7 Tips For Lead Generation
No matter how grand the campaign, how thoughtful the strategy or how well produced the content, nothing matters more to marketers than lead generation. At the end of the day, if sales are being handed either too few leads, or too poor a selection of leads, their job becomes more difficult and the sales funnel becomes that little bit less effective.
So, with lead generation in mind, we’ve put together the seven top tips to ensure your marketing efforts are bring in the ROI you need.
CTAs must be clear
The first tip, and perhaps most important, is that the call to actions on your site must be clear. A landing page is ineffective if it doesn’t offer an obvious next step to the user, whilst making it clear exactly what the user stands to gain by continuing through your site. Choose a colour that jumps out of the page, avoid the word ‘submit’ at all costs, and stick to one CTA to avoid confusing the user. According to unbounce, a travel website saw a 591% increase in leads when they revamped their CTAs - you can’t afford to be neglecting them.
Email is by no means dead
One of the biggest misconceptions floating around the marketing world at present is that email marketing is dead. It’s not - it’s alive and well. A study by McKinsey suggested that emails are 40 times more likely to acquire a new lead than Facebook and Twitter combined.
The important thing to remember with email blasts is that there is no magic formula. Longer emails can work as well as shorter ones, unbranded emails can work as well as branded ones and there is no magic length for subject lines. Essentially, find the method that works best for your brand, not the other way round. If you can tell your story in 100 words, great. If it takes a little longer, that’s fine too - just try and keep it interesting.
Consider using influencers
No matter how big or small your company is, having thought leaders and social influencers on your side is an invaluable source of leads. Of course negative reviews are bad, but if you’re confident in your product, send it out to as many influencers as possible asking only for an honest review in return. Having bloggers even tweet about your product is a great source of almost free exposure, particularly if their community is currently bigger than yours.
Social media: essential but not an end in itself
If you haven’t fully accepted that social media is here to stay as a marketing tool, then it’s about time you caught up. Having a presence across the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram is a necessity for building brand awareness, interacting with your customers and, you guessed it, generating leads.
But don’t use social for the sake of using social; it has to serve your business. Everyone belongs on Facebook, but fashion brands struggle on LinkedIn and Instagram really isn’t the place for an analytics firm. Share content, build that following, and engage, but do so on the platforms that best suit your industry, spreading yourself too thin can render all efforts ineffective.
Use LinkedIn
On the subject of social media, though, use LinkedIn. Unless, as mentioned before, your product simply isn’t suited to it, LinkedIn is a fantastic lead generation machine. According to Hubspot, a survey of 5,000 small businesses found that LinkedIn is by far the best social network for lead generation, with a 2.74% visit-to-lead conversion rate, compared to Facebook’s 0.77% and Twitter’s 0.69%. If your product suits it, use it.
Test
You should never feel like your landing page is perfect, or that your format for email blasts is as effective as it can be - these things can always be fine tuned. According to Marketo, ‘testing can allow you to enter a new market with little risk.’ This doesn’t mean overhaul, though; you can tweak your site, your emails or your social media efforts delicately then measure the results to find out which is best for your product.
Something as simple as changing the color of a CTA button, or the length of your email subjects, has been known to have huge effects on lead generation, and is very easily reversible if no improvement is found.
Gated videos work
Let’s start this one by saying you should be putting out video content. This doesn’t mean creating expensive advertisements or recreating an infomercial - something as simple as a product explainer video has been found to ‘generate leads at a rate of up to 33%,’ according to unbounce.
The likes of Wistia now allow brands to gate their video content, asking users to submit information before making that content available. Take as little information as you need, though, and make the process as streamlined as possible - both factors can turn away potential leads.
If you'd like to learn the digital marketing tips of experts at Sky, Unilver, Yahoo & more, check out the Digital Marketing Innovation Summit.