Generating business-to-business leads: How to reach the people behind the logo

Abstract

For a long time, business-to-consumer companies looking for new customers have included social media in lead generation. There, they identify individual needs, lifestyle, values and topics that are important for future customers. In business-to-business (B2B) marketing, both web and social media are used to support and maintain existing customers. To attract new customers, however, many companies are still using addresses collected through traditional methods, such as cold calling and assembling different address lists and publications. At the same time, digital channels offer a huge potential for new B2B customers to be identified and contacted. This paper shows how text and web mining can be used to track the digital footprints of existing and potential customers in the B2B market, how to create intelligent profiles of companies and organisations (including profiles of relevant contact persons), and how to reach them at the right time with the right content.