It’s Time to Give Your Lead Generation Strategy a Makeover: Here’s How

Every good marketer knows you’re only going to go as far as your leads will take you. It’s why we work so hard on assessing the competitive marketplace, identifying our target audiences, and selecting the most robust tools that our campaigns can afford so that we generate the most qualified leads possible. Then convert them to sales. But before we start counting the profits, let’s instead take this time, in advance, to plan tactics that will gain solid leads from the onset, allow us to act on them, and improve upon them whenever possible.

Here are suggestions for developing a solid lead creation strategy.

Plan Your Needs

Embrace the planning stages. Identify your targets and the tools you’ll use to attract them. You’re going to want reliable data. 

All of this should start with a review of the past year’s campaign results. Scan your bounce rates, website conversion rates, CRM funnel, and other metrics to see whether they reveal trends that can be applied to your plan now.

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As importantly, that data may also expose previously overlooked gaps that can be anticipated and leveraged to your benefit. All this intelligence will help you choose your reporting method: a template, an executive dashboard or something more specific that suits the campaign.

Design a Lead Funnel for Lead Generation

Ask yourself these and other fundamental questions and plug in answers to determine your capabilities in generating solid leads.

• What’s the budget?
• What’s a customer worth?
• What’s an affordable cost-per-click?
• What’s our definition of conversion?
• What are the Key Performance Indicators?

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Sure this is simple, but setting realistic goals based on actual boundaries and making all the information visible from the start is essential. Everyone on the campaign, and anyone seeking oversight of it, will see what’s capable and realistic at all points along the way. For example, accepting a cost-per-click that won’t be easily recovered in the sales conversion doesn’t make sense.

Take Command of Conversion Tracking

Own this element of your campaign.

With direct online sales, there’s a clear line that connects advertisement investment and revenue. But in lead generation campaigns, determining a true return on ad spend can be muddy. So relish getting your hands dirty on this data:

• Call tracking
  • Who doesn’t love call tracking? Phone calls are lead sources often missed by digital-focused marketers without reliable call tracking software. Track them and be certain that they’re linked back to their channel of origin. Deploy conversation intelligence if you haven’t already. Along with context from the conversations themselves, all this data will reveal optimizations for specific campaigns, landing pages, keywords and so much more. 
• Conversion measurements
  • Have a plan to track the conversions that matter most to you. Map out campaign UTM parameters, and use tools like Google Tag Manager to accurately measure popular metrics like:
    • Appointments scheduled
    • Button clicks
    • Chats
    • Clicks to call
    • Downloads
    • Form fields
    • Link clicks
    • Mailto: clicks
    • Time on site
• CRM connections
  • When in your planning stages, be sure to choose an analytics platform that will allow you to link your advertising systems with your financial reporting system. Data such as these will give a clear indication of where campaigns are succeeding.

Dissect Changes

No one knows with 100 percent certainty what will work best before the campaign even begins. So expect to make adjustments to your tactics, and know before you start that you’ll want to draw upon analytics that reveal the effects of those adjustments. Even the most experienced marketers adjusting on the fly can benefit from seeing comparative performance metrics that help interpret the results of course corrections made mid-campaign. 

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats should be compiled and assessed. So, too, should change to the brand, organizational structure, leadership moves, and other past adjustments that can affect new marketing efforts. 

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Remember not to overlook how your target customers and prospects have evolved.

Ideally, your website is a major asset that supports brand relevance, thus commanding precision focus. Even small adjustments here can result in big returns. 

A search engine optimization audit will reveal missing tags, an incomplete sitemap or other snags that take minor effort to resolve. Freshen the content calendar, set a regular optimization schedule, and choose a testing tool so that the website maintains a constant state of effectiveness and improvement. 

Try Ad Products for Lead Generation

Advertising platforms are consistently adding new products and features, massaging their capabilities just like marketers adjust campaigns on the go. With your analytics tools and their conversation intelligence reporting in place, ready to reveal performance metrics (as advised above) as well as prospective customer insights, there will come a time you may want to introduce new elements. See how display ads with video, text message extensions and other innovative ad options perform lead generation compared to your original choices. By introducing one or more of these features mid-campaign, you’ll be rewarded with intelligence that allows apples-to-apples comparisons to apply when planning future campaigns.

Offering these simple steps to command your lead generation campaign does not infer that such efforts are easy or immediately successful. We all know that marketing is hard work, and creating successful campaigns is challenging. Yet, when we prepare and plan with purpose, including selecting tools we know we’ll need to judge our campaign’s performance, there are great reasons to move forward confidently. 

Digital marketing can be as confounding or as straightforward as our ability to interpret the data it generates. So get started on your next campaign. Look for gaps in old strategies, close them in new plans. Move confidently to make changes to stay fresh. Update what’s outdated. That includes landing page revisions and their settings, social media profiles and other items of low visibility that still reach customers. Reset your website for its most effective engagement and tracking. Get your data, analyze it and adjust to it. The patterns are there and the better you fine-tune them, the more successful this campaign, and the next, will be.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]