Develop an Effective Lead Generation Program
With shrinking marketing budgets in the last few years, it becomes more pertinent to have comprehensive lead generation program to maintain the sales pipeline and leadflow for your business.
To be effective in any campaign, tracking, measurement, testing and optimization is crucial to your campaign's success.
If you are transitioning from traditional media advertising, direct mail and cold calling, here are some online methods which you need to adopt into your overall marketing strategy.
These are the areas you want to consider for a developing an effective lead generation program.
1) Paid Search Marketing or Pay Per Click
Will yiel d instant results with the ability to bring in very highly qualified leads based on the messaging of your ad campaign and your landing page's call to action.
2) Social Media Optimization
With over 500 million users on Facebook and 190 million on Twitter, social media is no longer something any business can afford to ignore. Your customers and prospects are using these sites to interact, look up peer reviews and most importantly look for more information on products and services.
The collaboration of social media and search marketing has brought about Social Search - Real time results showing the latest Tweets, videos and blogs based on the keyword typed.
"42% of Twitter's 190 million users use Twitter to learn about products and services" (source: Edison Research April 2010)
- Ensure you have a Facebook business page and strategy to get more "likes."
- Create a Twitter business page and strategy to acquire a larger fanbase.
- Set up a LinkedIN business page and a strategy on getting into the conversation and being involved with the business community.
- Create a company blog and share information on your products and services. When you share information and pull/engage your audience, it becomes a great way to gain qualified leads instead of push/outbound marketing. Outbound marketing is becoming less and less effective so think carefully before you decide to purchase an email list of non-subscribers or hire telemarketers to do cold calling.
3) Organic Search Marketing
Organic search is still the most credible way to build a website. The main drawback is that it takes time. Anywhere from 3-9 months for it to actually yield results. As a long term strategy however, having a well structured website for search engines to fnd and crawl your site is absolutely necessary for your overall lead generation program.
- Ensure that your on-page SEO of your website has a content strategy and is filled with the necessary kewords, links and fresh content.
- Compliment your on-page SEO efforts with off-page SEO via continuous efforts in building more quality inbound links.
- Create videos of your products or services. The viral aspect of vSEO is a great component to your lead generation programs. Remember the Blendtec/iPhone viral video?
4) eMail/CRM Marketing
Your current database of email subscribers can be an incredibly powerful tool to turn them into customers. Assuming that you did not purchase your email list (yes, companies actually do that!), email is still an incredibly effective way to communicate with your fanbase and potential customers.
Your subscribers already want to hear from you. Emails you send will have a high open rate. Recently a friend of mine who is a curator of an email list of Silicon Valley start up events sent an email out. He wanted to improve his newsletter to serve his community of subscribers. There was an 81.3% conversion rate of subscribers who actually filled in the survey.
If you send emails of value looking to serve your customers, email is a great way to build a lead nurture program.
"90 Trillion emails were sent in 2009" source: Hubspot
- Create a lead nurture campaign with different offerings based on your customer's activity.
- Use an email platform which allows you to track and measure your potential customer's level of activity based on your email offerings. This will allow you to tailor it to their needs while providing your customer with more relevant information and offers.
We can help you develop a lead generation program tailored to your needs. Have a look at some of our core expertise as a digital search agency for lead generation purposes.