Is your website a Field Of Dreams? One that attracts a steady flow of traffic with an interest in your services? Or, have visitors not yet seen the vision of what you’ve built? Even without James Earl Jones, there are a number of effective lead generation strategies you can incorporate to help them see.
10 Lead Generation Strategies
Start With Content
Engaging web pages that target audience needs are a great start. But, to keep prospects coming back it takes an ongoing commitment to content.
Landing Pages Increase Conversions
Create landing pages that make it clear how your unique capabilities can satisfy your prospects' needs and eliminate pain points.
3Develop landing pages that tell visitors exactly what you want them to do and why they should do it - your homepage is a great source of information but it isn’t designed to convert prospects. Instead, a landing page is singularly focused on two things:- Buying - for businesses with products or services
- Permission - for getting leads and building your email list, blog subscribers and more
Lead Generation ROI Starts With Follow Up
Don’t spend the time, make the effort and go to the expense of a lead generation program unless effective follow up is part of the process. Lead generation programs often fail because of two equally bad processes:
- Sales ignores all leads
- Sales follows up on leads until they get frustrated because many leads aren’t qualified and most aren’t yet ready to buy
Define A Process
6Develop a defined process that ensures rapid follow up - it’s essential to establish agreed upon definitions and follow-up steps between marketing and sales. This typically includes:- Marketing qualified leads - have expressed an interest in your capabilities. They may have submitted a contact form or connected with you in some other way. But, you need more than that interaction to qualify as a potential lead. For example, does the lead fall into the market segments, company size, geography, and more, that represents your target audience?
- Sales qualified leads - a lead may pass MQL criteria but not be ready for sales follow-up. A sales qualified lead is typically defined as the authority to purchase or at least influence the purchase, budget authority, and a time frame to purchase that’s consistent with your typical selling cycles and more.
- Sales-ready leads - depending upon your business, specific website interactions may be a strong indication of interest. For example, watching a capabilities video, downloading a white paper and then reviewing a pricing schedule may reveal a prospect nearing a purchasing decision. When they exhibit that type of behavior, a lead is sales-ready and quick follow up is paramount.
- Response time KPIs - even in B2B opportunities, the quicker you follow up, the more likely it is that you close a deal.
Data Improves Lead Generation ROI
Meaningful data collection can improve the outcome of your lead generation program. Collecting it in a logical, transparent manner benefits both your company and your audience.
7Gain greater insights on your prospects - using progressive profiling or other methods to better understand their position and needs. Personalized follow up succeeds far more often than generic attempts.8Score leads - so you can provide information that coincides with where prospects are in the buying process. Someone that opened an email or visited a web page once is likely in a different stage of purchase consideration than the prospect that downloaded a white paper, reads your blog and visits your site frequently. A scoring process will help you identify the categories your prospects fall into.
Focus - Feedback - Fix-it
A website is a living document, always in need of tweaks, revisions and improvements. As part of a broader web strategy, lead generation programs need that same attention.
9Test and revise to increase performance - slight changes in copy, button colors, form fields and other perceived minutia are just a few of the variables that can impact the value of your lead generation efforts. In fact, one client experienced a 15% increase in form submissions when they changed the color of their submit button.10Work closely with Sales - their feedback on lead follow up and other program attributes will result in a better and more effective program.
Naturally, it takes more than showing up at an appointment with a prospect to achieve sales success. Similarly, if you want to engage prospects on your website, it requires more than a good design. However, by implementing effective lead generation strategies, you will increase the number of leads. And it will increase the return on your marketing investment.
InterEdge Marketing delivers lead generation strategies that help organizations drive revenue. Subscribe to our newsletter to get bi-monthly tips on how to elevate your marketing programs.
Insight Delivered Directly to You Interesting topics, great offers and free marketing tools.
