and help you convert more of those visitors into leads.
Your chatbot needs to cater for all stages of the traditional buyer’s journey. You’ll be surprised how many times I say this on a weekly basis, but every website and marketing campaign should provide content for those just looking around to those wanting to make a purchase or buying decision, as well cater to those in between. Programming your bot to prompt those conversations will create more B2B leads. And if you have the resource, live chat provides users with the option to talk to someone within your team direct; a valuable customer service tool for any organisation.
3. Regularly publish content within a series
Commit to creating content and deliver it to a schedule. Every publisher and creator of content will know that one of the sure-fire methods of generating MQLs is to post topical content consistently. Doing so will motivate your audience to come back again to read, watch or listen to similar content. Creating such programmes, often within a series, is the most important element for generating leads; without them, your audience has nothing to engage with and come back to engage with again. Two (or three) pieces of linked content always helps bring readers back also.
This is often a major hurdle for B2B organisations, especially after the content programme has started where the organisation always has a deadline for content looming. Ensure you have a structured content production programme that can consistently deliver the content you require to reach those leads, at regular fixed intervals. Keeping the format the same - the content type as well as the structure - will provide your readers with content they feel comfortable with, which they can also anticipate and subscribe to.
4. Run pay-per-click lead generation campaigns on social media
Pay-per-click is the perfect B2B lead generate tactic. It really is. You create lead generation programmes - decide what you’re going to promote, create the infrastructure for the leads to be generated - and then set up the ads on social media to point to those pages. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram… and a wide range of other social media platforms offer advertising opportunities whereby you decide on who you want to target and how much you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad (and therefore a visitor to your landing page).
All sorts of content offers and services can be promoted, and if you simply haven’t hit the hotspot with your ad, there are a large number of variables you can tweak and experiment with. The platforms themselves provide adequate reporting so that experimentation can become a habit. Any content your organisation creates - be it whitepapers or webinars - can be promoted in this manner. In addition, and if you are feeling adventurous, move away from social media and explore Google and Bing ads.
5. Repurpose everything you can get your hands on to gate
Generating leads in B2B pharma is challenging. Content marketing is just as challenging but without this content, there is often no leads. The content creation process, however, can include the highly productive exercise of getting more out of each piece of content you have created. I think this is really where you can see the results of your content strategy come through, without too much creative effort.
A 30-minute webinar will likely have enough content to develop four new thought leadership articles on your blog, all of which can be shared on your social channels and via email. If you see these thought leadership articles building up, you could take 8 of them - where the topics complement each other - and create a downloadable e-book to promote via social media or via a specific publisher in the pharma space. Whitepapers are huge investments for any organisation, not only in pharma, so why not review the paper and pinpoint all of the various content pieces you can source from it to use elsewhere? Rest assured, this isn’t a case of old pills in new bottles. Remember, more content brings more people to the website.
6. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Now for something of a more outbound nature…
LinkedIn Sales Navigator features a set of search capabilities, improved visibility into extended networks and algorithms to help reach the right decision-maker on the platform. It’s an add-on to your normal LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is quite possibly the most effective network to access B2B pharma audiences but the issue has always been how salespeople use LinkedIn - they don’t do it with real consideration and expect meetings and requirements gathering calls with prospects to follow all outreach efforts. If LinkedIn is used as part of a wider marketing and sales drive, it can be highly effective.
If you operate within a sales role, Sales Navigator is a critical tool for finding and generating leads. You have access to InMail quotas, full profiles outside of your networks, TeamLink (tapping into your second or third-degree connections) as well as utilise a range of filters to identify connections in the same way that Campaign Manager would for your pay-per-click campaigns would. Proactively using Sales Navigator will certainly help you generate more SQLs if such outbound methods feature within your marketing plan or if you are wanting to use more of LinkedIn’s sales features.
7. Employ/collaborate with influencers to promote yourself
In B2B pharma, people care about experiences and this is how people decide if they are going to do business with an organisation. In many B2C sectors, organisations use influencers to promote their products and offer discounts because audiences trust these celebrities. Pharm can do the same by using trusted and well-known industry influences to help promote their products: A growing trend across the entire marketing landscape.
Organisations and brands can use influencers to share their stories. They might not even need to be famous in that respect. In big pharma, for example, following the story of someone who is using medication for diabetes, while they share positive stories about their experiences. Word of mouth is also quite prevalent in the pharma sectors, where people’s opinions get others interested. So, getting influencers to share positive experiences they have had with your drugs or your services or your content will increase the trust people have in your brand. The leads you would also develop would almost always be high quality and would be considered SQLs too.
Ok, let’s have some fun with the next few ideas…
8. Place CTAs on other people’s content when you share within your networks
We may choose to promote web pages and other content pieces - which do not have CTAs on them - within our network but we can’t attribute anything from such followers. A common problem for content marketers. Social media is a great example of this network where the sharing of content from all corners of the internet is common. Social followings may be in the tens of thousands, but although we often know who those followers are (if we use Twitter and LinkedIn, for example), they are not considered leads until they actually take action and enter our CRM system. Tools such as Sniply allows you to generate leads from the content you share via those followers.
Sniply is a social media marketing tool that lets marketers add custom messages to the web pages they post and promote. So, if you are sharing your own content (that lacks a CTA), or better still, content from publishers, third parties and other sources, you can place your own CTAs at the bottom of that page that overlays a small part of the content. Anyone who clicks on a Sniply link - that may contain your e-book, webinar or product or service will see the original content with the call-to-action displayed inside, allowing organisations to convert social media followers and other users into leads by always looking to bring them back to your website and landing pages to convert.
9. Generate leads directly from your videos!
Did you know that your videos can generate leads for you too? Videos often generate thousands of views from B2B audiences in pharma but there is very little else you can expect from them (unless your primary use of the video is to promote your offers on a landing page). But video editing software now allows for lead generation directly from the video itself - and since you’ve worked hard to get your video created and seen in the first place it would be a waste to sit back and let those viewers walk away without trying to convert them into leads!
There are a number of tools out there to make this happen, but we’ll focus on Wista: A video editing software that utilises its feature (called Turnstile) to generate leads. Turnstile is a simple pop-up that can appear anywhere in the video that also integrates with common email marketing tools and CRMs. So, how about your video itself having a section that encourages a form submission but placing that form inside the video? I know you’re not doing this - generating leads straight from your video views - so if you have videos on your websites, or on third-party websites (it won’t work on YouTube as videos are uploaded and hosted there), be sure to optimise them using a tool like Turnstile by Wista.
10. Identify anonymous website visitors with Leadforensics
Finally, and as another outbound tool, Leadforensics works very well with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. I would be thinking about investing in both if you are considering running more outbound marketing rather than inbound. And Leadforensics only works if you have the capacity to conduct manual outbound marketing, commonly conducted by sales in our sectors, as well as have a large number of visitors to your website. I have used Leadforensics in the past and the software is better than any other in its category. It tells you the organisations that are visiting your website, and what pages they are visiting, by using that visitor’s IP address and cross-referencing it with their database.
Essentially, you are provided with a list of potential leads in the form of company names (who have already engaged with your content) with the view of finding out who the most relevant company at that organisation could be. Leadforensics offers specific contact details from their database which you can also purchase within the tool. (However, this is information that can just as easily be accessed from the email address finder tool Hunter for free.) Alternatively, you could then go to LinkedIn, find the appropriate person’s name by identifying the right job title and use Sales Navigator’s features to get in touch. So, if you’re looking to make more out of the visitors that visit your website, Leadforensics is key.
Generate more B2B leads in pharma
The ideas above provide a mix of tactics to generate more B2B pharma leads using a range of inbound and outbound methods. Adopting just one or two of them will certainly improve the numbers of leads you generate on a monthly basis. For additional insight, please see our case study on how we were able to generate 1,000+ inbound downloads of one e-book (now closer to 3,000 downloads at the time of writing) for more on lead generation tactics, as well as some of the other articles mentioned in this post.
For more on strategic content marketing and writing in the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help you, visit our section on content.
