By Samuel Thimothy, VP at OneIMS.com, an inbound marketing agency, and co-founder of Clickx.io, the digital marketing intelligence platform.
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Generating leads is a challenging but essential part of marketing. It’s the top priority for every company because it can literally make or break your business.
Statistics say that companies with mature lead generation processes generate 133% more revenue than average. But generating good quality prospects isn’t as easy. In fact, 61% of marketers (download required) say that generating traffic and leads is their biggest challenge, which is not surprising at all!
To have a chance at success, everything must work together—strategy development, execution, evaluation and continuous optimization.
No leads, no sales. So the question is, how do you go about tackling such a vital part of your marketing strategy?
First off, let me point out a very important fact. Today, your buyers don’t want to be sold to. They don’t want their attention to be bought. They want you to earn it. I want to share the four L’s to keep in mind when you are thinking about lead generation that can help you develop a more effective digital marketing strategy.
1. Lead Capture
When you are thinking about lead generation, you have to wonder what kind of information you need to capture to really understand if this prospect who submitted a form is a qualified buyer.
What you want to do is to seriously think about the lead capture process. See how much information you are collecting from them, especially when they are coming to your website for the very first time.
Make that process as simple and easy as possible for them to convert.
2. Lead Magnet
When you ask people who are landing on your website to provide their information, you’re asking for things too early. That’s way before they are willing to provide that information freely to you.
Figure out what you can give of value in exchange for their contact information in a form your prospects prefer.
Some examples include an ebook, a webinar, an educational video series or some templates or guides that you can make available to them as an expert in your industry.
3. Landing Page
Imagine you are a prospect who’s landing on your website. If you were a visitor who was browsing around the web and landed on your website, would you be overwhelmed with what you saw? When people are presented with too many things to browse around and click through, it creates a lot of distraction, so you want to somehow guide them through the buying process.
Use a landing page with minimum clutter and have just one ask of that prospect or visitor to convert them into a contact you can essentially nurture and close.
4. Lead Scoring
It’s inevitable that when you have an effective inbound marketing strategy, you’re going to drive a lot of quality traffic, and sometimes poor quality traffic as well.
You want to be able to give some sort of a score for each of those visitors who converted so you can prioritize who is the best buyer you think you can contact and who has a high propensity to become a buyer.
Lead scoring allows you to determine which marketing channels and programs generate high-quality leads so you can reinvest your dollars wisely and make informed decisions.
Finally, having several lead generation strategies in place is much more effective than having just one. Obviously, what works for one prospect isn’t necessarily going to work for the other. But all these people are potentially interested in doing business with you; otherwise, they wouldn’t be part of your target market.
Make sure you apply an integrated online marketing approach to your lead generation strategy. This can increase your conversion rates significantly.
