Are you looking to develop a successful lead generation strategies? Here are some quick tips on how to have productive conversations and improve the outcomes of your lead-gen initiatives.

 

1. Aligning Goals

Effective lead generation initiatives start with alignment and understanding of your goals. Go beyond surface-level objectives to uncover your motivations and aspirations. For example, it’s important to determine how sales and marketing will collaborate to achieve your goals. Alignment across sales and marketing is imperative to ensure a targeted outcome. For instance, when you identify individuals within the buying cycle, the team can ensure their efforts are targeted towards nurturing and converting prospects at just the right stage of their purchasing journey. This foundational insight is the blueprint for the entire lead generation strategy. Therefore, it guarantees a tailored approach that seamlessly aligns with your business objectives.

 

2. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile

It is paramount to define a precise target. Go beyond demographic basics and delve into psychographics, behaviors, and preferences. This comprehensive understanding enables you to develop strategies that resonate deeply with the intended audience. To get started, consider analyzing your Salesforce data and interviewing your sales team. In addition, leveraging SOCIAL LISTENING tools such as Brandwatch or Sprout and monitoring key competitors’ social pages is beneficial. And lastly, it is helpful to deploy online surveys or conduct online focus groups with a provider like DScout. Think about your ICP and the information you can share that they will find useful. When you craft a strategy that aligns seamlessly with the target demographic, you enhance the probability of capturing quality leads who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

 

3. Existing Resource Assessment

To enhance the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts, it’s crucial to conduct a comprehensive assessment of resources. Assess the existing toolkit to uncover strengths that can be capitalized on and pinpoint weaknesses within the current strategy and infrastructure. Examples of resources that can be built into your toolkit include creative posters or magnets, robust research, detailed whitepapers, and webinars, as well as checklists and gated videos. This analysis forms the foundation for strategic enhancements, guaranteeing that resources are fine-tuned for optimal impact.

 

4. New Content Creation & Optimization

Content is pivotal to the success of lead generation. But, it’s not just about any content; it’s about crafting valuable material that speaks directly to your audience. According to Informa Tech’s 2023 Trust in Marketing Index, survey respondents reported four actions that boost trust. They include providing case studies, providing current and actionable data, providing access to experts, and creating messages and content that solve specific problems. Alternatively, four actions that bust trust are content with dated or repeated information, content that leads with a sales pitch, continued ads for the same brand’s product after purchase (or decision not to buy), and phone calls after form completion. Delve into the details, making sure it is tailored to connect with your audience. Content should do more than grab attention—it should seamlessly align with lead generation goals, weaving a cohesive story that guides potential customers on their journey to conversion.

 

5. Seamless Execution

Make sure your execution stays aligned to your original objective. A well executed lead generation campaign requires thinking through each element of the experience. Consider crafting a dynamic lead form, linked to valuable content like a white paper or webinar, or providing exclusive discounts through email inputs. When creating that form, make sure it is collecting the information the sales team finds useful and the user is rewarded instantly with information upon completion.  It’s important to integrate these leads into all marketing touchpoints, including email nurture streams, social media retargeting, and prospecting campaigns, as well as connecting into Salesforce upon meeting the criteria of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).

Your tactics should be finely tuned to how leads flow through your business to create a strategy that maximizes effectiveness and resonates with your vision for success.

 

6.  Measure and Evaluate

It’s important to keep the foundation of your lead generation strategies simple and streamlined. Make a measurement plan that can be tested and QA’d to ensure data is flowing and leads are being captured. Forecast your results and establish benchmarks so when it’s time to evaluate and make optimizations it’s easy to identify areas of improvement or successes to replicate.  And most importantly, continue talking with the sales team to collect feedback on lead quality, future content ideas, and new customer insights.

Interested in our expert opinion?  We’d love to meet up and talk about how a successful lead generation strategies can grow your business. Just tell us a little more about your goals in this FORM.