Lead generation is incredibly important for marketers and the businesses they want to grow. Increasing leads means increasing brand awareness and interest in your products or services, nurturing curious prospects through the marketing funnel and into your sales pipeline. If done well, lead generation strategies create strong relationships with qualified customers who invest in your business for a long time.
Considering that every business has its own lead generation process, here are some of the top characteristics that a well-designed lead generation process should have in order to get the most out of your campaigns.
Targeted / Personalized
Personalization is an integral part of any business and one of the most pivotal aspects of the Lead Generation Process.
By leveraging holistic data you can easily analyze key characteristics and buying behavior of your target market. It’s a continuous process which helps marketers to build long term relationships with clients and customers.
challenge filling the sales funnel with quality leads. Sales teams sell better when they have more number of qualified leads. On the other hand, marketing teams strategize better when they have a clear and accurate database. While sales teams want marketing teams to provide highly qualified leads, marketing teams expect sales teams to nurture leads. All these small gaps, in turn, don’t allow the lead to finally get converted.
Personalization here plays an important role by allowing marketers to get highly qualified leads. This allows marketing and sales teams to work in sync and perform better.
Earlier, lead generation was all about getting names of potential buyers and pass them onto sales and marketing to qualify them. Today buyers do their own research about the product or service before even speaking to a salesperson. In fact, according to Forrester, buyers might be anywhere from two-thirds to 90% of the way through their buying journey before they even reach the vendor.
The reason this is happening more often is that buyers have relevant access to information produced by companies.
Creating a highly personalized lead generation strategy will help you build trust and capture the interest of your buyer before they are even ready to contact sales.
Additionally, you don’t want your sales teams spending time going down a list and cold calling. If you can generate leads for sales, the process is easier and you will see more of your leads being turned into deal closures faster.
Multi-touch
Multi Touch Lead Generation is similar to Outbound Lead Generation but in addition to email uses additional “touches’ ‘ to make contact with your prospects. For a standard Multi Touch campaign we include an online display and ‘retargeting ads’ and LinkedIn text-ads and display ads. We can also include other touches via social media.
Why use Multi Touch?
- Multi-Touch generates Higher Responses – prospects more likely to respond when they see you on multiple channels.
- Multi-Touch LinkedIn Placement and Brand Awareness – having your brand promoted and associated with LinkedIn and high quality websites improve response rates; using retargeting ads to display your brand on high-quality websites also increases the perception of your company and solutions.
- Number of Touches Relates to Success – overall increase in frequency and volume of touches increases the number of positive lead responses.
- Highly Targeted – As with Outbound, you pick who you want to target at the beginning, and you can specify who to target with online ads – so all responses should match the target profile.
- The first step toward Account-Based Marketing – Account-Based Marketing is a fast-growing approach to enterprise sales prospecting. It uses all elements of Multi-Touch but is highly targeted at a narrower set of potential accounts. It also requires a higher level of customization for each campaign step. Multi-Touch lets you ‘learn the ropes’ before committing to full ABM.
Multi-channel
The technology market is crowded with the majority of companies offering services and products similar to yours. It can be very challenging to acquire new customers, to demonstrate what makes your offerings valuable to new customers. As well as why they should choose you instead of the competition. While this multi-channel lead generation strategy applies to all markets.
By leveraging all the available online channels and the data that comes with it, while adopting a multi-channel approach to your online lead generation strategy is a must. It is an effective and clever way of achieving your goals of generating leads for your business. The key is that you need to set clear targets of what success looks like and choose channels that are easily compared and optimized based on your results. Testing is always the key to success. You should spend a large amount of time testing your campaigns on different channels to find the perfect mixture and the right allocation of budget.
Webinars
Webinars are also a great tool for every business. Here at Callbox, you can choose to incorporate webinars into your Callbox campaign in order to complement all the other channels and strategies that we use and offer.
Live Chat
HubSpot’s free live chat installed in your website, Callbox representatives are available for 24/7 live chat that will allow your web visitors to talk to your Callbox team in real-time, allowing for quick conversion. Qualified prospects identified via chat sessions are entered into your Target List and appropriately tagged and nurtured via both manual and automated touchpoints.
Callbox initiates contact through targeted email – that is, having attention-grabbing subject lines, brief but precise body text, and compelling calls to action, which almost always guarantees better open and reply rates. Thousands of initial and follow-up emails are sent via Callbox’s email system — fully equipped with open and click tracking and KPI reporting.
Tech-driven
The rapid evolution of technology has significantly impacted nearly every facet of business today, from generating marketing content to managing client issues. One of the areas that technology has affected the most significantly, however, is in the realm of lead generation.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is arguably the linchpin of lead generation. If you want people to volunteer their contact information, you have to give them something in return. More often than not, that “something” will be a piece of content. There are a number of different avenues for publishing and circulating lead generation content (third-party syndication among them). Regardless of which you pursue, you’ll need a way to post and manage assets on your website.
That might include an industry blog, a research library, case studies, pricing guides, frequently asked questions, or all of the above. The key here is to pick something that lets marketing users access and edit the content on a regular basis without needing help from engineers. If you have the necessary resources, your Dev team might decide to build a custom solution into the backend of your site. Otherwise, you can use an off-the-shelf content management system (CMS).
Landing Pages
Landing pages are ground zero for prospect-to-lead conversion. After traveling in through a link from one of your various marketing channels, prospects must decide whether or not to abide by your call to action. In the context of lead generation, that usually means submitting their contact and firmographic information through a web form — name, email address, business name, industry, location, etc. According to a 2012 benchmark study by HubSpot, B2B companies with 40 or more landing pages generate five times more leads than companies with only a few.
At Callbox, we continuously optimize our landing page. We always test each page element as well as tweak the content and design to ensure that our prospects respond to the campaign’s call-to-action. In order to boost your Landing Pages, we’ll also help you build powerful online forms so that you can start growing your database with leads converted from your landing page or website.
Marketing Automation Platform
A marketing automation platform (MAP) is one of the most important tools in the lead generation stack. That’s partly because of its broad range of features (a MAP helps you orchestrate multichannel campaigns and track ROI) and partly because of its lead management capabilities (lead nurturing, scoring, segmentation, and analysis). MAPs are also great at identifying prospects and logging their behavior across your digital properties. Since somewhere between 57 and 90%of B2B site visitors are anonymous, that’s a big deal.
If you don’t use a marketing automation platform, your ability to capitalize on generated leads will be severely limited. This is especially true in cases where a marketing team buys in bulk from a third-party provider. Purchased leads should meet an agreed-upon standard for quality and engagement, but they will still need to be nurtured through at least the first couple stages of the purchase process before speaking directly with sales.
