By Jayson DeMers
As large language models (LLMs) continue to see a sharp rise in popularity, traditional marketing channels like organic SEO are taking a corresponding hit.
SEO has long been a great source of top-of-funnel (TOFU) brand awareness and lead generation, but with many businesses experiencing massive declines in displaced organic search traffic, what are the options to replace that lost traffic? Here are seven of my favorite lead gen strategies.
7 B2B Lead Generation Strategies for Declining Traffic
1. Start an Email Outreach Campaign
With organic SEO traffic shrinking for many businesses due to the rise of LLM search and AI snippets in Google search results, it’s crucial to adapt by setting up new lead-gen channels. And most business owners I’ve talked to don’t have an email outbound campaign set up yet for one simple reason: they don’t know where to start.
If you can get your message into the inboxes of your target audience at scale, you’re building massive brand awareness and opportunities for conversion.
The email outreach industry is undergoing massive change. Landing in inboxes is nowhere near as easy as it was just a year or two ago. Deliverability (i.e., landing in inboxes rather than spam folders) is the hardest part of cold outreach, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to come to the same conclusion as many other business owners I’ve talked to: “It doesn’t work for my business.”
In reality, the reason why cold outreach doesn’t work for many businesses is because their emails are landing in spam folders of their recipients. Of course businesses aren’t getting replies; nobody checks their spam folder!
I wrote a beginner’s guide to cold emailing to help get you started with cold email outreach. If you aren’t sending out emails, and you’ve seen a massive decline in your SEO traffic (as many businesses are facing), it’s time to get started with your own outreach strategy.
2. Put Your LinkedIn Profile to Use
If you’re like most professionals, you have a LinkedIn profile, but you haven’t touched it in forever. Well, it’s time to dust it off and put it to good use, because it’s more important than ever to take a multi-channel approach to your TOFU marketing strategy.
Your LinkedIn strategy should have four main prongs:
- Find and connect with people in your target audience
- Send InMails to people in your target audience
- Post value-rich posts on your profile two to three times per week
- Interact with and engage on other people’s posts
If you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can send up to 800 InMails per month—use them! They convert at a much higher rate than email, and they are guaranteed to land in inboxes of your prospects. The secret here is to send InMails to people with “open” profiles, as it doesn’t cost any credits.
3. Participate in Relevant Reddit Discussions
Reddit is the world’s largest online forum community, and there are probably dozens of subreddits (i.e., communities) that are relevant to your product or service. Here’s what to do:
- Ask AI (i.e., ChatGPT) for a list of subreddits that would be relevant to your product or service
- Find discussions within those subreddits where you can provide value and expertise
- When you post, you can occasionally mention your brand, or drop a link to your blog or some other resource as long as it adds value to the community.
Reddit has a very strict anti-self-promotion culture, so don’t aim to blast your brand out. You need to give value before you try to get it from Reddit. And that means answering questions and providing advice for people in a genuine, human way (don’t use AI).
There are tools you can use to automatically find relevant Reddit threads and posts based on keywords related to your brand. These tools save time, so use them.
4. Get Recommended by LLMs
The “new” SEO is GEO (generative engine optimization), and it’s all about getting your brand to be one of the ones recommended by LLMs when people ask for advice or recommendations.
The question is, how do you do that?
This is a new field of research, but early studies show that having your brand mentioned in as many places as possible is a really good start. In particular, having nice things said about your brand (in blog posts, press releases, news articles, and social media forums like Reddit) is a major key.
So, work on building your brand. Issue press releases to announce major updates or features. Monitor your brand mentions online and participate in discussions about your brand to show you care.
Aside from that, reach out to other businesses and get yours listed in “Top 10” style blog posts. LLMs learn by seeing where your brand is ranked in such posts, so create your own on your own blog, too.
5. Cultivate a Better Blog (and Optimize for SEO)
Content marketing (and the resulting SEO benefits) isn’t as effective as it once was, mostly due to the rise of LLM search and AI snippets within Google search results.
But content marketing and SEO are still viable for generating organic inbound traffic, if you know how to do it. Start by researching keywords and phrases being searched by your audience, develop content that fits those topics, and publish that SEO-optimized content to increase your chances of ranking highly in Google searches.
Blog posts are also an excellent opportunity to show off your brand’s expertise and make a good first impression on people visiting your website for the first time.
6. Do Podcasts
Podcasts are a great way to capture new fans and talk about topics related to your area of expertise. In addition to creating and hosting your own podcast, you can appear on other podcasts as a guest to demonstrate your thought leadership.
Repurpose your podcast content for a YouTube channel and even as content for your LinkedIn profile.
7. Offer a Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is a free product or service given away in exchange for contact information or some other small commitment from the recipient. It is often in the form of a white paper, a piece of original research, or a more comprehensive industry report.
In short, develop a valuable piece of content your audience is going to want to see, then give it to them for free in exchange for their contact information.
More from AllBusiness:
Experiment to Find the Right Way to Boost B2B Leads
Don’t expect to master the art of TOFU marketing or lead generation overnight, especially in a rapidly-evolving marketing field where AI is shaking up traditional channels.
As you roll out new tactics and measure their impact, you’ll gradually learn what works and what doesn’t for your business. Keep adapting, and you’ll keep taking positive steps forward.
Jayson DeMers is the founder and CEO of EmailAnalytics, an email visualization tool that enables you to measure and improve your team’s email response time in Gmail and Outlook. Jayson is also the founder of OutreachBloom, a B2B email outreach agency. He has contributed to Forbes, Inc Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, and dozens of other major media publications since 2010.
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