Developing a Lead Generation Strategy |
09 November 2009
Lead generation is an important aspect of any business development strategy and as more and more consumers go online the internet is proving to be the main tool used to communicate with prospects.
One of the fundamental benefits of the internet is that it allows prospective customers to thoroughly analyse a companies offering and then engage with the company through an online enquiry for example. This unobtrusive style of lead generation has demonstrated excellent results time and again, particularly now that the internet acts as a central point for research by more and more customers. This makes having a comprehensive lead generation strategy a high priority element necessary for the successful development of any website.
‘Developing a Successful Lead Generation Strategy’ looks at ways that a company can maximise online enquiries and effectively turn visitors into prospects and prospects into customers.
- Understand prospects through existing customers and competitors
- Create your lead generation campaign
- Thought leadership marketing
- Collection of relevant information
- Establish a strategy to manage leads through the sales pipeline
Understand prospects through existing customers and competitors
Understanding your prospects is one of the most important aspects of effective online communication, it allows you to talk directly to their needs and provide solutions to their problems. Firstly to provide these solutions you must understand the general characteristics of your target market, some research methods include;
Online Feedback
Generating an understanding of your company’s core offering and competitive advantage can often be best explained by your most recent customers. Provide incentive for new customers to provide feedback on your products and services, this again will reveal what it was they were looking for and what advantage they saw in your offering over the competition.
Online Polls and surveys
Online is an incredibly efficient means of generating information and an online survey is an easy (and very cost effective) tool to gain an in depth understanding of your customers and prospects. Remember to offer an incentive to increase participation rates. This could be something as simple as a complimentary industry report for their feedback or even simple acknowledgement of their effort.
Competitive review
By understanding your competitors you can understand the nature of their offering. This makes competitive analysis a vital step in creating a strong market offering and it will often identify aspects of your offering that you had overlooked for promotion.
You can then reflect what you learn on your website as part of a systematic process to neutralize your competitors’ advantage by highlighting ways your offering is similar to theirs and highlighting your own differentiators. This makes it easier for your customers to compare apples to apples and realize the advantages of your offering over your competitors.
Once again your website is an ideal vehicle for this process as it offers you a free way to test different ideas and measure the extent to which they gain traction with your customers.
Focus groups
Your current customers are your best form of feedback and they will often provide this feedback for free! Identify customers that have had a strong connection with your company and talk to them about what problem it was they saw your company could solve.
You can do so particularly well by creating a section on your website which restricts access only to those select customers, which in addition to making them feeling valued ensures your focus group methods and customers’ feedback is not visible to your competitors.
Create your lead generation campaign
Once you have identified what your customers are looking for you can use your website to communicate directly with them about the various ways your offering is a perfect match for their needs. To ensure your lead generation campaign is a resounding success you must have a clear understanding of your core offering, competitive advantage, target market and customer demographics.
When communicating your core lead generation messages through a marketing campaign your website can be a very effective tool in reaching out to all identified prospects allowing them timely access to information about your offering. Some of the tools you can use to communicate with prospects include;
- Meaningful and season-relevant promotions
- Frequently updated blogs and articles relevant to your industry
- Easily accessible case studies and success stories
- Interesting and information rich emails and newsletters
With a potentially large amount of information to showcase to your prospects and a limited space to do that in, a new web technology ideally suited to the job of lead generation is random serving of content.
Random content serving technology allows you to take a potentially large pool of promotional buttons or banners for example and randomly serve a few every time a prospect visits your website. For example if you can only effectively display 2 promotional panels but have 6 messages your prospects will see a random selection each time. This makes more likely for the prospect to encounter exactly the right ‘call to action’ for them to initiate contact with you and become one of your leads. These ‘calls to action’ can also be scheduled to only display at specific times of the year when they are most relevant to the season and are automatically disabled when they are no longer relevant.
Requesting details
Due to the wide spread increase in unsolicited email and poorly targeted online marketing campaigns prospects are becoming increasingly wary about sharing their details. As internet marketers we can all agree with their concern but there are methods that you can adopt to ensure that your prospects feel comfortable enquiring through your site.
Allowing the prospect to opt into email newsletters for example helps your prospects exercise their option to not receive your promotional emails. Similarly, if you provide an online form for a specific purpose like enquiring about a product or service, reassure the prospect that their details will be used only to deal with their enquiry and will not be added to any promotional or direct marketing lists unless they choose to.
Thought leadership marketing
A great way to increase your online enquiries is to give something away in exchange for prospects details. The internet has created a new form of marketing known as thought leadership marketing. This is where experienced professionals express their views and opinions on various issues within you industry then offer this information as a report to potential customers in exchange for their details. As the number one use of the internet is research this has become an incredibly valuable tool and is turning visitors into prospects.
Other things that you can give away include a free consultation, market reports, business health checks or complimentary demonstrations. You need to create a sense of value to encourage a prospect to enquire through your site. Try it on your site and measure the results over time and with no cost attached to experimenting with different techniques you can put this powerful tool to work for you.
Collection of relevant information
When collecting prospects details ensure that you have different forms for different offers, solutions or products. This will allow you to have a clear understanding of the nature of the enquiry and give you the ability to save their details in the relevant segment of your data base. It will also enable you to measure the success of each ‘call out’ and assess the success of your lead generation campaign.
Ensure that when creating your form you carefully choose its fields to make it as easy as possible for the prospect to fill it in. Requesting minimal but valuable information will increase the number of overall enquires and decreases the dropout rate of prospects who abandon the process of filling in an enquiry form before submitting it back to you.
By fostering this confidence on the part of your prospects that their information will be used in accordance with their wishes and honoring that commitment you optimize your chances of turning each lead into a viable prospect and populate your sales pipeline.
Establish a strategy to manage leads through the sales pipeline
When you are at the stage where your lead generation strategy has yielded the hoped for results and delivered prospective customers details, what do you do with them? Your tailored form will identify to you what specific product, solution or offering they are interested in and you can now hand this lead on to the sales team, on a silver platter!
You do not need to alter your normal sales process in any way and can proceed towards converting each opportunity as your sales team normally would. You can add value to the sales process by using your website to communicate quotes and estimates, additional information, specifications or drafts for example using an extranet. With the ability to customize information on a customer by customer basis, you can dramatically improve engagement with your prospects and turn them into loyal repeat customers.
Conclusion
The key to a successful lead generation campaign is to get to know your prospects and create a lead generation campaign that appeals to this target market. Utilise the available online tools to increase the quantity and quality of enquiries and shepherd them through your sales pipeline and beyond.
This makes it critical to use a knowledgeable provider who will not only help you generate leads but pull them through your sales pipeline. Talk to us about how Online Now will help you generate more opportunities for your company online.
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