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How To Create and Execute a Successful Lead Generation Strategy
This article was written as a primer for businesses on how to cultivate leads and show you ways to create and execute a successful lead generation strategy.
Creating compelling content is a must for getting consumer attention, especially in today’s digital world where you are one of many. Creating the right blog posts and social media posts can help set your brand aside from others – driving visitors to your site through these channels before nurturing them into bigger investments like product purchases or paid advertising campaigns. Your lead generation strategy needs to be at the top of its game.
Table of contents:
What is a Lead Generation Strategy?
A Lead Generation Strategy is a set of promotional activities that will bring visitors to your site or store that may become future customers.
How you structure and plan this strategy, how much budget you have available to invest in tools and tactics, will all help determine the overall effectiveness of the program.
Lead Generation is used by businesses of all sizes – from mum-and-dad shops to large corporations. It’s a key component for companies that are just starting out as well as those with mature sales teams.
It helps bring new business opportunities into an organisation and can also be used alongside other performance marketing platforms such as search engine optimisation, social media marketing, email campaigns, content development programs, etc.
Having a solid lead generation strategy in place is crucial because it provides both new client acquisition opportunities and gives your sales team new people to connect with — bringing more business in the door.
Key Components of Lead Generation Success
How Are You Identifying Your Target Audience?
This is a crucial first step. How you plan on identifying your target audience will determine how many leads you generate and whether they’re interested in your product or service offerings.
You can choose from a number of lead generation channels, such as search engine marketing (SEM), email marketing, social media engagement, etc., that bring visitors into contact with your brand online; however, this doesn’t necessarily mean those contacts are ready to buy – yet .
How you plan on engaging with them once they’ve landed on your site will determine whether they’ll convert into customers.
Having a Solid Follow-Up Strategy
Paid advertising platforms like Google, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, etc., can be a great way to expand the reach of your content and brand name – but it’s important to have planned out how you’re going to treat those leads after their click .
How are you going to capture contact information? How are you going to nurture them through the sales funnel? How are you going to connect in an authentic way? How do you plan on turning these visitors into email subscribers or paying clients?
You need a multifaceted strategy for each of these areas that mirrors each other.
Being on the Right Platforms
To decide which channel works best for you, it’s important to have an understanding of who your target audience is – and where they’re spending time online. How these channels work will be based on your individual lead generation goals; however, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- How do you track leads?
- How do you measure ROI of each campaign?
- How do you segment out visitors so that they go through the appropriate sales funnel stages and land in an appropriate conversion goal- “lead,” “customer” or something else ?
- How much budget can you invest into paid marketing platforms, which ones will give you the highest return on investment (ROI), when should you start using them to develop your brand name , how long does it take to see results
How to create and execute a successful lead generation strategy
The goal of lead generation is to make a higher conversion rate from people engaging with marketing efforts or buying your product.
How you treat leads through your digital marketing strategy, how many leads you gain, and how much value those leads have to your business.
Lead generation can be broken down into two categories:
The first goal: is to get visitors from outside of your marketplace; people who’ve never heard of your company and may not know anything about what it offers. This could include brand new audiences or existing audiences that are not familiar with what your company does/offers yet
Generating these kinds of leads often requires an investment in paid advertising platforms like
Having a number of lead generations methods in place make for a more effective lead generation than just one. This means you can then cater to a wider audience and thus create more qualified leads.
The second goal: of lead generation is getting the attention of leads who already know about your product. If someone has visited your website, clicked on an ad, or purchased a product before and has entered their contact information into your marketing system/website then they’ve already shown interest in what you’re offering
The goal with this method of targeting existing leads or visitors to your company’s site is to nurture them through a series of communications until they are familiar with how you work as a business, comfortable with buying from you again and become a client.
How many conversations do you need before someone buys? How long does it take for people to move down the sales funnel?
Lead Capture
The first stage of creating and executing a successful lead generation strategy is lead capture. You could publish volumes of content that encourages a visitor to your site but then after that they may never come back again.
The key aim of lead capture is to peek their interest and the capture their information. This could be an email address which can be trickier to obtain than you think.
Many will now consider signing up with their email as an invitation for the company to spam their inbox and you must now allow the customer to ‘opt in’ so you now need to give before you receive.
This is where the next stage of the lead generation strategy comes in, with ensuring that you have the relevant lead magnets in place.
Lead Magnets
A lead magnet is a tool that provides your site visitors with value in exchange for their contact information.
This could be;
- A how to video series
- A free trial or discount
- Webinars
- E Books
- White Papers
- Expert Interviews
The aim really is to receive the permission from the prospect to gain their information and allow you to then follow up on the lead.
Further on in creating an executing a successful lead gen campaign is to ensure you have an effective landing page.
Landing Pages
There are two main purposes of creating an effecting landing page.
The first is to warm up potential customers in this first stage of the sales process.
The second is to capture their interest enough for the to provide you with their information by attracting them to something that you sell and for them to make a purchase.
A landing page is a page that someone will land on after they have clicked on an ad or other online marketing element. This page will exist separately from your website and is used as its own single marketing tool.
An effective landing page is simple, provides clear information and one simple call to action as not to frighten off or bombard the visitor at the first interaction they have had with you.
Lead Scoring
Another way to create and execute a successful lead generation strategy is to begin to score your lead. Lead scoring is a component of marketing automation software that helps prioritise leads depending on level of engagement with your inbound marketing content.
This helps determine who is ready to buy and also confirms if your lead generation strategy is working.
The way you can score a lead is dependent on the level of the type of engagement someone has had. Many don’t use this technique and it can be an essential part of creating an executing a successful lead generation strategy.
It provides real time feedback with how responsive your leads are and when people are ready to buy.
These are just a few ways in which you can create an execute a successful lead generation strategy but you need to try and number of approaches and see what works for you and your businesses by tracking the success.
The aim of a lead generation strategy is to capture the attention of the potential customers and capture their information to turn them into buying customers and to ensure you always have new leads coming in.