Lead Generation Secrets

Lead generation is the process of raising buyer interest and gathering inquiries from prospective purchasers, often in the form of names and contact information.

These leads are then qualified for their ability and desire to purchase your products and services.

While generally the focus of B2B marketing organizations, lead generation also applies to B2C companies, especially where high price, high consideration products are involved.

57% of a typical purchase decision is made before a prospect ever talks to a supplier based on a Corporate Executive Board study of over 1,400 B2B customers across industries.

For marketers, lead generation is a tradeoff between quality and quantity. Specifically without a sufficient number of leads, you can’t achieve your sales conversion goals.

By contrast, too many leads often translate to unqualified buyers who need lots of persuasions to convert or they’ll never buy.

1. Global Social Media

Ensure that the content is the right type of content for the community that it’s presented to and the right place in the customer journey. Be cognizant of the many steps in your customer’s journey. Make sure that awareness content is used in social channels. Consideration type content can be used for paid targeted audience buys.

2.  Find and Convert

Experiment with owned earned and paid campaigns. Try something you’ve never tried before. Be willing to fail small and fast.

3. B2B Marketing Insider

The most effective way for marketing to drive stellar leads for sales is to deliver the right content to the right prospect at the right time. Mapping content to the buyer journey and then delivering it to the right prospects is the best way to drive effective sales-ready leads without wasting your sales’ teams time and your company’s money.

5.Actionable Marketing Guide

Today’s customers are social media and content marketing savvy. Whether they’re making a purchase for themselves or their business, they’ve at least started their research before they ever contact you.

*Understand your potential customers including their influencers, end-users and social media community. To this end, create a marketing persona.

*Provide your market with the information they need to make an informed decision (i.e. the 5 basic content types). If you don’t offer it, your competitors and/or near substitutes might and you may lose a prospect.

*Incorporate a contextually relevant call-to-action. Don’t assume that potential customers will automatically contact you. Help them to buy from you.

*Ensure that your purchase process is easy-to-use. Keep your branding consistent as prospects move from your content on one site into your purchase funnel. Use tailored landing pages and ensure that your buying process is streamlined.

*Continually test each step of your lead generation and purchase process. Since your marketing is a dynamic process, test every step on a regular basis to ensure that your content and related marketing as performing as well as possible. This means that you must track your results!

6. Social Media B2B

You must include calls-to-action on blog posts to give visitors the opportunity to raise their hand and express interest in your company and its ideas. Too many blogs do nothing to try to convert their hard-earned blog visitors to leads.

7.  Social Marketology

Borrow a notion from Lean Manufacturing, and think about the world through the customers’ eyes. Each single one of us is inundated daily by marketing messages that are irrelevant. Those microseconds of attention are fundamentally without value; they’re waste. Eliminate waste, and create marketing that adds value to the lives of your audience.

8. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Be smart about your content creation. The mantra for content marketers should be not to create more content but create more relevant content. Relevance is everything.

9.  Lead Generation for Dummies

Don’t forget about nurturing your leads once you have them in your database! Many marketers think that lead generation ends after the lead acquisition, however, what are you doing to move leads through your funnel?  Just because someone downloaded a whitepaper doesn’t mean they are ready to buy. Once they are in your system you have to use strategies like lead nurturing to educate them throughout their buying journey. That way, new leads become familiar with your company over time, and once they are ready to be sent to sales you will have much better luck closing the deal.

10.  Strategic Objectives

To generate leads, Strategic Objectives has created a cross-channel model: PESOF

P – Paid amplification of your content

E – Earned media through public relations

S – Shared content – that is both owned content that others share, and found content that you share with your audience

O – Owned content like websites, blogs, social connections, etc.

F – Found – use a Search Engine Optimization strategy to identify the keywords your audience is searching for, and then utilize these keywords in your content creation strategy and web copy.

Leads will be knocking down your door looking to hire your company if you properly align lead generation efforts across PESOF.

Lead generation, especially in a connected, content-rich world, is a multi-step process. While prospects may be 60% or more of the way through the process before they contact you, don’t expect them to buy from you immediately.

Be prepared to coax prospects through the purchase process by providing them with the 5 basic content types they need, giving them the ability to gather more information and to get their questions answered, and allowing them to purchase when, where and how they wish to do so.