Lead generation is the lifeline for a company’s growth.
It’s the foundation of revenue-generating marketing—a comprehensive, goal-oriented, and data-driven marketing approach to growing a company’s revenue.
This approach can significantly impact how a marketing team perceives success. It can determine whether a company thrives or fails.
Marketers understand the power of lead generation.
According to BrightTalk, 53% of marketers spend at least half of their marketing budget on lead generation.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation involves attracting people who are unaware of your company. It turns them into individuals who are strongly interested in your products and services.
The ultimate goal of lead generation is warm them up and pass them along to sales.
When you receive “business card” information from your leads, ensure to note their name and job title. Also, capture their company name and email address.
Putting this data into a marketing automation system such as HubSpot, Marketo, and Eloqua is essential.
This will help you keep track of all your leads and then you can nurture them through emails.
It’s also critical to connect your marketing automation system with your customer relationship management (CRM) system such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics.
Integrating the systems gives you a holistic view of your leads. You can also see the times they interacted with your company.
Lead generation is the most significant challenge for marketers
Now that you understand lead generation, let’s talk about optimizing and improving your lead generation efforts.
According to Hubspot’s State of Marketing report, 61% of marketers consider lead generation their biggest challenge.
There are three things crucial to your lead generation success. They are:
- Generate more leads
- Produce better leads
- Convert more leads
It’s pretty simple, but it’s more challenging to execute.
How to improve your lead generation efforts
Let’s dive into these three areas. This will help you improve your lead generation process. It will also increase sales and help grow your company.
1. Generate more leads
To create more leads, you need lead magnets.
A lead magnet is a marketing buzzword term. It refers to a free item given away to gather contact information, such as an email address.
Lead magnets can be eBooks, research reports, interactive quizzes, handy checklists, or templates that simplify everyday tasks.
Other options include a four-page whitepaper, a trial subscription, a free consultation, or an email course. You may also consider offering a product sample or an email newsletter.
Create treasured lead magnets.
These lead magnets need to add a lot of value.
Why?
Because consumers in the United States now are less likely to share their personal information, according to a 1,000 person survey by the Advertising Research Foundation.
The survey says 61% of respondents were willing to share their email addresses in 2018. In 2019, only 54% were willing to share.
Your lead magnets need to solve a problem your target audience has. They should do it in a non-salesy way. You should give them away for free.
Building trust with your audience before you sell to them is essential.
The lead magnet should be presented as a thought leader, not as a sales professional.
What are the best marketing channels for lead magnets?
Once you create lead magnets, you must focus on the landing page that “hosts” them.
Landing pages must be compelling enough to entice people to give you their contact information.
Additionally, make sure your website homepage is optimized for lead generation.
For example, the website homepage must communicate your company’s value proposition.
It should also point to other lead magnets, about pages, products, services pages, and other helpful content.
You could lose your visitors’ trust if you don’t set up your website homepage correctly. This could result in lost potential sales.
Consider these five effective lead generation tactics. They can drive traffic to your lead magnets’ landing pages. Collect more contact information with these approaches.
Digital advertising
To drive more traffic to your lead magnet landing pages, invest in Google Ads.
Google has offerings for companies of all sizes and advertising budgets.
You can target different audiences. Most people use Google to find answers to problems.
Another digital advertising channel to invest in to promote your lead magnets is LinkedIn.
It is an underutilized social media platform, so it’s an excellent opportunity to help you improve your lead generation efforts.
According to QuickSprout, only 47% of marketers use LinkedIn even though 45% have acquired customers through LinkedIn.
For example, here are some ways LinkedIn can help you:
- LinkedIn Sponsored Content allows you to create and publish native ads to promote lead magnets in your audience’s LinkedIn newsfeed.
- You can also create LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. These forms are pre-filled with a member’s LinkedIn profile data so they can send you info with only a couple of clicks.
- On LinkedIn, you can also create Message Ads to direct message people to take action, such as fill out a Lead Gen Form or visit a lead magnet landing page.
Content syndication
Another way to generate leads is through content syndication, which occurs when another website republishes your lead magnet content.
They provide you with the contact information of the people who downloaded it.
Receive contact information in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
Enter it into your marketing automation system. This way, you can send them a welcome email. It’s another way to get information beyond your website.
According to a Salesbox survey, 65% of business-to-business (B2B) marketers use content syndication for lead generation.
Organic social media
Another way to generate more leads is by promoting your lead magnets on social media. Use platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
You can also explore other popular social media channels.
Promoting lead magnets via social media is free. It’s an excellent way to promote your content and drive traffic to your lead magnet landing pages.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Almost 30% of global web traffic was created via search, and 76% of all international searches happen on Google.
Today’s digital experience begins with a search engine like Google.
Research shows that search engines drive 300% more website traffic than social media. Optimize them for search engines to drive more traffic to lead magnets.
Events
In-person and virtual events are excellent ways to collect contact information. People need to register to attend your event, which provides you with contact information.
Once you have their information, you can email them and warm them up with other content.
2. Produce better leads
Once you have created the lead generation engine by producing many leads, focus on quality. Quality is more essential than quantity.
You may have a lot of contact information from people.
However, is it the audience who will buy your products and services?
The point is not to collect much contact information but to collect data for your target audience.
According to the Sales Insight Lab, 50% of your leads will not fit your products and services well.
Therefore, it’s essential to spend more resources on marketing activities that convert the best (which we will discuss next).
Find out how your best leads are coming to your company. You can add a simple field to the form on your landing pages. For example, ask “Who invited you to the event?”
You can use marketing automation systems to track the “lead source” before they filled out the form. This includes digital advertising, website homepage, content syndication, and social media.
If you generate many leads monthly, you can analyze which marketing channels produce and convert the most leads.
You’ll most likely see that the Pareto principle applies. This means 80% of the successful outcomes come from 20% of the activities.
In other words, 20% of your marketing efforts will produce 80% of your best marketing leads.
It is crucial to stop investing in marketing tactics that generate low-quality leads. Instead, invest more in channels that produce higher-quality leads.
It’s also important to know your audience and essential characteristics. These include a company’s size, job title, and industry.
Finally, developing your buyer persona using free tools like HubSpot’s Make My Persona is crucial.
3. Convert more leads
Once you generate more and better leads, it’s essential to identify the leads that convert the best.
Find out what marketing channels produce the most sales opportunities and attract new customers.
Creating email nurture emails is crucial. These emails ensure that the leads you generate are “warmed up.” This happens once they get into your marketing automation systems.
A warmed lead is more likely to engage with you and to discuss your products and services with your sales team.
Email marketing is critical to converting more leads.
According to Campaign Monitor, you’ll get a 4,400% return on investment for every dollar you spend on email marketing.
To increase lead conversions, lead nurturing through email marketing helps you increase your chances of converting leads into paying customers.
Just because someone gives you their contact information doesn’t mean they are ready to purchase from you.
That’s why effective email nurturing sequences are so essential. They are a series of emails designed to help your leads learn about your company.
These are pre-written emails to deliver information such as helpful content, coupons, discounts, an email digest.
Email nurturing establishes a positive relationship. It helps your company stay top of mind, so they consider your company when they are ready to buy.
These emails are crucial. When you send them a useful email, they are more likely to convert.
Providing value increases their effectiveness.
Bringing it all together
Lead generation must be improved if you want your marketing efforts to grow your business.
After focusing on it, you must tweak it by generating more, better, and higher-converting leads.
Doing this will increase sales and grow your company.
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