When it comes to lead generation, there are a lot of different approaches that you can consider. However, not all of them are created equal. To run a successful lead generation campaign, you need to focus on different drivers and evaluate all your lead generation campaigns to determine the best solution.
In this blog post, we will discuss how you can set up an effective and impactful lead generation campaign for your business and improve your bottom line.
What is a Lead Generation Campaign?
A lead generation campaign involves strategies and objectives to generate high-quality leads. It means you need to persuade your prospects or website visitors to give you their contact info in exchange for something valuable such as informative content, case studies, product demo, software tutorials, free trials, discount offers, etc. By doing so, you gain access to connect with your leads to nurture and convert them into long-term customers.
There are a few different objectives that can be behind a lead generation campaign. One objective could be to increase the number of leads that are generated from given marketing activity. Another objective could be to increase the conversion rate of leads into customers. Additionally, a lead generation campaign could be focused on generating quality leads, rather than just quantity. Ultimately, the goal is to increase sales and revenue for a business, but the lead generation campaigns must be tailored to fit the specific needs and objectives of any business.
There are a few terminologies you must understand before getting started.
- SEO – Search Engine Optimization refers to the strategies and tactics to optimize your website and make it rank among the top search engine results.
- Target Audience or Prospects – The most favorable set of audiences for your business that holds high potential to become a customer.
- Lead Magnet – A valuable incentive or gated content that you offer to your prospects in exchange for their information.
- Lead Scoring – Attributing a numerical value to the leads based on their likelihood of becoming a customer.
- Lead Nurturing – A practice that involves pushing your leads down the sales funnel by turning them into sales-ready or sales-qualified leads.
- MQLs – Market qualified leads are the leads considered qualified enough to invest by offering valuable content or other incentives
- SQLs – Sales qualified leads are the leads qualified enough to pass the sales team without further nurturing.
Real-Life Examples of Lead Generation Campaigns from Industry
Example -1 HubSpot
HubSpot, a renowned content marketing platform, offers a devoted section on its site that features a wide range of informative and valuable content assets. Visitors can gain access to this gated content in exchange for their contact info and personal details.
Example -2 Content Marketing Institute
Content Marketing Institute is known for arranging webinar sessions to generate hot leads by engaging high-value prospects. Similarly, you can schedule a webinar and generate leads by asking your audience to fill out a subscription form at the start or end of your webinar session.
Example – 3 Trello
Trello, a project management platform, offers a freemium grade of its software utility to generate hot leads and converts unpaid users into subscribers after further nurturing. Freemium or Free trials of a product or service can help in strengthening trust between a brand and its prospects.
12 Steps Behind a Successful Lead Generation Campaign for Your Company
1. Understanding the Company Business
For a better and targeted approach, it is necessary to understand your business model, budget, objectives, niche, and competitors. You need to plan your lead generation campaign that well serves your company’s objectives in the short and long run. Evaluate your budget and other resources to decide which campaign can get you desired results within a defined time frame and allocated resources. And last but not the least, have a strict check on the ongoing trends in your industry and what your competitors are up to. It’ll further help you in revising your lead generation strategy.
2. Establishing a clear objective
Even if any lead generation strategy fails to attain significant milestones, it ensures a rich learning experience and insights. In the era of data science and statistical modeling, digital marketing campaigns can be well monitored and evaluated for particular KPIs. You just need to set SMART goals for all your lead generation strategies.
Are you clear about the objective that your lead generation campaign is intended to attain? Note down and document different measurable objectives. You can set the following attributes as achievable goals or milestones:
- A particular number of leads
- ROI
- Subscriptions
- Sales
- Sales
- Rate of Conversion
- Time to notable outcomes
3. Identifying Your Target Audience
To whom you are targeting with your lead generation campaign? How precisely can you answer this question?
Identifying your target audience is a challenging task, but each of the following steps will let you know your prospects from a different perspective:
- Determine the demographics of your prospects using tools like Google Analytics
- Determine the demographics of your social media followers
- Investigate your sales team regarding prospects who are more likely to become a customer
- Try to find out the type of prospects your competitors are trying to hook
- Conduct Q/A surveys
- Collect customer feedback
4. Content Planning
Another vital step in your lead generation campaign is to align your objectives with the interest of your audience. You need to target their pain points by offering valuable and relevant content.
The content you produce must cover different content formats or mediums, such as:
- Landing page content
- Product descriptions
- Blog posts or articles
- Social media posts
- Visual content like webinars or podcasts
For long-term and organic growth, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most crucial factors. You need to optimize your content marketing approach and use the right keywords or phrases to engage your prospects. Incorporate keywords in your content for each stage of your lead generation funnel.
5. Creating a Lead Magnet
It is recommended to offer high-value gated content in the form of a lead magnet. By strategically positioning a lead magnet, you ask for prospects’ contact info in exchange for valuable content or any service, such as:
- Download an eBook
- Register for a webinar
- Free product demo
- Subscribe for a giveaway
- Watch a podcast
- Register for a newsletter
- Register for a free course or tutorial
- Request a consultation
- Request a quote
- Get a coupon or discount
6. Content Promotion
It is almost impossible that any lead generation campaign achieves its objectives without a dedicated promotional campaign.
Some potential mediums to promote your content include:
- Email subscribers lists
- Social media accounts or pages
- Blog posts
- Paid advertisement
- Guest Posting, etc.
Consider different lead generation ideas that leverage the potential of paid, earned or owned media. Create a perfect combination of different mediums and approaches that boost the impact of all your lead gen efforts.
Also read about the effective tips to improve your email lead generation campaigns.
7. Lead Generation Optimization
The core purpose of a lead gen campaign is to persuade your prospects to give you their contact information. Determine why they refrain from clicking your CTAs? Therefore CTAs and lead magnets must be impactful and persuasive enough to push your prospects to fill their content info in your CRM forms.
Strategically place your leads forms in the right place and ask for the relevant information. Refrain from asking too much from your prospects. Keep your lead forms limited to email address, name, country, industry, and job role. For instance, imagine yourself as your prospect. Do you prefer providing too much information to any businesses for whatever reason?
8. A/B or Split Testing
In the aforementioned steps, we’ve discussed the content, discount offers, promotion channels, and lead magnets that collectively generate quality lead for your business.
Now, considering that your lead gen campaign continues for a significant duration of time, you need to keep optimizing it throughout your inbound journey. Set different KPIs and performance metrics that let you determine the impact of each strategy & conduct A/B split testing.
A/B split test involves the testing of your different lead generation ideas & campaigns using different variables. These variables may range from email subject lines, blog titles, Advertisement copies, landing page layouts, etc.
9. Performing Lead Scoring
Lead scoring allows your sales & marketing personnel to aim their efforts on the hot leads. Hot leads are the ones having a high potential of becoming a customer. Lead scoring involves attributing values to each lead depending upon its qualification or potential. It allows sales teams to determine when and how to approach a prospect in the lead generation sales funnel.
There are different lead-scoring strategies. It is recommended to get started with the following factors:
- Buyer persona — by how degree the prospect matches your buyer persona
- Prospect’s Behavior — How your prospects engage with your content and business website
- Stage of the sales funnel — The stage of the prospect’s journey in your lead generation funnel
10. Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is intended to push prospects further down the stage of the B2B sales funnel until they become a customer and keep them intact for future sales. Apart from conversion, you need to strengthen your relationship with your prospect by ensuring an engaging after-sales experience. It comes amidst high chances of word-of-mouth marketing for your brand, product, or services.
The most impactful lead nurturing approach involves sending personalized emails to your prospects. There is a couple of best lead nurturing email examples that you can use as inspiration for lead nurturing process. Understand the pain points and the stage of your prospect’s journey to push relevant offers and valuable content for personalized user experience such as:
- Welcome mails
- Promotional offers or discounts
- How-to guides or product tutorials
- Product comparisons
- Customer case studies
- Limited time offers, etc.
11. Implement Chatbot Marketing
Chatbots introduced an evolutionary phase in the marketing domain via automation. As people use their smartphones less often for conversations, chatbots can interact with them in a highly personalized manner to acquire their contact info and help them out in resolving their fundamental problems. You can spare the crucial time and effort of your marketing and sales team by incorporating chatbots into your business or e-commerce site. All in all, chatbots can help you increase sales and conversions, provide customer support, and collect data about your customers.
12. Convert Leads into Sales
Honestly speaking, you cannot generate ROI just by generating leads. This is where the most vital step comes in to make your lead generation efforts fruitful, that is converting leads into sales. Identify MQLs vs. SQLs perfectly to ease the burden on your sales team. Approach prospects with all the necessary steps discussed above according to their stage in your sales funnel and lead them to the bottom of the funnel to lock the deal.
How to Run a Lead Generation Campaign on Facebook?
You can post relevant and informative content regularly on your Facebook page to generate leads from Facebook. Another effective way to generate leads faster is by utilizing Facebook Ads.
Below is the step-by-step guide to setting up an effective Facebook Ad lead gen campaign
- Visit Facebook Ads Manager.
- Click Create at the top left panel.
- Select Lead Gen as your objective and give a title to your lead gen campaign.
- Select the page you want to utilize as your lead page. Read and click agree to accept the terms and conditions.
- Select your favorable audience, ad placement, budget, & schedule.
- Choose the format of your lead ad from different layouts like a single image, video, or slideshow.
- Add a compelling headline, ad copy, and CTA. (A panel on the right shows a final view of your ad once it becomes live).
- Scroll further and select Contact Form. Add your desired form title, introduction, queries, your company’s About & Policies, etc.
- Go to the Settings under your lead form and check that you prefer to generate organic leads. You can also alter the language of communication from here.
- Hit Finish. Review your ad copy from Ads Manager and click Confirm once you are ready to make your Ad live.
Once you’ve made your ad live, you can check leads via customer system integration or after manual download.
How to Run a Lead Generation Campaign on Instagram?
Here is how to run an impactful lead generation campaign on Instagram:
- For Instagram Ads, you need to begin with Meta Ads Manager & choose Instagram as placement by following these steps:
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- Open Ads Manager.
- Click Create.
- Select a marketing objective that supports Instagram as an ad placement.
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- Click Continue
- Submit the details for your Ad copy like your target audience.
- In the placements section, opt for Edit Placements.
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- Select Instagram to make your ads appear only on Instagram.
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- Click Continue.
Now you have Instagram as a placement. Define the budget & schedule for your Ad campaign, its layout, and relevant links. Once you submit these details you’ll be able to preview your Ad copy before making it live. Submit your Ad for approval by the Meta team and it will appear on Instagram once approved.
- Add a compelling and relevant bio that matches your business tone
- Add a CTA button on your Instagram profile or CTA Bar on your posts.
- Use right but fewer hashtags in your Instagram posts
- Upload informative stories like DIY or Hacks
- Collaborate with Instagram influencers in your niche or industry
Lead Generation Campaign as an Agency
If you’re like most businesses, you know that generating leads is essential to your business. But what’s the best way to go about it?
One option is to hire an agency to create and manage a lead generation campaign for you.
Here’s where we come in. ScaleYourBiz can work in close collaboration with your company to set up effective lead generation campaigns to boost conversions, ROI, Ad clicks, and other engagements for your brand or website.
We’re capable of generating and nurturing high-quality leads and retaining them for as long as possible through a list of funnels:
- Advertorials
- Opt-ins
- Sales pages
- eCommerce pages
- Quizzes
We know how to reach your clients across every marketing channel, maximize ROI, and drive business growth, unlike most media buyer companies.
Conclusion
There is no absolute or universal solution to crafting a state-of-the-art lead generation strategy. All lead generation strategies vary from business to business and industry to industry. But the fundamental ideas discussed above are vital for making any lead gen campaign effective in the long run.
You must follow all these practices without taking any one of them for granted for your lead generation campaign. Understand the pain points and interests of your prospects, compare your leads with your buyer persona, offer informative content, and portray yourself as an industry expert.
Do not forget to add value and revamp the relationship at each step. Being authoritative and adding value is crucial to ensure a better ROI and prolonged business growth.
