Getting personal information is an important part of generating leads. The goal is to create a campaign that encourages website visitors to provide personal information (usually in the form of an email address or phone number) in exchange for something from you. A lead generation campaign usually involves you having a main offer of valuable content, information, research, a free trial, a product, or something else they might want or need.
Once you have their information, you can reach out to that person again and nurture them in the hopes that they will one day become a customer.
How to Run a Successful Lead Generation Campaign
When running a successful lead generation campaign, the following steps can help you maximize your resources.
- Establish a clear objective: How many leads do you need? What’s your cost-per-lead goal? In what timeframe do you need to be successful?
- Research your audience: Who is the best customer for your business? Are you testing to see if you can expand this pool?
- Plan your content: Does your consumer want content? A free trial? A discount or offer of some type?
- Create an offer: Your offer should be compelling and provide value. It needs to be something a visitor will give their email address for and convince them that your paid offerings are worth it.
- Promote your content: Be strategic about the channels you choose, where you spend your budget and where your campaign performs best.
- Optimize your lead capture: Measure as you go. Develop key performance indicators (KPIs) that allow you to understand what’s working so you can tweak to make your campaign more effective over time.
- Test: If something isn’t working, try something new.
- Lead score: Not all leads are created equal. Develop a mechanism to know who is worth nurturing and following up with.
- Nurture: Keep the relationship warm with the leads you know are valuable to you. By nurturing your leads, you have a greater potential to turn leads into customers.
Defining Your Target Audience to Attract Leads
Your first step is to determine your audience. Who is your lead generation campaign targeting? How specifically can you answer this question? It’s tempting to generalize and choose large audiences, like women, car buyers or online shoppers.
However, these answers are too generic and don’t tell you much about the specific pain points that motivate your target audience. The more you understand your prospective buyers, the better you can zero-in on their wants and needs.
Audience research is a challenge to master, but each of the following will get you started:
- Examine the demographics of your website visitors with Google Analytics.
- Examine the demographics of your social followers.
- Probe the sales team for their take on who buys your products and services.
- Try to ascertain what types of buyers your competitors target.
- Run surveys.
- Conduct customer interviews.
Develop a Compelling Value Proposition
Your lead magnet is the main offer in exchange for the personal information that gets a visitor into your funnel. You must provide compelling value to turn a visitor into a lead.
Use the research you’ve gathered about your target audience to determine what value will work best for them. Some of the lead magnets you might consider include:
- Download an information asset.
- Register for an event.
- Try a product.
- Enter a contest or giveaway.
- Subscribe to a newsletter.
- Sign up for a free mini-course or challenge.
- Complete a survey or assessment.
- Request a demonstration.
- Request a consultation.
- Request a quote.
- Get a coupon or discount.
Once a visitor fills out the form to get the lead magnet, it’s up to you to deliver high value, showing that you are worth their hard-earned dollars.
Selecting the Right Channels for Your Lead Generation Campaign
Once you have a compelling offer, you need to promote it through various channels.
Some possible channels for promotion include:
- Your own email lists.
- Organic social media channels.
- Blog posts.
- Paid advertising in the form of:
- Social media.
- Native advertising.
- Search advertising.
- Display advertising.
- PPC campaigns.
- Guest articles.
- PR activity and earned media.
- Events, such as webinars or a summit.
Will your campaign include pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising? Are you also considering the longer-term play involving organic search? In both cases, keyword research is important.
For organic search, search engine optimization (SEO) is an important factor, too. Consider both free and paid keyword research tools. If you plan to put a sizable stack of chips down on either PPC or SEO, consider seeking consultations from search engine marketing professionals.
Taboola is a powerful recommendation engine that powers the promotion of content, products, articles and much more for advertisers on the open web. It’s a great way to boost the number of leads in your next content marketing campaign.
Review the many lead generation strategies that take advantage of the power of paid, earned and owned media. Devise a media mix that may work for your campaign.
Campaign Optimization Tools
Campaign optimization tools include various items that help you capture leads more efficiently. Tools like landing pages, popups and chat can help you optimize your funnel.
Taboola offers a number of tools that can help you manage the process. Other tools can also help you analyze your results and understand your target audience. Some of these tools include:
- Sprinklr: Helps you manage posts and integrates with different channels to provide insight.
- Google Search Console: Get an idea of what drives organic traffic to your website, as well as common terms that get people to your page.
- Optmyzr: Designed to help with paid search, helping you determine where to put your money for more effective ROI.
- SEMrush: Find keywords and understand conversion rates. You can also do competitor research.
- AdEspresso: This tool can help with Facebook Ads and even includes an ad gallery to help you manage your paid campaigns for lead generation.
- Google URL Builder: Use this to add parameters to your target URL for the purpose of making sure you know where traffic is coming from.
Campaign optimization isn’t just about finding a few tools, though. You also need to make sure you’re optimizing as you learn new information. You can do this by closely examining key metrics that reflect the efficacy of each component and run A/B split tests to compare different iterations.
Split testing is the process of testing elements of your campaign by creating variants, including email subject lines, headlines, copy, CTAs, page design, and ad targeting. Compare to see which version of each component gets the best results.
Creating Engaging Content That Converts Visitors Into Leads
Once a visitor arrives on your page, you need to convert them to a lead. This means creating compelling copy that encourages them to take the desired action. If you want to create copy that converts, consider the following:
- Understand your visitors’ pain points and offer them solutions to those issues.
- Use relatable and relevant language. You should understand the backgrounds of your visitors and know how to speak to them in a way that resonates.
- Know the needs and expectations of your visitors and address them. Your campaign should have a specific target. The needs of a 55-year-old approaching retirement are different from those of a 25-year-old hoping to buy their first home.
- Get a feel for the buying cycle of your visitors and where they are on the journey so your copy addresses where they’re at.
- Include information visitors need to make an informed decision and show how making that decision will improve their lives in the area of the pain point you’re addressing.
Automate
Automation is increasingly a major part of lead generation. With the help of automation, it’s possible to streamline the process. Plus, you get data delivered directly to you, in the form of reports.
With the help of automation, you can create lead generation campaigns, launch them and automatically collect data and generate reports. Setting up automated processes can take some time, but once you get a system in place, your ROI is much higher, given you have an attribution model in place.
On top of that, the automated process means that you can tweak your campaign more easily. When you discover what works, you can make changes quickly to take advantage of this new information.
Measuring Success: Key Metrics and KPIs to Track
Do you know what you want your lead generation campaign to achieve? Establish and document measurable goals. These common objectives can help you figure out which key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to focus on:
- A specific number of leads
- Revenue per lead
- Subscribers
- Registrants
- Trials
- Sales
- Conversion rate
By measuring these items, you can get an idea of how successful your campaign is, and see whether you’re making progress.
Another way to track performance involves lead scoring. Lead scoring helps your marketing and sales team focus on the leads most likely to become paying customers. Lead scoring assigns values to the quality of each lead to help sales teams identify when and how to approach the buyer.
There are a variety of lead-scoring models and ways to put them in play. A good model for getting started is to focus on criteria including:
- Fit: The degree to which the prospect fits your buyer persona(s).
- Behavior: How the prospect has interacted with your content and brand.
- Buying stage: Where the prospect is in your sales funnel.
This information can help you identify the best leads and focus on them to drive revenue.
Key Takeaways
Even if every lead generation campaign is not a success, every campaign is a learning experience. Welcome to the scientific age of digital marketing, where the true performers measure and monitor everything. Creating a thoughtful campaign and using the tools at your disposal to learn and adjust can increase the ROI on your lead generation.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the goal of a lead generation campaign?
Lead generation is designed to gain the attention of potential customers. You get them to take an action that provides you with information you can use to nurture them into buying something later.
What is an example of a lead generation campaign?
An example of a lead generation campaign might be someone with a course offering a free webinar on a specific topic. Once signed up for the free webinar, the business can put them into an email automation that keeps in touch with them in the hopes that they will buy a course.
