What is the best way for a small B2B firm to generate leads online?

Hi Dan,

Here is Blog (SEO and Social Media) that I have wrote not to long ago.

Search Engines Optimization and social media marketing are now closely linked up with each other that they cannot be separated for marketing strategies. It’s the time to hold on with the latest concept of doing good job in SEO with social media marketing which will definitely drives you to the growth phase. In quite recent years the budget spending of marketing companies has been shifted from the conventional modes to the digital tactics sounding like SEO and social media in order to boost up with their improved performances. From a marketing standpoint, few of the initial tasks you need to be proficient in are: you should have well defined and communicated goals, a targeted set of strategies and a clear game plan of activities to be carried out for creating a social media roadmap.

For building healthy contacts and increasing your website page rank, the advanced tactics ranging from Facebook, Twitter to MySpace have made it possible for everyone to make fast forwarding and effective outreach mechanism. Some of the key concepts that will make your website a search engine friendly accompany: external links with your site, on page factors, internal links, site organization, crawl able content, the maximum usage of key words that is content optimization, code optimization and inbound links from external social median sites.

After hearing so much about this latest style of marketing through the combination of SEO and social media, there can be lots of questions coming to your mind like how I can use this media? What would be its core benefit? And finally how can I carry on with this concept? Here lies the answer to most of your questions: social media marketing gives birth to thousands of new inbound links with the invitation to the old customers as well as new ones.

Social media campaigns also play a vital role in reputation management. It can affect in both ways like enhancing your company’s image or sometimes it can tarnish the brand depending upon the positivity or negativity of the aspect. Websites like YouTube, Digg, and MySpace have friendly reference listings that appear on the first page of the search engine tools. Healthy information which can make your website social media friendly is a key to have good search engine rank. Social media, where people want to find things that are interesting, simple and fascinating, and in addition to this they need to have a painless method of sharing things with others and it would be advantageous and stimulating for the expansion and ad vocation of market reach.

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Hope that gives you more ideas

Creating valuable content for your market and promoting it on various online sites (focus.com, twitter, LinkedIn, your blog, etc...) is a great way to create visibility/credibility for yourself and generate leads. It is also very durable. Once you have it it’s there for a while and will generate good leads for you. However getting this credibility takes time and effort.

A quicker way is probably to purchase PPC on advertising networks (Google Adwords) and generate traffic to your website/landing page where you can try and convert them into paying customers. The content part you should still do. As a bonus it can serve as a "bait" to get paid visitor to give you their contact information. From there you can send them emails and continue marketing them

Tried to keep it simple and not too long. There is a lot more to it then the above but this should get you started.

Dan,

Looks like you've already received some valuable suggestions and I am in complete agreement about using social media effectively to establish your reputation and credibility. No doubt, SEO can also be a valuable tool to help your website. Those tactics, however, won't typically yield immediate results...think of them as a longer term strategy.

For immediate results, pay-per-click works well because you can control the spend. I've had success promoting B2B clients using Google PPC, Yahoo, LinkedIn, etc. Because you can really tailor where you show your ads in a PPC model, it seems like it would be ideal for a tax firm where your clients will likely be based locally.

But before you begin driving traffic to your website (paid, organic, social), first ensure your website and landing pages have clear calls-to-actions so you'll be able to better convert your traffic into leads. This step is absolutely critical - otherwise you can increase visitor traffic but still have no tangible results!

Happy marketing!