With marketing, your mission is a simple one: you want a steady stream of genuine leads that have a realistic chance of converting into sales. This is precisely why 91% of marketers say lead generation is their top goal. Master the fundamentals of lead generation strategies, and you’re well on the way to fulfilling that mission.
So who should you target? Once captured, how do you qualify and nurture those all-important leads? Which channels and content forms tend to deliver the best value for money? Explore our lead generation guide for hints and tips on all of this.
Importance of Lead Generation
As mentioned above, the main mission of any marketing activity is to attract potential customers. However, lead generation activity isn’t actually to generate sales. Instead, it’s to gather the information of your audience in order to nurture these leads to turn them into customers. This is done by creating a resource that your audience will give you their data in exchange for, such as their email address to sign up for your newsletter.
By creating useful and engaging content for your target audience, you’re able to consistently reach new audiences, nurturing the leads to turn them into customers.
Organic marketing features prominently in lead generation, which is good news if your budget is limited. Most digital ad campaigns require continuous budget allocation to stay effective. By contrast, if you create a whitepaper, you only pay for initial creation and publication. If it starts to resonate with your audience, picking up traffic, shares, and eventual leads, it can pay for itself over and over again. The trick is creating something of worth.
This also can help you with boosting your brand awareness. By creating a piece of content, such as a whitepaper, report, or podcast, your brand is being pushed to more audiences. This can increase your visibility and recognition, which can naturally lead to more sales and conversions.
Lead Generation Strategies
Now we know why lead generation activities are so important for both business and branding, we can look into some of the strategies that you can use to start generating your own leads.
Identify your target audience
Your aim is to reach out to the right people (i.e. those who are likely to convert) at the right time, and in the right way. You need clarity on precisely who it is you are trying to reach. One of the best ways of achieving this is by drawing up a buyer persona — a hypothetical representation of your ideal lead. Key elements of a buyer persona usually include the following:
- Demographics: Age, gender, location, education level.
- Job role: This is essential in B2B spheres, and includes factors such as the job title, company size, and decision-making power.
- Pain points: What problems they are looking to solve.
- Goals and motivations: What they are trying to achieve, and what factors influence their buying decisions.
- Budget: How much they are able to spend.
- Communication preferences: The digital and physical channels they use to access information, the devices they use to access it, and the formats they prefer (articles, video, audio etc).
- Objections: Any barriers that may stop them completing a purchase.
Create and publish useful content
The research you did to create your buyer persona should tell you what broad areas of information are likely to attract your audience. Now, you should know who your potential leads are, what problems they need to solve, and what motivates them. Your next job is to create marketing material that is likely to attract, engage, and ultimately convert that audience.
Resist the temptation to be too salesy — remember, the idea is to gather lead information, not sell your product.
The type of content you create is up to you, as long as it’s helpful and useful for your audience. Formats you might consider include:
- Research articles, ebooks, and whitepapers
- Podcasts
- Interactive tools
- Videos and webinars
- Free samples and trials
These types of content should, ideally, be as in-depth as possible, with data and insights that are unique to your brand. Whitepapers, for example, are long-form documents, often diving into detail on specific topics with references to unique data from surveys or interviews. For this reason, they’ve long been a popular option for lead generation strategists. In fact, research has shown that 50% of B2B buyers find whitepapers to be an appealing content format, so you should consider whitepapers for your lead generation strategy.
The best whitepapers do not deliver a sales pitch. Instead, they offer your company the chance to showcase your authority and knowledge on a particular issue. Best of all, if a potential lead supplies their contact details to access a white paper (something they are often very willing to do), you can use this as a springboard for further dialogue and lead nurturing. The continued popularity of this content format demonstrates that when it comes to lead generation strategies, tried-and-tested methods are often the best.
Another popular choice is podcasts — and for good reason. Over the last few years, the podcast format has become a massively popular way of consuming information, which is exactly why it deserves to be on your radar. A recent survey of 511 senior business professionals found that 75% of B2B decision-makers are listening to podcasts to learn.
Effective lead generation strategies have always involved reaching out to prospects in ways they’re familiar with, and likely to engage with. If you can create or co-host a podcast series — with a deep-dive into the issues that are on the minds of your potential buyers — you’re on the way to effectively engaging with leads.
Appear in front of your target audience
You’ve established who your leads are and the type of content you’re going to produce. Next, it’s a matter of deciding where and how you are going to engage with them. The research you carried out to develop your buyer personas should give you an indication of the channels most favoured by potential leads. For maximum reach, think about a multi-channel approach where your content is appearing in front of as many people as possible.
To do this, you should be looking for ways to repurpose your content, and publishing it on various platforms, in various formats.
For example, if your lead generation activity is a podcast, you could film the episode and use the video to create video and audio snippets to publish across social media. A short, 30-second clip of your podcast could be posted on social media, such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, or LinkedIn, and you could post a few clips from a single episode.
You might also want to dig deeper into a specific section of your podcast with an accompanying blog post to be sent to your existing newsletter subscribers, which provides further insights and data. Be creative with repurposing and reposting your content — you want to try and get as much content as possible from each lead generation format you choose, in order to maximise your reach.
Capture your leads
Once you’ve captured your audience’s attention, you then need to capture their leads. This could be asking for email addresses in order to download the whitepaper, listen to an entire podcast episode, or read a full blog post.
By gaining their contact details, you’re able to nurture them into the next stage of the buyer funnel.
Remember, potential leads are only going to give their information if they can see the value of doing it. With this in mind, try to make your gated content offering as relevant and enticing as possible. For instance, your potential lead has just read your blog post relating to a new IoT threat. So your gated offering following on from this might be an invite for them to download a whitepaper on further IoT cybersecurity risks every business owner should know about.
You should also avoid using the gated content access form as a general data harvesting exercise. At the early stages of the buyer journey, you don’t need their business address and telephone number — just a name, email, and job title will do.
Nurture and convert MQLs to SQLs
Once you have your leads, you then need to qualify them. This means researching them to see if they fit within the BANT framework:
- Budget
- Authority
- Need
- Time
If the lead fits within all these factors — they have a need for your service, the budget and authority to make a purchase, and within a short timeframe — they officially meet the definition of a marketing qualified lead (MQL).
Once you have this list of qualified leads, you can move to the next stage of your strategy — the delicate balancing act of nurturing your lead to turn MQLs into SQLs.
In order to do this, you need to reach out to the leads, make connections, and build relationships, ensuring that you’re always offering something of value. Once you’ve built a rapport with the lead, and you’re satisfied the lead meets the SQL criteria, they can be passed over to sales for more personalised engagement, such as a discovery call, needs assessment, and demo.
Retain and upsell
It’s well-known that retaining and upselling to existing customers is significantly less costly than acquiring new ones. Research has shown that customer acquisition can cost as much as 25 times more than customer retention, which is why your engagement strategies should involve the nurturing of customers even after they have converted.
Areas to focus on here include tutorials and guides to ensure customers get value from your product quickly, useful and relevant advice regarding potential add-ons, advanced tips, case studies, and any feature updates.
Outsource Lead Generation for Streamlined Processes
When it comes to making the most of your lead generation strategies, never underestimate the potential of easy wins — especially when it comes to rapidly expanding your reach, and exploring rich pools of potential new customers.
For instance, what if you could reach a ready-made audience of potentially hundreds of thousands of tech buyers and business decision-makers, the vast majority of whom are looking for new ways to solve their biggest business problems? This is precisely what EM360Tech can offer.
With deep expertise in thought leadership marketing and analyst-led podcasts, we offer multiple opportunities to elevate your lead generation strategies, resulting in more leads that actually convert.
To discover what’s possible for your brand, get in touch today.