Lead generation is one of the most important steps in acquiring new customers and is a crucial element in generating new business opportunities for your company. In this article, our experts explain how to establish an effective lead generation strategy that helps acquire new customers.
What is lead generation?
A lead is a person who has expressed interest in the products or services offered by your company and from whom you have managed to obtain personal information.
Establishing a lead generation strategy is about finding unique ways to attract potential customers to your company with targeted offers and content so that they become interested in your brand and think positively enough about it to make them want to interact with it. To develop an effective lead acquisition strategy, you will need to rely on different web marketing levers such as content creation, inbound marketing, search engine optimization, emailing, social networks, etc.
How to qualify a lead?
To determine the level of interest of a lead, you need to collect as much information as possible about them. This information must be relevant enough to know if the products or services offered are appealing to them and if they are adapted to their needs.
The important information to know is:
- The full name: A basic piece of information to communicate with the potential lead.
- E-mail address: This allows the company to communicate with the potential lead through e-mail marketing campaigns.
- The name of the company where the lead works: It helps the company learn about the lead’s industry and determine how your products or services could be useful to them. This information is useful mainly for B2B.
- The lead’s position: This allows the company to determine how to communicate with the lead based on their role in the company. Different people involved will have different views on the company’s offer.
- Country: This geographic information allows you to qualify a lead and determine its location to address it to the appropriate sales team.
The mechanisms used in lead generation
Lead generation has several components:
- The visitor: a person who has discovered a company via one of its marketing channels (website, blog, or page on social networks).
- Call-to-Action (CTA): an image, button, or message that prompts a site visitor to perform a specific action. In terms of lead generation, this action consists of directing them to a landing page.
- Landing page: a web page that the visitor visits for a specific reason. Landing pages can have many different purposes, but they are typically used to collect leads via forms.
- Forms: Usually integrated into landing pages, although they can be found on any page of a site. They are used to collect information in exchange for a content offer.
- Offer: content or another item of value that is “offered” on the landing page. This offer must interesting enough for a visitor to agree to provide contact information to receive it.
Once these elements are in place, a company can leverage its various promotional channels to share links, attract visitors to these landing pages and thus start generating leads.
Keep in mind that if the prospect has never visited your company’s website despite all the efforts you have put in place, then they are not interested in your offer. If leads have not chosen to receive communications from a particular company, they are highly likely to mark them as spam. This can damage your company’s reputation and its image.
This is why the inbound marketing methodology is particularly interesting to generate leads in a natural way, which express a real interest in your company.
Key steps to a successful lead generation strategy
Analyze your target audience
A successful lead generation strategy starts with defining your target audience. To do this you need to work on your “buyer personas”. You need to understand their behavior, interests, expectations, objectives, and purchasing criteria to offer them appropriate content and attract them.
Define your conversion and lead generation campaign objectives
You need to be clear about your conversion objectives: when do you consider a visitor to have turned into a lead? What action does the visitor have to perform on your site to be considered a lead?
You should also define your campaign objectives: how many visitors do you need for conversion? What is the expected number of new customers? Etc.
Build a content strategy
To generate leads, a content strategy is essential. Content allows you to attract visitors to your site and answer their questions. Some content such as white books for example can ensure your reputation and demonstrate your expertise in your field.
Don’t forget to distribute your content via social networks, emailing, and advertising to gain visibility and make yourself known.
Work in collaboration with your sales team
It is important to work closely with your sales team to agree on the maturity of a lead and its life cycle. You can put in place a system to allocate points when implementing lead scoring for example.
Performance analysis
You need to analyze the performance of your lead generation campaign to adjust your objectives, and your content strategy and review your conversion tunnel. You will also be able to further refine your “buyer personas” according to the latest data collected.
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How to generate qualified leads?
After identifying your target personas, you need to define a content strategy that meets their needs and expectations to encourage them to visit your website. You can propose blog articles, audio or video documentation, white books, etc. In addition, traffic growth relies on the use of appropriate generic and long-tail keywords that will improve your visibility on the web.
Another element to consider to attract qualified leads is to improve the conversion of your site. To do this, use engaging forms to capture attention, set up CTAs, and lead magnets to encourage visitors to take action.
You can also qualify your leads with relevant and consistent landing pages that will help you classify your leads according to their degree of engagement. This is called lead scoring.
Finally, marketing automation is an important way to qualify leads. Thanks to automated marketing campaigns triggered by users’ actions on your site, you can attract prospects through e-mailing, re-launch an abandoned purchase, or promote a personalized offer that may interest your prospect for example. These campaigns contribute to lead nurturing, a process that stimulates the maturation of leads.
Eminence, your lead generation agency
As an agency with expertise in marketing automation, lead nurturing, social media engagement, and content creation, Eminence can help you create and optimize your lead generation strategy.
Thanks to our partnerships with Hubspot and SALESmanago, we have powerful means to generate qualified leads and develop your sales pipeline. Our ultimate goal is to attract qualified people to your brand and products through a quality website and engaging content. For this to work, it is imperative to create the right content, in the right place, at the right time. Your message will be seen as more relevant by your target audience and will encourage them to convert.
If you need a real expert to accompany you in your Lead Generation strategy, don’t hesitate to contact us.