What is a lead generation campaign? A lead generation campaign is a time-sensitive marketing campaign that directs leads to a single point of contact. This strategy works by capturing qualified leads who are interested in your product or service. The result is aspiring clients that include your company in their shortlist of potential solutions to their problems.
In the marketing world, you’ll read a lot about “lead generation campaigns.” Whether it be marketing literature or blog posts, these terms are used quite a bit. If you’re new to lead generation, you may be wondering what one is and why so many people talk about them. What is a lead generation campaign exactly?
One of the main objectives of running a successful lead generation campaign (and one of the most important) is to do just that, generate leads. The campaign process involves classifying prospective customers and qualifying their probability to buy in advance of making a sales call. The purpose of lead generation can vary from driving sales leads to something like increasing webinar registrations, but in the end they have the same goal and that is to get prospects to raise their hands. Before we go into how to build a successful lead generation campaign, we need to understand a few basic terms.
A lead generating website: As the name implies, lead generating websites are meant to generate and nurture new business leads. There are variations on the types of leads a website might be looking for. For instance, one site may be focused on recruiting where another may be more interested in generating new business teaming partners.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System: CRM systems are intended to collect information on prospects. The information you can gather in a CRM on your contacts can include their website, email, phone number, mailing address, content downloads and open opportunities you may have with them. Your firm can customize your CRM based on the information your firm needs to qualify your leads.
A Content Marketing Strategy: A strategic plan focused on generating and distributing educational content to your target audience on a consistent basis. An end goal of your strategy could be to drive your audience through the content funnel, gaining their trust, having them view you as the expert, and then contact you when they are ready to buy.
A Content Calendar: A resource tool that marketing teams can use to plan all content marketing activity for both traditional and online marketing. The benefit of using a content calendar is being able to visualize and strategize how your content is distributed.
Basic Terms of a Lead Generation Campaign
Lead: A prospect that has some level of potential in becoming a client. The individual usually shows interests and provides his/her information to your firm.
Qualified Lead: A prospect that meets all of your firm’s qualifications and criteria necessary to be considered more likely to become a client.
Lead Generation: The initiation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a your firm.
Lead Generation Campaign: The process of capturing and simulating interest in a service or product for the purpose of developing leads. This includes a strategy using a particular media source and an offer to create inbound leads.
Nurturing: Some leads qualify early on, while others may take more time. Many of your leads will need some nurturing through frequent communication until they are ready to be contacted by someone from your business development team.
Hard Offer: This is typically an offer for a service or product that usually requires the prospect to act immediately. Often times these offers are limited to a few people or may have an expiration date.
Soft Offer: This type of offer usually doesn’t require an immediate response. An example of a soft offer is an email newsletter subscription.
Lead Capture: The use of marketing automation systems, allowing marketers to gather contact information from web forms, landing pages and email campaigns.
Landing Pages: A page that a visitor can land at or arrive on in response to clicking on a link or offer.
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Building Your Lead Generation Campaign
Imagine this scenario for a moment; you are at home when suddenly you receive a phone call from a local moving company. Earlier that day you filled out a form on their website. You input your name, phone number, zip code and services you are interested in. While on the website you also downloaded a guide on how to get ready for your move. In doing so, this local moving company generated a new lead, and that lead is you. With the information captured, they are now able to contact you with further value and information. That is how the lead generation process takes place.
The process begins with several main components. These components are necessary in order to maximize the number of qualified leads that you receive. Below are a few components to consider:
Generating Leads Through a Successful Plan
By understanding the basic terms and having all of the components that make up an online lead generation campaign, you can then start to develop your plan by going through these 5 steps. It’s important to know that your process will vary depending on your objective, target audience and use of media.
1. Set your campaign objective: Your objective can vary based on the outcome that you want to achieve. You may want to start off by defining your goal by either the number of leads expected or revenue per lead. These are just a few examples of what your campaign objective could possibly be. In order to better define your objective you may want to ask yourself the following questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- How will you reach them?
- What do you want them to do?
- What call to action do you want to offer them?
- What are you going to offer them?
- How will you follow-up?
- When will you will follow-up?
- Who will follow-up?
- What will you do or what will you ask when you follow-up?
- How will you record and report on the results of the lead?
- Who will you report these results to?
- When will you evaluate your lead generation efforts?
- What will you consider a success?
2. Evaluate and select your campaign target: This may come from your current list of contacts that you have or you may want to focus on an entirely new target group for your lead generation campaign. Either way, make sure you have identified who those groups are and what their pain points and issues might be that your firm can answer with content.
3. Determine your media outlet: While there are may different media outlets ranging from email marketing to eBooks and guides, our research has shown that firms generating more than 60% of their leads online are 2x more profitable than their competitors. Therefore, choosing an email campaign or holding a webinar would be an example of a great strategy for generating more online leads
4. Develop an offer: To reiterate, a lead is a prospective client who has peaked interested in your firm’s product or service. In order to identify these prospects in your list of contacts, you may want to send out an offer. This could be a free download to a guide, registration for a free webinar, etc. When the lead responds to your offer, their information is captured. They are then pulled into your lead generation campaign where you will continue to nurture your leads until they are ready to close a deal.
There are several main mechanics to creating an offer. First you must create a landing page where a prospect lands for a distinct purpose. This is usually prompted by an offer and a call-to-action in which the prospect is prompted to fill out a form. Your hard or soft offer respondents become, as what we at Hinge like to call, a “new hot lead.” There are several different places you can promote these offers such as on a blog, on a webpage, on social media, in an email…these are just to name a few.
5. Create a communications strategy process: This includes what your follow-up process is going to look like. Strategizing how you will respond to your leads, what kinds of material will you share, who will contact them, and finally defining what your proposals will look like as well.
Looking at all the elements of a successful lead generation campaign can make your head spin a bit. So in conclusion, make sure your campaign includes a clear understanding of your target market, multiple media channels to capture and narrow down your leads, compelling offers, and a strong strategy that tracks performance. If you have all of these then you are good to go!
7. Optimize Your Website to Promote Your Lead Magnet
To generate more leads, make sure website visitors can easily find your lead magnet. Design on-site funnels that segment your audience and drive them toward the lead magnet most likely to resonate with their needs and interests. Accomplish this by promoting lead magnets around your site.
- Highlight it as the primary homepage call to action.
- Promote relevant lead magnets at the end of blog posts and pages.
- Use a lead generation pop-up.
- Create a resource library filled with gated content.
- Add a lead gen hello bar (that sits at the top or bottom of your site).
- Promote your lead magnet in the sidebar.
Example: Podio, a project management tool, doesn’t waste time trying to guide website visitors to their lead magnet. They immediately drive users into their free trial using the primary hero section of their homepage.
8. Optimize Your Social Profiles to Promote Your Lead Magnet
When you have a valuable lead magnet, make sure your social followers know about it. Highlight it on social networks so that when users engage with you, they see your offer and the clear next step toward working with you. Promote your lead magnet in hero images on profile pages. Also, leverage call-to-action buttons by adding links to your lead magnet instead of driving users to your homepage.
Example: Leadership coach and author Michael Hyatt uses his Facebook page for lead generation marketing. His cover image promotes his lead magnet and drives page visitors directly toward his free offer.
9. Pay to Promote Your Business on Social Media
Use paid social ads as one of your lead generation strategies. Leverage Facebook’s and Instagram’s powerful targeting options to show ads to the people most likely to be interested in your products or services. You can target people on macro levels (using demographic segmentation) or micro levels (using behavior and psychographic segmentation), allowing you to connect with a very specific audience.
Example: Conversocial, a social media customer care tool, uses paid Instagram ads to drive target prospects to their gated, in-depth social media guides and reports.
10. Target Top-of-Funnel Keywords
To attract interested prospects and drive them toward your lead magnets, create a plan to target the terms they search for. Do keyword research to discover phrases your ideal prospects search for at the top of the purchase funnel. Then, target those keywords in multiple ways.
- Create evergreen content optimized for the target terms.
- Develop an on-site blog strategy around the target keywords.
- Target the terms in pay-per-click marketing.
- Guest blog on sites that have a high share of voice for the target terms.
Be sure to follow best practices for SEO to boost your chances of showing up on page one. The more visible you are in search, the more interest and traffic you’ll generate from potential leads.
Example: SmartAsset, a personal finance tech company, targeted a top-of-funnel term they knew their target audience was searching for. They created useful, valuable content around the topic, which helped them rank for the term.
11. Retarget People Who Have Engaged With Your Brand
If prospects don’t convert during their first interaction with your brand, keep the faith. Use retargeting to reconnect with audiences who have engaged with your brand but failed to take the next step.
Retargeting allows you to show ads (through Google display or social ads) to people who engage with your brand’s website or social pages. Because customers may need to see your brand a few times before they convert, retargeting is a strategic way to continue guiding customers down the purchase funnel.
Example: You’ve seen retargeting in action if you’ve ever visited a website and then saw an ad for the same brand a few hours later. Here’s an example from Shopify on Facebook. Retargeted ads look just like normal ads, but they only target audiences who have already engaged the brand in some way.
12. Create a Referral Rewards System
Create a referral rewards system where your customers bring leads to you in exchange for a benefit or discount. Customers value and trust recommendations from their friends, so encouraging existing customers to spread the word about your brand can be a powerful way to fill your lead funnel.
Example: Sunglasses company Shady Rays gets their current customers to generate leads by asking them to provide an email address of someone they think will like their brand. In exchange, Shady Rays gives the existing customer $15 if the lead makes a purchase.
CONCLUSION
There are several definitions of a lead generation campaign. While there is no industry standard definition, from what I’ve gathered one definition states that a lead generation campaign is any set of marketing activities designed to collect and distribute leads for marketing automation. I’ve personally observed lead generation campaigns in the areas of content marketing and telemarketing, although the principles are the same for both areas.
Lead generation campaigns strive to generate high-quality leads for your business. There are a number of different approaches you can take when running a lead generation campaign, but all center on one key goal: building your “list” and getting prospects emailing you.