Marketing

Optimize Your Lead Generation Methods With These 5 Tips

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By Jennelle McGrath

7 min read

Good lead generation produces qualified buyers and makes the buying process as frictionless as possible. If your lead generation methods tends to produce leads that aren't qualified to buy, consider implementing the following tips.

Have you ever had a sudden idea that you thought was brilliant, but the results were disappointing? Often, it's this approach that squanders an effort to generate leads. Doing research and testing beforehand can help. In the meantime, here are some common mistakes that are made as well as some examples of what good lead generation looks like.

Common Lead Generation Mistakes:

Using a Single Marketing Channel

In the old days, marketers relied heavily on mail and telemarketing to get leads. In fact, telemarketing was all the rage before the internet. Some companies relied on it almost exclusively. Believe it or not, many companies still rely on it exclusively today.

Establish more than a single marketing channel to generate leads. For example, marketers still rate email as their most effective tool for digital marketing. That doesn’t mean your business should only use email, however. Email is only as effective as the number and the value of your contacts. In order to get more contacts, use tactics like free content and social media.

Investing In Marketing That Doesn’t Produce ROI

Getting your emails opens and social media followers are great confidence boosters. Regardless, they don't necessarily indicate that your marketing is effective. These are often called “vanity metrics," and for one important reason: they don’t directly contribute to your ROI.

If your 10,000 emails were opened by 10,000 recipients, you probably wrote a killer subject line. If only 1 person converted into a lead, the content within the email may not have been compelling or relevant. Everyone wants thousands of Facebook followers, but if none of them are visiting your website, they may not be people who need your product or service. In a worst case scenario, they may not be people at all!

Failing to Nurture Your Leads

Once your leads are in the sales funnel, they need to turn into a sale. Only then can you count your marketing effective. You need to nurture your leads after that initial point of contact. Align your sales and marketing so that they strive for the same goals. Use email automation, exclusive content, and lead scoring to nurture your leads.

Good lead generation methods means retaining the leads you already have. Once a lead has passed a stage in their journey, they should be met with a new type of touchpoint that is relative to them. This will keep them from unsubscribing and dropping from your lead list.

Rescinding Your Efforts

When business is good and the sales funnel is full of conversions, lead generation methods often falls by the wayside. But once you stop measuring marketing data and acting upon it consistently, you’ll start to see a drop in your number of conversions. Eventually, you’ll find yourself with some impressive past victories but no actionable leads to work on. Sustain your good lead generation efforts through good times and bad.

Relying on an Unspecialized Team

Some businesses rely on their sales team for all of their marketing efforts because they can’t afford to hire an in-house marketing team. When this is the case, businesses will often make the mistake of investing in marketing only when they desperately need it and then stopping their efforts once they see results.

Additionally, not every sales team has the experience necessary to market to prospective customers who are just beginning their journey.

To solve this problem, many companies outsource their marketing efforts. If your company outsources marketing, it’s best to think of your marketing partner as an extension of your own team. There should be clear communication between both of you about what your goals are, just as you’d expect between you and your in-house sales team.

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Examples of Good Lead Generation Methods:

Using Multiple Marketing Channels

No matter what product or service your business offers, it’s safe to assume that potential customers are waiting for you in multiple places. Multichannel marketing is the practice of interacting with customers using a combination of communications channels. There may be some variances in which channels you use depending on what your business does and who you intend to target, however.

If you intend to target millennials, you may want to invest more time into social media channels. If your target clientele works in an industry that is heavily influenced by data and research, you might be better off writing whitepapers and promoting them with an email campaign. Regardless, you should have a presence on every channel that might be viable. You never know where a lead might come from, but you have to meet your customers where they are if you want to be successful.

Investing In Strategies That Work

You should learn to love your marketing metrics, but you should also look at them with a healthy amount of skepticism. In other words, know what your metrics indicate. A strategy like a social media campaign may give you a huge boost in website traffic, but it won’t result in leads or a tangible ROI if you don’t also invest in a marketing strategy that is designed to convert visitors into leads.

You can also measure your new strategies against old ones. If your new strategy isn’t working, it might not be a good idea to double down on your investment. Try investigating why your old strategy was so effective and using that research to inform your new strategy.

Providing Useful Content

Offering free content can help you push your contacts further along in the marketing funnel. People love free stuff. They also love free content, especially if it helps them answer a question or solve a problem. In fact, most people have come to expect helpful information to be free online.

At the early stage of the buyer’s journey, meeting your contact with a sales pitch is going to turn them away. They are still becoming aware of what your company does and how it can help them. Providing them with useful content is the best bet for converting them at this stage, and is one of the most important practices of good lead generation methods.

Staying Consistent

Marketing never stops.

Because of mobile technology, the average consumer is bombarded with advertisements, images, and information from the moment they wake up to the moment they put their head back on the pillow. Regardless of what kind of horrific effects this may or may not have on our collective psychology, it means that your business is going to have to fight hard if you want to hold people’s attention.

If your marketing approach is giving you more lead generation, keep going and stay consistent. Don’t make the mistake of stopping your manufacturing lead generation methods once you’ve seen some success. You should develop a marketing schedule for your team and stick to it so you don’t fall behind in the future.

Using a Marketing Team

Your sales team is an essential part of your business. If you have a good one, you probably have a lot to thank them for. Many of them may even have some experience in the marketing world. Regardless, if you are relying on your sales team for marketing, may be missing an important qualifier: they aren’t marketers.

If you don’t have an in-house marketing team or don’t have the budget for one, you can outsource your marketing projects. Good lead generation only occurs when sales and marketing teams are aligned. However, both need space to focus on their own projects. Marketers exist to get leads into the sales funnel, convert them, and then hand them to salespeople to close the deal.

Your business can’t flourish without good lead generation methods. With the right approach, you’ll avoid some of the most common mistakes and be well on your way to a consistent marketing strategy that will we result in a real ROI.

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