5 Steps to Identify Prospective Leads and Drive Sales to Generate More Revenue
Forest Gump famously stated, “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.” And I don’t know about you, but I prefer to know that my chocolates are going to be filled with gooey sea salt caramel---not that gross orange fluff.
The goal of running a generic lead generation campaign is plain and simple: identify prospective buyers. But a successful lead generation campaign is a few steps ahead. Aside from identifying prospects, your lead generation campaign will set an objective by targeting a specific audience and nurture their lead until they have been converted into a driven sale.
By utilizing these five steps, your marketing campaign will be able to precisely pluck the sea salt caramels from the box and swiftly deliver them to the sales development team.
The key here is to identify which leads are optimal for generating the most revenue and which ones are well, orange fluff.
What Goes into A Successful Lead Generation Campaign?
To understand the components that make up a campaign, we should first clarify some essential terms:
- Leads: This is a prospect; in other words, this person has the potential to become a client. They’ve expressed an interest in your organization and provided information to your company. A lead has opened a channel of communication to you. Many lead generation campaigns think all leads are the same, but we can classify the type of lead by their likelihood of purchasing from you.
- Marketing Qualified Lead: This is a lead where the contact has engaged with your marketing team, possibly through an email/newsletter or social media content but is not ready for a sales call yet. They may have clicked on your website or filled out a landing page form, but no moves have been made, yet.
- Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): These are contacts that have engaged on your website, expressed interest in your products, and are most likely to buy from you. Schedule the sales call!
- Product/Service Qualified Leads (PQL): These are contacts that have used your trial product and/or service and are ready to buy. These leads are different from regular qualified leads because they’ve already experienced what you have to offer. Schedule the sales call!
- Customer Relationship Management System (CRM): These systems collect data on your leads. The information you collect on your contacts can include their phone number, email, website links, content they’ve downloaded, and opportunities. This is customizable based on your objectives and which information is most useful.
- Content Marketing Strategies: Content is a major channel that you can use to distribute information to your target audience. Having a strategy to generate and distribute content to your prospects is a necessary step to building a successful lead generation campaign. Content will help you earn the trust of your lead, allowing you to educate them on your solutions so they can confidently contact you when they’re ready to purchase.
- Nurturing: Some leads may not qualify right away, and a successful campaign will leave room to nurture the leads that require more frequent communication until they’re ready for more committed action.
- Hard Offer: Sometimes an offer that’s made requires an immediate response. For example, an offer may include a discount but with a firm expiration date.
- Soft Offer: These offers do not require an immediate response. Examples of a soft offer include email subscriptions or newsletters.
- Lead Capture: This is the process by which you generate leads. Often times marketers will use a marketing automation system that gathers information from website clicks, landing pages and emails.
- Landing Pages: Visitors to your website will arrive at this page by clicking on a link or offer. These pages are useful when capturing leads and can be used to harvest information about the visitor.
With these terms in mind, let’s discuss the Lead Generation Process:
How do these terms apply in practice?
- Strangers: A stranger discovers your business via one of your marketing channels, whether it be social media, blog posts, or websites. Something you’ve done has attracted their interest in learning more about what you have to offer.
- Visitors: While on your website, social media, or blog, they click on a link, such as an image, or form, called a call-to-action (CTA). These links encourage the visitor to take some sort of action on your website, like moving to a new page to find more information.
- Leads: These links send your visitor to a landing page, which as previously mentioned allows the visitor to provide information in exchange for offers. This is where a mere visitor transforms into a lead and you can send them offers via email engagements, or inform them about new products via newsletter, blog posts, or social media. And boom! You’ve captured a new lead.
Now that we know the process of generating leads, how can we curate the best campaign for lead generation?
After all, today’s world is full of orange fluff, how can we prioritize the leads that are sure to become our clients?
- Set your objective:
This is where you define the goals for your campaign. Defining your goal by the expected number of leads or revenue per lead is a good starting spot. By asking yourself the following questions, you can set clear goals for your team:
- Who is your target audience?
- How will you reach them?
- What do you want from them?
- What are you going to offer them?
- How and when will you follow up?
- How will you record and report the results of each lead?
- Who will see these reports?
- What will be considered a success?
By asking yourself these questions and defining these parameters, you can easily visualize your campaign making the most progress. With these questions answered, you have the first step completed.
See our Case Study! Eightbar increases opportunities by 65% with IQConvert
- Find your campaign targets
How can you set an accurate target for your campaign? Your target may be set from your current list of contacts or customers, or maybe you may want to focus on an entirely new target group. Whatever works best for you, you want to ensure these targets are defined.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What issues does this target group have?
- What are their pain points?
- Where they spend their time online
- How can you give it to them?
You can interview your current clients to learn their similarities like:
- Their background
- Their goals
- Where they spend their time online
- How they choose an agency
From there, you can identify their differences and problems. A successful lead generation campaign will learn how to bridge the gap between your client’s similarities and their differences.
Download our eBook: The Ultimate Guide to Modern Demand Gen - Determine media outlet and develop engaging media:
This is where it gets good. The bread and butter of your campaign. In any successful lead generation campaign, there must be unique and informative content. In the third step of building your campaign, ask yourself these questions:
- How do our current clients best receive our content? (email marketing, newsletters, blog posts, social media, etc.)
- How can my content stand out from our competitors? (is your content personalized, engaging, and informative?)
Once you understand the basics of your current content outlet, how your clients respond, and how you can improve, you’re ready to create compelling content for your leads. If this is an area where your team struggles the most, you may want to revamp your future media outlets.
How can you make blog posts more informative?
- Is your post clear and concise? Straight to the point?
- Do you have external links, promoting your offers, and directly sourcing valuable information?
- Is it specifically tailored to your audience?
- How they choose an agency
Are Your Socials Up To Date?
Don’t underestimate the power of LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram! These tools are underutilized, but they easily guide followers to take actionable steps to contact you. With these social media apps, generating leads has never been more direct.
Additionally, audio resources such as podcasts and other online interviews give your clients and prospective leads an inside look as to what your brand has to offer. Not only that, but podcasts and videos are a more modern approach to promoting solutions and resources to your clients.
Check out PharosIQ’s podcast hosted by CEO Chris Rack! B2Boring
Send More Emails!
Email marketing is a tried-and-true way to get in touch with clients. Email is a great way to contact people who are already aware of your brand. And since they’re already subscribed, it’s much easier to get them to act. This is the best place to send out the latest information about your products and offer discounts.
For some brands, using online sources aren’t necessarily the best way to meet new clients. In the digital age, sometimes the best way to stick out from the crowd is to be in-person! Don’t be afraid to organize industry events or collaborate with other businesses/creators. The whole point of having a successful lead generation campaign is to build your community. By having in-person networking opportunities, you can easily nurture new contacts into qualified leads.
Business partnerships are another great way to generate new leads based on your current clients and goal objective. You can use joint content strategies and promotional materials to reach more prospective leads in your target audience.
Understanding the power of media content in generating + driving new leads is essential to a successful lead generation campaign. Finding the correct combination of these outlets will ensure your box of chocolates is full.
Check out this DemandGen Infographic on the effectiveness of email marketing on generating leads! - Develop An Offer:
Check out this DemandGen Infographic on the effectiveness of email marketing on generating leads!
Developing an offer is the moment of truth when prospecting leads. In step 4 of your campaign, you will send out an offer. This could be a free download to an eBook or guide, or it could be a free webinar. You must create a landing page, which calls your prospective lead to fill out a form. These links may come from blog posts, webpages, or virtually any media content. And as mentioned above, the opportunities are endless here.
- Swift Communication Strategies:
In step 5, we answer the questions, what does the follow up process look like? How will you respond to your leads, what will you share with them? What will your proposals look like? To make a qualifying lead, we must nurture it via effective communication. Having a swift communication strategy is what takes a qualifying lead to an actual client. When looking back at the lead generation process, this moves the client to the last step: delight.
This post by Martech talks about more proven strategies!
At the end of the day, the purpose of a successful lead generation campaign is to optimize new leads through these five key strategies.
To reiterate, a marketing campaign begins by defining a target market. Through compelling content like blog posts, webinars, and social media, you can nurture a lead further down the marketing funnel. From there, your team can offer a prospect promotional offers and subscriptions to create more sales qualified leads. And finally, through consistent communication efforts, a qualified lead becomes a dedicated client.
Contact PharosIQ for more resources on generating leads that convert using signals that matter.
