Ten years back, you could invest in search engine optimization, some ads, and email marketing efforts and expect leads to glide into your sales funnel.
It was a simpler time back then when B2B companies barely had marketing budgets. You could stand out from the crowd even with minimal effort.
However, the same doesn’t hold true today.
These days, even in the B2B landscape, you need to be strategic with your approach and intentional with your campaigns. That’s to say, you need to show the right ads to the right people at the right time.
The same can be said for other B2B lead generation tactics like:
- SEO: you need to assess the keywords you are capitalizing on for which audiences and at which stage of their buying journey.
- Email marketing: you need to be deliberate about which type of content is shown to which people at what milestone.
This change is the result of excessive competition and the emergence of new technologies.
If 2023 was a testament to anything, it was that we can expect both competition and technologies to continue their exponential growth in the coming years.
On that note, let’s dig in to find out what technologies you should be looking for in 2024 and how they can be beneficial for B2B lead generation.
Now, before we dig into the meatier bits, let’s take this section to briefly discuss the role and importance of B2B lead generation (if only for SEO purposes 😉)
Business-to-business (or B2B) lead generation is essentially the activity of attracting potential customers to buy your products.
The first step is to identify your ideal customer profiles (ICP) and then target these personas on different mediums, such as websites and social media. The goal? To have them engage with your content and become aware of your offerings.
The task of lead generation is a harmonious effort from both marketing and sales teams — depending on how your organization is structured.
Advanced Technologies Transforming B2B Lead Generation in 2024
In 2024, you can expect multiple AI-assisted technologies to take center stage. These could translate to both non-generative and generative AI tech.
Aside from artificial intelligence, other technologies like machine learning and big data analytics are also gaining leverage, with companies specifically using neural networks to make more data-driven decisions.
Besides these, we’re already seeing automation’s adoption in day-to-day lives, with brands leveraging workflow and marketing automation to support and enable lead-generation tasks.
While we’ve just touched upon these technologies in this section, let’s take the next section to discover the practical use cases we can expect to see in 2024, especially when it comes to B2B lead generation.
2024 Trends: Impact of These Technologies on The Current and Future Landscape of B2B Lead Generation
Without further ado, we think six tech trends will grab the spotlight in 2024.
1. Predictive Analytics
In 2024, one of the best use cases of artificial intelligence tools is their application in predictive analytics.
Companies essentially use mathematical models and historical data to assess behaviors among a certain group and predict which lead is ready to make a purchase—and we know this from experience because Breadcrumbs, too, uses AI and lead scoring models to present predictive analytics to its customers.
Our solutions (Reveal and Copilot) are designed to assess attributes among potential leads that closely match your ICPs. That’s to say, once you connect us with your CRM tool, we’ll analyze that data to find out how your target audience interacts with you and which of these audiences can become potential leads based on their interaction levels.
For example, if an audience member belongs to a market you cater to, has downloaded your e-book, regularly opens your emails, and has signed up for a trial. That might be a hot lead (now, think of Breadcrumbs assessing all these attributes among all your target personas).
2. Hyper-Personalization
With AI and machine learning algorithms, we can also expect customers to get more hyper-personalized results. The result? Higher conversion rates.
In the coming years, this may translate to:
- Receiving emails relevant to your industry/interest instead of viewing the same newsletter as everyone else. For example, if you’re a sales head in the hospitality industry and a company is emailing you, they might share how their solution can benefit your specific use case instead of making vague, generic statements that can fit every target persona.
- Chatbots remember previous conversations and help you accelerate or prevent issues (keeping historical data in mind) instead of explaining your issues from start to end.
- Cross-platform hyper-personalization based on your engagement levels. While the example below is specific for B2C, it can also be replicated for a B2B audience.
- Being able to set preferences on websites about how you’d like your website experience to be. More and more websites may also have smart filtering options, allowing you to search for topics and content based on your interests.
- AI that could assess emotions to tailor interactions accordingly. For example, if you’re chatting with a virtual assistant, they might be able to mimic your tone and provide contextual answers, keeping empathy and urgency in mind.
- More and more companies might be able to provide community-led experiences. For example, on LinkedIn, if you’re on someone’s profile, you may know others in their network. Similarly, once you add something to your cart on Amazon, it shows you what other people who bought the same item also bought. Other companies might begin incorporating experiences like these soon.
Many experts are also saying that 2024 might bring about additional scrutiny surrounding privacy laws. So, we might need to safeguard user security before providing them with hyper-personalized experiences.
This means that more of us will need to look into container security best practices within IT infrastructure. Some experts also say blockchain will become an effective safeguard for user communications (especially in industries with sensitive information, like the medical field).
3. Interactive and Immersive Experiences
Interactive experiences like quizzes and polls and immersive experiences like the implementation of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will also be effective tools for B2B lead generation.
In the coming years, we might also expect businesses to use these experiences to showcase how a product will look once it fits into their organization.
For example, we’re presently seeing makeup and eyewear brands have virtual try-ons. Something like this might also come true in the B2B landscape (e.g., office supply companies might have virtual try-ons to show what furniture will look like in an office).
Similarly, B2B heads can engage with interactive pricing pages to get customized quotes based on their requirements.
4. Plug-and-Play
In the next year, lead generation might become entirely plug-and-play with the help of autopilot platforms.
Fawaz Naser, CEO of Softlist, says, “More B2B companies are automating and using AI in lead generation. For example, UiPath’s Autopilot uses AI to manage marketing campaigns, from creating content and choosing the best channels to adapting strategies based on audience feedback.
Post-campaign, it offers comprehensive insights for continual improvement. I believe Copilot platforms will rise next year, acting like AI assistants that continuously optimize marketing and lead generation efforts, providing valuable insights for ongoing improvement.”
It might be noteworthy to mention that many lead-generation platforms already leverage AI.
For example, CRM platforms now use AI to automate tasks—platforms like Zapier automate communications through zaps on Slack and Slack alternatives. Documentation and e-signing tools like PandaDoc have added automation to their product updates.
5. Advanced Decision-Making
AI tools will also be at the forefront of decision-making tasks, not only because they’ll be able to provide us with analytics but also because they’ll be able to deliver recommendations based on analytics and gaps they’re seeing.
For example, while you already get recommendations on how and where to invest money in your lead generation efforts on PPC platforms, you might also expect to see recommendations about:
- Which influencers should we partner with to get the most leads? Since parasocial relationships are on the rise in the marketing landscape, these recommendations may allow you to consider influencers/thought leaders you never even had in mind. ChatGPT can easily be accessed for this task, but it won’t be surprising if AI tools are developed specifically for this use case.
- Which type of content to push forward (companies like Dash Hudson already have an AI tool that uses historical data to analyze which type of content will do well with the audience by giving them a score out of 5)?
6. Integrative Outbound Tools
Last but not least, experts like Matthew Murray (MD at Sales Higher) and Tierney Pretzer (growth lead at Numeric) are saying they are the most bullish on the adoption of tools like clay.com, as they can generate personalized results.
Why? Mainly because they are connected with more than 150 data sources and help you with all types of lead generation activities (i.e., outbound, account-based marketing, etc.).
On that note, we might also expect the adoption of other complementary tools that can help with lead-generation activities.
For example, an AI translator tool like the one from Wordvice AI can automatically translate your website content into the language your user speaks. This AI-powered tool carefully translates the content into the language of your choice without changing the context significantly reducing the website localization cost.
On the other hand, accessibility audit tools can analyze if your website and communications match the accessibility standards laid out by W3C.
Let Breadcrumbs Take The Lead
Instead of beating around the bush, we’ll get to the point: If you’re on this blog, it means you’re considering adopting advanced technologies to help you with your B2B lead generation strategies.
While you can take your time to sit and analyze all the paid tools that search engines spit out and their pros/cons specific to your organization, we have one free tool you can begin using today to score qualified leads: Copilot.
Simply connect Copilot with your CRM and find data about which leads are ready to convert. Create your free Copilot account here!
It’s time to take the bull by the horns and level up your B2B lead generation efforts in 2024. Your bottom line will thank you.