Quality Lead Generation that works
Delivering real, converting leads to your teams
Lead Generation (Lead Gen) is one of the most important tools in a Marketer, Sales Team or Business owners toolbox. It is a key component to Demand Generation and one of our specialities.
First things first, we’ve been designing, building and executing Lead Generation campaigns for almost 2 decades so we’ve seen every iteration – good and bad – of lead and lead generation campaign. We know how frustrating it can be when it just isn’t working and how incredibly powerful it can be when you get it right.
Simply put Lead Generation is the process (or processes) of converting unknown people into qualified opportunities.
In reality it often means a combination of generating:
All of which need to work together to deliver the ultimate goal – increased sales.
The first step is to understand what is your real goal and quantify it – are you trying to provide your sales team with interested contacts to call or do you really need to give them hot opportunities to work on? Do you need to drive more traffic to your e-commerce store or more sign ups to your emails?
Good Lead Gen will start with the goal in mind and work backwards through each stage to build an effective program.
Determining your channels should be the next step – what options do you have for both inbound and outbound lead gen?
Outbound Lead gen might focus on targeting existing mailing lists with a core promotion or even Telemarketing to known contacts to find new opportunities. More sophisticated approaches will also include Marketing Automation programs to create renewed Demand within an existing base or targeted Display Ads to lapsed visitors/ customers.
Inbound Lead Gen is more complex and often uses a mix of different channels to drive action across all of the stages we listed earlier.
WHY?
As consumers we’re able to find pretty much all the information we could ever want on products/ services/ solutions online and so attracting leads to businesses has become much more challenging as we all compete for attention through the noise.
Understanding where your consumers “hang out” and what’s really on their minds is the key to generating real results. Choosing the right channels (and content) to drive action at each stage will make the difference between a campaign performing well or becoming “that thing we did that didn’t work” and let’s face it, no-one wants that.
Qualification is the final component for good lead generation, in fact it’s vital to be able to produce successful results.
Depending on your goal Qualification though might mean different things – for new visitors you might term a visit lasting longer than 2 minutes qualified or if online sales are your goal then maybe a certain value is your criteria. For those looking to create qualified leads to feed into Sales team them we’d recommend setting a number of criteria (some of which can only be verified by an actual person!) :
Needs – Does your Lead have a genuine need for you? That you can solve? Have they identified that for themselves or are you assuming?
Action – Is your lead ready to take action?
Timing – When are they likely to act?
Power – Does your prospect have the spending power and sign off to actually buy from you?
Of course you can add as many criteria as you like but getting the qualification right will help you sort and grow good quality leads that convert.
