There are different lead generation strategies to incorporate into your marketing program and campaigns. While they take time to develop and set up, the effort is worth it because you'll be able to collect data that will clearly show you how effective your CRM and marketing automation software is in helping you meet your goals to increase revenue with tightly focused, highly qualified leads.
Here are five key ingredients that should be part of your lead generation strategies:
Capturing The lead
If you don't have leads, you have no way to move forward. The problem is, we are tired of giving up our email address if we aren't given something very compelling in return. Extremely well written, useful, unique content is how we capture those leads. But it's not easy to create content that will give us that email address and other contact information.
If your product or service sales cycle is long, you have to understand the different phases and write content for each step in the buyer's journey. If you're just starting out and don't have a good body of data to base your segmented content on, you have no choice but to test different types of content until you get the responses you're looking for. You have to be increasingly sophisticated to understand what your target audience needs to absorb to win them over to doing business with you.
Magnetic Lead Generation Content Types
Since we all react differently to the type of content we like to consume, you're going to have to plan for creating and publishing different content types to get the most qualified leads quickly. The last thing we want to do is bore our prospects with a singular content type, so be ready to find the time and resources to publish content types like these:
- Interviews with experts - written or in a video
- Webinars - free or paid, depending upon how valuable the information is you're going to give away
- No-cost trial - there's nothing like giving the prospect a test drive or the opportunity to let her fully experience your product or service to demonstrate the benefits and features. Depending upon what you offer, this could be a huge conversion opportunity.
- Ebooks - can you publish and offer a short ebook? This instantly establishes your credibility and expertise in your industry, and if you create one that's evergreen content, the initial effort will produce lasting results for a long time.
- White papers/case studies - we all like stories, and if you can create a compelling story where you clearly demonstrate a problem, show how you're a hero with a helpful solution, and provide a happy ending for the client, then writing and offering a white paper or case study is valuable for your lead generation and conversion efforts. Keep it short - no more than four or five pages - and you could be filling your pipeline with more prospects.
3 More Lead Generation Strategies
Landing Pages That Use Successful Conversion Elements
There's an art to creating landing pages that guide the prospect into your CRM as a lead. Keep the landing page focused with a specific offer, short bullet points and a clear call to action that's easy to accomplish. Don't go off on tangents, and use only one call to action click. You'll need to test multiple landing pages with different offers and calls to action, but don't give up, as your target audience really needs information and probably a presentation or demonstration about your products and services. Keep your eye on the ball - you're trying to generate leads to nurture through the entire selling journey, and the most successful landing pages can do a lot of heavy lifting for you.
Scoring The Lead
Now that you've gotten interested prospects, you need to take the time to score them, depending upon the action they took on your site. Lead scoring, done properly, cuts down on the amount of time spent on people who may just be tire kickers. Your CRM will need to be fine tuned for the most accurate lead scoring, so be sure to invest in the necessary time and effort to get this part right.
Done right, lead scoring will help you contact the hottest prospects in a timely manner to take advantage of their interest. If you don't have lead scoring set up, you'll spend too much time chasing after people who really aren't in the sweet spot to start the buyer's journey.
Stay In Touch With Your Community
Now that you've gotten a solid system going with interesting content, a well-thought out landing page and a lead scoring system that makes sense for what you offer, it's time to branch out beyond your own site and actively seek interested prospects on other sites.
I really like LinkedIn. It's where the B2B marketers and service providers can come together in a social media environment that's highly focused on finding the right partners to do business with. Fill out your profile as completely as possible and keep it updated with new skills, certifications, accomplishments and events.
Do a search using keywords that describe what you offer to find groups and communities to participate in. You'd be surprised at who'll contact you if you take part in conversations where people are asking for information. You can also develop email campaigns to target industries and positions, as well as geographical areas to find prospects who may be interested in doing business with you.
This is a lot to review and implement, because you need to feel confident about using your CRM and marketing automation system together with in-depth functionality. Here at Measured Results Marketing, we understand that getting the two systems to work well together can be challenging. We also know what it's like to try to figure out those sweet spots in content strategy and landing page conversion, so if you're stuck at this point, give us call. Let's take 15 minutes to quickly do some prioritization for you, and go forward from there. Call us at 571-606-3106, or contact us. Want to learn more about what we offer? Check out our services and see what we can do for you.
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