Lead generation campaigns are an important part of doing business. When you can capture more leads, it allows you to promote your business to those who have already expressed interest. It gives your sales team something to work with so that it isn’t all about cold calling. Your sales team can be more productive if you are actively generating new leads.
The problem is that many businesses don’t plan. They don’t have a digital marketing strategy in place, they don’t use marketing analytics, and they are flailing in every regard. You can implement a variety of marketing best practices in order to enjoy greater success with your lead generation campaigns.
Create a Plan on Paper
One of the first things you need to do is put your plan on paper. This means you want to take the time to define:
- Your target audience
- Best channels
- Cost impact
- What competitors are doing
- Pain points
The lean canvas approach will allow you to consider a variety of different aspects without creating a 40 page business plan. Instead, you focus on a single sheet of paper that answers such questions as the problem, solution, and establish a unique value proposition.
By taking the time in this area, you address various obstacles that you would otherwise stumble upon. You can save yourself a lot of time and frustration by writing out a solid plan as to how you are going to implement a digital marketing strategy.
Define Metrics
Various metrics need to be established so that you can learn about the efficiency of every campaign that you launch. The last thing you want to do is launch campaign after campaign, wasting money. Adjustments should be made to the user experience and overall design as you take into consideration marketing analytics.
Such analytics include Reach-to-Impression Rates, Click-through Rates, Visits-to-Lead Rates, Lead-to-Conversion, and Cost-per-Lead as a Proportion of Average Transaction Value. If you are going to use PPC (pay per click) marketing, you want to make sure you know the ROI on the campaigns.
Set up a System
A system should be put in place that will allow you to capture the leads and segment them automatically. Not all leads are going to be of the same audience. By asking the leads certain questions, or filtering demographics, they can go into different subsets. It will allow you to take a more customized approach when helping potential customers to navigate through the sales funnel.
If you don’t have a good system, your lead generation is for nothing because you aren’t doing enough with the information once you receive it. The more you can focus on the sales funnel within your system, the easier it will be to get the desired level of conversion.
Nurture Leads
Be sure that you are doing everything you can in order to nurture leads. It can be advantageous to have a customer relationship management (CRM) program in place that will allow you to track the leads in the various aspects of the sales funnel. It is lead nurturing where most businesses fail. You have to remember that not every lead is going to convert immediately. You want to provide education, involve them in your newsletter, and continue guiding them towards the sale.
Always Test
A/B testing should always be done so that you can be sure to keep your customers engaged. Some forms of branding and verbiage can work better than others.
In the end, following marketing best practices will allow you to improve your inbound marketing strategies. You can take the leads and guide more people through the sales funnel towards becoming customers.
