A Complete Guide To B2C Lead Generation

Businesses are constantly in a tug of war to attract new customers. Leads are the ones that become customers if they’re convinced enough about the company and its product. For B2C businesses, it is essential to have a compact lead generation strategy because you’re dealing in person with the customers.

If your business has an online presence, you need to stay competitive to generate leads as much as you can. There are many ways for B2C lead generation, but if you’re out of ideas, this blog is for you. 

In this blog, we’ll cover the basics of B2C marketing, and discuss the strategies that fit your business the most with real examples.

So, let’s start by understanding B2C marketing.

What is B2C marketing?

B2C (Business to Consumer) marketing is aimed at individual consumers rather than businesses. This model targets end-users with products like clothing, cosmetics, and mobile phones, catering to personal needs. 

B2C vs B2B marketing and lead generation

B2C	B2B
Sales cycles are short	Quiet a long sales cycles (month or year)
Ready to buy customers	Businesses aren’t always aware of the problems, so buying needs to be motivated by high quality content
Huge audience with purchasing power	More confined market
Social media can be used to find leads (Facebook, Instagram, Youtube)	Business platforms like LinkedIn can be used to find leads
Cold calls and cold emails aren’t of good use in this case	Cold, calls, emails are quite common ways in this case

B2C lead generation types

1. Inbound: In case of inbound lead generation, your customers find you from different social streams and show interest in your business. The way the media streams are utilized is by creating great content  of interest and search engine optimization.

2. Outbound: For outbound lead generation, you need to reach out to your potential customers. Most of the time it is done by cold calls or cold emails. 

The B2C lead generation process

The B2C lead generation process begins with discovering potential leads and then progresses to nurturing and converting those leads. 

Firstly you need to understand your audience and engage them with effective lead generation tactics, gather their contact information and follow up until they make a purchase.

1. Identify potential leads

Businesses keep track of the activities that reflect someone’s interest. This can come from anywhere including engagements like queries, social media interactions, form submissions, trial registrations and so on.

That’s why businesses need to engineer these forms, trials, social media posts in a way that signals the customers interest and also provokes them to interact more.

2. Gather information

This stage of the process is critical since gathering information on the person is where things begin to escalate. To gather personal information, you need to create effective lead magnets. 

With lead magnets as an offering, you boost your chances of receiving information. That is why it must be something valuable that will attract customers.

3. Nurture and convert leads

The first two steps mean nothing if this stage is not functional. When you have gathered information, create strong relationships with meaningful interactions. This ensures that your leads become customers in the future.

8 B2C lead generation strategies with examples

The B2C sales cycles are faster than b2b. That means you need to design the lead generation strategy in a way that moves customers from awareness to the decision stage swiftly.

When identifying the potential lead, you gather some behaviors of customers and analyze them. It’s like an aura they are radiating, that makes them the perfect lead. 

You just need to feel that aura, meaning translate those actions and identify how you can build your lead generation strategies around those signals. 

Here are ‘Number’ lead generation strategies with examples that have successfully identified their potential leads and turned them into customers.

1. Building online community 

Etsy is a popular global online marketplace. As it is a virtual store, they utilized user generated contents by creating a community.

The reason it worked wonders, cause people always check what others are saying before buying anything. These discussions build a sense of safety. It’s like having conversations in a physical store about products. People also enjoy sharing their views and brands within Etsy engage with their customers using this platform.

What you should do: 

• Create a Community section on your website so that the customers can share their stories as well as engage with each other. 
• Incentivize your customers to share their stories by providing discounts.

2. Showcasing video testimonials 

Carelon is a healthcare service company. It’s focused on creating high-tech solutions and providing operational support to solve complex healthcare challenges. They showcase the firsthand experiences of previous patients to build trust among the prospective ones. 

In these testimonials, patients talk about the exceptional care they received. These actual stories influence the decision making process, reassuring people looking for healthcare solutions for themselves or their families.

What you should do: 

• Provide exceptional customer service and after sales service to create a strong relationship with existing customers.
• Reach out to the customers who want to share their stories about your product or service.
• Don’t force your structure on the customers, let them express themselves with originality.
• Don’t use made-up stories as it can tarnish your reputation.

3. Creating content that helps users

Fluent Forms is a lightweight and feature rich form builder for WordPress. The way we use content for lead generation is, we find out what any WordPress user or small business owner would need. Then we answer their questions in those contents. 

With this approach we can reach a larger base of audience (500K users already), who even though don’t use our product, finds us from these contents.

People nowadays prefer self help contents and also they’re curious. So if you easily answer their queries and help them do things on their own, they’ll connect with you.

What you should do: 

• Research about what the audiences of your niche search for. Which form of content they want. 
• Optimize your content for search engines while keeping in mind that humans will read it.
• Try to create different forms of content (video, carousel etc.) and keep the language easy to understand.

4. Personalized email marketing

Spotify is a popular music streaming service. It is one of the pioneers of personalized email marketing. By using specific data and analytics, they customize offers and solutions according to the user’s behavior. 

This targeted approach makes the users feel special and connected to the brand. It also encourages them to share these kinda posts on social media. This opens the opportunity to reach a larger audience.

What you should do: 

• Use tools and analytics to understand users’ behavior patterns. 
• Design emails according to the behavior, also design offers if possible. 
• Keep the email engaging and send it in such a way that they will mention you to others, like happened with Spotify Wrapped.

5. Social media marketing 

GoPro sells action cameras and accessories. Their social media campaign connects people from different parts of the world, sharing their most memorable events. That is how people feel attached to a brand. 

It also helps to reach untapped audiences on a larger scale. The campaigns spark conversations and increase engagement with people.

What you should do: 

• Launch social media campaigns that align with the emotion of your customers. 
• Give rewards to incentivise the customers to join the campaign.
• Feature your customers on your social media page and engage in the comments or tweets.

Learn more about the best social media lead generation strategies

6. Popup 

Caraway is a well-known brand for kitchenware. For lead generation, they use a very simple thing like pop-up. With a full screen pop-up they catch the customer’s full attention providing a high value offer.

By offering things like free shipping in exchange of contact information, they get in touch with the potential customers.

What you should do: 

• Design eye catching pop-ups on your website.
• Create valuable offers that customers feel worthy of exchanging their information with.
• Don’t flood with pop-ups. Trigger it if the person spends a specific amount of time on your site. 

7. Offering gated contents 

Optimonk is a website optimization solution that helps businesses increase conversions and engage with their website visitors efficiently. 

We know that using gated contents in exchange of email or contact info The way Optimonk uses this classic lead generation technique is amazing. They create valuable ebooks or pdf that users would likely exchange their email for. 

What you should do: 

• Do sufficient research on what is not available for customers or can add unique value to their business or life. 
• Create your ebook or content around the need and design it attractively.
• Keep in mind that the title and copy of the content should be fascinating enough to motivate the customer. It should be obvious about the value clients will receive.
• Ask for contact information, which most people will readily provide. Also, don’t ask for too much. Otherwise people will be demotivated.

8. Creating polls and quizzes

HoneyPot is a feminine care brand that focuses on female hygiene. Their quizzes are famous for inclusive and relatable questions. 

Quizzes that are used to provide personalized suggestions are quite helpful for lead generation. Even if someone isn’t your buyer, if they answer these quizzes you get a chance to know about them.

What you should do: 

• Find out which type of people are your customers and try to involve all of them in your quiz.
• The questions shouldn’t be too personal. 
• Build with relevant quizzes and also, let them exchange the answer or the suggestion from this quiz with their contact info. 

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, there are a huge amount of B2C lead generation processes. We only mentioned the ones that have a higher success rate. But you also need to think about the nuances. 

You are the one who knows your business the most. That’s why you need to find out which type of strategy suits your business the most. 

Comment below to express your thoughts on B2C lead generation. What strategies work best for you?