Cost of Lead Generation in B2B – A Beginner’s Guide

March 26, 2024
12:40 PM

In the B2B realm, lead generation and its associated costs are intertwined. Crafting a brand engagement strategy that is aligned with driving high-converting sales places lead generation at the core of B2B operations. It’s crucial to attract the right customers, minimize churn rate, and fuel revenue for sustained profitability. Above all, it is vital to accommodate yourself with change.

Embracing change is pivotal for growth. Recognizing that B2B industries and their leaders adapt strategies and campaign objectives is key to aligning yourself with this growth. For sustainable growth and success, you must take the reins, steering your marketing and sales teams toward effective lead-generation strategies, and amplify returns through top-tier leads.

Lead generation cost varies across industries and their prospect attraction practices. In this blog, we delve into how dynamic industry strategies bring in costs that can be optimized with innovative technologies and compelling content. We empower marketers with insights to navigate financial complexities and the competitive B2B Industry. Get started on your journey where strategic investments meet measurable results.

What is B2B Lead Generation?

B2B leads are the people who have been identified by marketing and sales teams as potential customers for your business who are likely to find value and purchase your product. B2B lead generation, on the other hand, is the process of identifying these potential and ideal customers. Lead generation is one of the most essential activities for B2B marketing and sales teams.

There are two types of B2B lead generation –

There are two primary types of lead generation: inbound and outbound. Among the various types of leads that fall under these two categories, the two main types of leads that need more focus than most are Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL).

Marketing Qualified Leads – The leads here are in the first stage of becoming paying customers. The results are based on engagement with the content of the brand.
Sales Quality Leads – Leads in this stage have moved along the sales funnel and are ready for engagement and sales. They hold a strong intent to purchase the product or service you offer.

In short, lead generation is nothing but identifying the right audience to engage, nurturing identified leads, and finally converting these visitors into prospects.

Who Conducts B2B Lead Generation?

Two major teams working closely with aligned objectives for B2B lead generation are – Marketing and Sales teams.

Within marketing teams, several low-cost lead generation strategies help grow your business such as
– growth hacking, content marketing, and account-based marketing.

Within sales teams, tactics such as cold calling, outbound email, social selling, and sales cadences help in attracting prospects and reaching sales goals for profits.

What is Lead Generation Cost?

Not all leads are considered equal by the marketing and sales teams. The cost of one lead can vary depending on various factors. Some factors include the quality of the leads, how qualified they are, how engaged the lead is with the brand, which is more likely to convert than others, lead generation methods, and specific requirements of the lead.

Lead generation costs affect not only the time taken for conversion but also your marketing strategies and performance. Lead generation costs also depend on whether the customer will return for more purchases or if it was a simple, one-time purchase from the brand.

In simple terms, lead generation costs are all the expenses incurred to get one lead. This cost can vary from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars.

Lead Generation - Average Cost Per Fully Verified Lead

The central question that B2B lead generators ask clients and teams is how much they are willing to pay per lead.

Lead generation and average cost per fully verified lead go hand in hand. There is no ‘one’ answer for how much a lead will cost because the cost per lead differs by industry, company, and more.

A major struggle of many marketing and sales teams is the need to stay within the budget while promoting, attracting, and convincing prospects to purchase the product. The key here is to maximize profits and stay within the budget by lowering the cost-per-lead for sales and marketing teams as much as possible.

Overall, the average cost per lead helps you assess the efficiency of a digital marketing campaign. To understand the average cost of a B2B lead further, we must comprehend the term ‘Cost-Per-Lead’.

Cost-per-lead is the amount you spend to acquire a potential customer or lead. This eventually means the money you spend on running an ad or campaign to acquire leads, helping you build strategies accordingly.

You can calculate CPL with a simple formula.

Cost-per-Lead =

Money spent on marketing campaign

Number of leads generated.

For example – Let us consider a budget of $20,000 that is being spent via Pay-per-Click advertising on a marketing campaign. By the end of the campaign, 1000 leads were attracted to the business. By implementing the formula, you can gather that the campaign had to spend $20 per lead to get them to purchase the products and services.

Average Cost Per Lead by Industry and Channels

Below are two tables that attempt to properly showcase the statistics of the average cost-per-lead based on the industry and channel.

Average Cost per Lead by Industry

Industry	Cost per Lead on Average
Non-Profits	$31
Retail	$34
Telecom	$45
Education	$55
Marketing	$99
Consumer Products	$105
Travel & Tourism	$106
Media & Publishing	$108
Business Services	$132
Manufacturing	$136
Finance	$160
Healthcare	$162
Technology	$208

Average Cost per Lead by Lead Generation Channel

Lead Generation Channel	Cost per Lead on Average
Online Retargeting	$31
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)	$31
Email Marketing	$53
Social Media Advertising	$58
Display Advertising	$63
Webinars	$72
Referrals	$73
LinkedIn Advertising	$75
Content Marketing	$92
Search Engine Advertising	$110
Video Marketing	$174
Public Relations	$294
Traditional Marketing (TV, Radio, Print)	$619
Event & Tradeshows	$811

How to Reduce the Cost of Lead Generation?

Cost-per-lead or charge for lead reduction is essential for holding profits within your company. It involves various research, optimization techniques, continuous testing, and monitoring of a marketing campaign in real-time. Companies adopt multiple strategies and methods to reduce costs, and they are as follows:

Improve ad quality
Optimize targeting
Enhance landing page
Test different ad formats
Analyze and optimize regularly
Implement CRO techniques
Leverage remarketing

Another cost-effective way you can choose to reduce your CPL is through lead vendors. The data industry has various lead vendors, such as B2B database providers. Their primary work is to provide contact information of companies and key decision-makers who work closely with your products, services, and solutions.

DataCaptive is a proud and credible lead vendor that provides you with an option to buy a lead list that will help you. Your cost of lead generation reduces as your teams can immediately connect with them, rather than segmenting and verifying in-house lists with in-house professionals that can add up to a huge amount by the end of the campaign.

If you have a list of prospects, you can simply get it appended or verified by our data experts for easy lead generation.

How Can You Benefit from Reduced CPL?

CPL determines how well your marketing and sales teams operate within a limited lead generation cost. A reduced CPL can get you the following benefits!

Increasing Profitability
Giving you a competitive edge
Creating room for scalability and growth
Allocating your budget more efficiently
Giving you long-term sustainability

Types of Lead Gen Costs

In line with the discussion of CPL, discover various cost of lead generation between marketing and sales teams and gain valuable insights to make informed decisions for your business.

Advertising Costs – Lead generation requires placing ads on digital and print platforms to attract your target audience. These costs include print, online, television, radio, and more.
Marketing Costs – Once the ads are placed, there is a need to market directly and indirectly to the target audience. These marketing initiatives come to light via email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing.
Sales Costs – This involves costs that come with materials required by the sales team, such as product guides, samples, and brochures, and the remuneration of sales professionals who work with the product.
Software Costs – Automation and CRM software are the lifelines of lead generation. The costs of specialized lead generation software help sales teams close the prospect’s business with purchases and deals.
Service Costs – Outsourcing professionals and third-party service providers such as telemarketers or a lead generation agency culminate the service costs for lead generation.
Personnel Costs – Having specialized and experienced personnel working on the sales and marketing teams incur personnel costs in lead generation costs.

Low-Cost Lead Generation Strategies

Lead generation is a combination of strategies that work together to achieve success through profits and ROI. To understand the techniques involved in combinations, we present 5 major strategies incorporated and implemented to reduce the cost of lead generation. Get an answer to the most asked question – How to generate targeted, qualified leads for your business using cost-effective strategies?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO lead generation)
In this digital world, people research a company or brand online. Hence, implementing SEO techniques in lead generation will help you be visible online with organic rankings. The criticality of SEO strategy is to be discoverable online when searched. Therefore, SEO strategy is a must to reduce the cost of lead generation.

Pay-per-Click Advertising
Another common strategy in reducing the cost of lead generation is PPC advertising. It involves placing ads in the paid ads section of top websites and search engines. It is visible with relevant search results. They help improve exposure and capture valuable leads for your product and company.

Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is the best approach if your brand isn’t discovered on various platforms. You can target specific leads and place ads, send out DMs, or invite them with an offer for your products and services.

Account-based Marketing
ABM is your solution if you want to focus on specific companies or target accounts and leverage lower cost of lead generation. You can get time to focus on high-value accounts and get leads for your products and services.

Content Marketing
This is among the critical strategies to get people to discover you online. It involves sharing knowledge and expertise with the audience. It helps drive traffic. This traffic will consist of the target audience who are looking for information about your industry.

While deciding on your lead gen tactics and strategies on leveling the cost of lead generation, there are three major questions you must ask yourself – ‘How big is our budget?’, ‘who will be handling your strategy?’, ‘Which strategies do we want to use?’. These three questions culminate in your factors in B2B lead generation pricing.

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, a great marketing campaign for high conversions only asks – how many leads do I need to complete the campaign and what is the average cost of B2B lead generation.

This answer depends on company to company and product to product. All that marketing and sales teams can do to reduce cost-per-lead and the lead generation cost to implement various strategies.

If your overall lead value is more than the total lead cost, your marketing campaign succeeds in selling your product and engaging the audience with your brand. Remember to find a high-quality lead that easily converts or find an average-quality lead and nurture it to be a loyal customer.

It is time to partner with us if the lead generation process is not your cup of tea and if you are looking out to have a budget-friendly cost of lead generation. We bring to you our prestigious and relevant B2B Lead Generation services that will help you grow. Let us be your gateway to spend less per lead by buying leads from DataCaptive and earn more! Partner with us and invest your time with our Lead Generation Services today!

FAQs

How to generate leads cost-effectively?

An effective way to generate leads cost-effectively is via inbound marketing methods. They include content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, and referral marketing.

How much does lead generation cost?

Generally, the lead generation cost via PPC varies from $50 to $200 or higher. It depends on the industry and the keywords used to attract an audience to your product. If you plan to run a targeted campaign on platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook, it can typically vary from $20 to $100.

What is the cost per lead KPI?

CPL is a key metric used to measure the efficiency of a marketing campaign for lead generation. While it is calculated as the total money spent by the number of leads acquired, you can determine if the sales and marketing teams are obtaining new customers in a cost-efficient manner.

What is a CPA in marketing?

CPA stands for Cost-per-Acquisition. It is deemed as a type of conversion rate in marketing. It refers to a company’s fee for an advertisement that can lead to a sale.

Who provides the best B2B lead generation services?

DataCaptive provides the best B2B lead generation services in the data industry. Connect with our data experts today and find out your marketing campaigns exceed expectations on a budget!

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Amberlynn Adam

Blogger, Content Developer & Editor. Amberlynn is a Content Marketing Professional and is an integral part of DataCaptive since its inception. She holds a passion for tracking new changes in the ever-evolving business world and putting them down in the form of blogs to encourage intelligent discussions & thought exchange. Apart from writing, reading fiction and thriller novels are her major interests.

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