Best Practices for a Lead Generation Campaign

Finding new leads is essential for your business to grow. Lead generation is the process of utilizing various strategies to identify and attract potential customers. Maintaining a steadily growing number of customers can be a difficult task and requires knowledge and proper implementation of strategies in order to succeed. In this article, we will be discussing some of the best practices for a successful lead-generation campaign.

Before we start with our suggestions and insight, it is important to state that lead generation can significantly contribute to the success of your business by increasing your customer base, brand awareness, contact base, and revenue.

It’s important to know where in your sales and marketing funnels are the best opportunities for lead generation.

Below, you will find some of the best practices for a lead generation campaign.

So, let’s start!

1. Have a target end-goal

The single most important action you can take at first is to clearly draw the objectives of your campaign.

Answer the following questions is the first step in defining your end goal:

• How many people do you want to reach?
• What is your offer?
• What call to action (CTA) are you providing?
• How do you classify a lead?
• How do you follow up?
• How do you define a successful follow-up?
• How do you expect your metrics to improve?

Depending on the characteristics of your business, you might want to ask more (or less) questions. The main point of defining a clear objective is to set realistic expectations and minimize any inefficiencies or redundant efforts.

With a well-defined goal in mind, your lead generation campaign is immediately off to a great start!

2. Define your target audience

Now that you’ve set your objectives and started working on your campaign roadmap, it is time to decide who your campaign is for - this is defining your target audience.

It’s important to reflect on who you’re aiming your marketing efforts at, this is instrumental in helping you decide on integral and core parts of your campaign’s strategy. A lead generation campaign is that much more successful when it is aimed at the right people.

Ideally, you want to aim at people to whom your offer brings added value for either themselves or their businesses. Looking at your customer base, identifying common characteristics, and segmenting them into groups of interest will help you better define your approach - making your campaign that much more successful.

3. Make contacting you easy

It is important to have a way to directly communicate with your existing and prospecting customers. One of the many ways to do direct engagement is through live chat software. Having a platform for new or prospective customers to receive support, clarify questions and otherwise interact with your business is very advantageous in lead generation.

The big advantage of direct engagement is that the response time is usually very short, meaning you can address customers’ or prospective leads’ queries instantaneously. Every interaction represents an opportunity for lead generation.

There are various other ways to make contacting you easy, such as telephone support, social media accounts, and the good ol’ reliable queries emails.

No matter how you choose to approach this, what should be kept in mind is to make the experience of contacting you as straightforward and easy as possible. Good communication is the essence of a good relationship, after all.

4. Encourage Online Reviews

Nowadays, people are more informed than ever. You would ever buy a product without looking at some reviews first, so why would anyone do business with you without doing the same? Exactly.

This is to say that reviews are important and they play a huge role in lead generation. Therefore, incentivizing your existing or recently acquired customers to leave you reviews throughout the major platforms is a really important marketing effort to make.

You can do all kinds of incentives, and even give freebies for new reviews - sometimes just asking nicely will do the trick. It is worth considering that you don’t want to be too overzealous about it, however. Asking too many times for opinions can have the opposite effect and generate poor reviews.

We recommend you ask nicely once, and from now and then ask a customer who recently had an issue resolved to rate his/her experience with you. You will find that often it is not the issue they had that is reflected in their review, but the way you handled it that counts towards the score you’re given.

By receiving frequent feedback from your existing customers not only do you gain valuable insight into how to improve your business to better satisfy their needs but there is also the added benefit of generating leads through positive reviews.

5. Affiliate and referral programs

Having an affiliate or referral program can be very advantageous in your efforts in lead generation. Normally, these programs offer various rewards and benefits to incentivize your customers to recommend your product. Whether you opt to share a percentage of the generated sales or give out awards for sign-ups, or anything else you can imagine, having your affiliate or partner promote your business is simultaneously advantageous to both revenue and marketing.

One of the particularities of these programs is that they are very efficient in lead generation because the people playing the role of the promoter are the ones doing the prospecting in hopes of finding you an active customer so they can benefit from your reward system. This is why a generous and fair reward system for your programs is also very important to consider. If both sides stand to benefit you will find program participants much more dedicated to procuring you valuable leads.

6. Optimize for mobile devices

Have you ever tried to see a website on your smartphone and it was just a horrible experience? Site navigation was impractical, you needed to scroll sideways to be able to see the entire page’s content - don’t you just hate that? Well, I hate it too and so will anyone who visits that website on mobile.

Optimizing your website for mobile devices is very important in lead generation. Making sure that visitors to your site have a smooth experience reflects directly on your image. First impressions count and this is something to be aware of, don’t let a poor first impression stop your lead generation efforts from succeeding.

7. Make fun and interactive content

There are various ways of approaching interactive content, the focus should be on providing content that is engaging and interesting

Here are some examples of interactive content you could make:

• On-site tutorials and learning resources
• Video-tours
• On-site product editing tools (order customization)
• Interactive mini-games

There is real value in interactivity, it’s a great way to organically transmit important information about your business or product and it keeps the user engaged for longer.

8. Make mediatic content

Having a frequent output of content related to your business or organization is instrumental in lead generation, as it provides organic traffic to your website, relays important information about who you are and what you do, and more importantly, it makes you stand out.

This content can assume many forms, here are a few examples:

• Blogs
• Promotional videos
• News articles
• Podcasts
• Social media posts

Whichever format you choose, always make sure to make it interesting, relevant, and informative. Frequency is also important, but it’s preferable to provide quality content over content quantity. Ideally, you manage to do both. This balance can be hard to achieve at first, but once you have your content output and quality assurance set, you will be on the fast track to generating more leads for your business.

9. CRM tools are your friends

Using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool is one of the most important ways to manage your lead generation. Not only will a CRM reduce your overall lead generation cost, but it will also increase your effectiveness in both the identification and pursuit of leads, generating more and better opportunities for your business to acquire new customers and grow.

The benefits of using these software solutions are pretty self-explanatory, as you can expect to significantly increase your productivity by minimizing any wasted efforts. Having all of your leads in one place makes follow-ups easier to track and execute.

Choosing the right CRM for you and your business requires a fair amount of research and more often than not some trial and error as you test new tools to see which one best adapts to your needs. This process is worth doing, however, as the increased efficiency of your actions will reflect directly on your return on investment in various parts of your business, including lead generation.

10. The importance of scoring your leads

Once you have acquired new leads, it’s important to segment them and organize your follow-up plan accordingly. Some leads are more valuable than others, being able to identify and focus on the more valuable ones is one of the best practices you can have in managing your leads.

This is not to say that you should not plan or care about less valuable leads - an opportunity is an opportunity - but having a clear and well-defined score for each new lead will simplify the follow-up process and generate better results for your company.

Another advantage of scoring your leads is that over time you develop a sixth sense of how to better approach prospective customers through common characteristics compared to previously approached leads, further developing your marketing skills and improving your success rate.

Summary

We spoke of some of the best practices for lead generation today and hope to have provided you with some valuable advice.

Here’s a quick rundown of our suggestions for you:

• Define an end-goal
• Define your target audience
• Make communication easy and fast
• Encourage reviews
• Develop affiliate and referral programs
• Don’t ignore mobile
• Create fun and interactive content
• Content output and creation
• CRM tools and how they are your friends
• Score your leads for a better follow-up

Following these suggestions will definitely put you on the fast track for better and more efficient lead generation.