Lead Generation 101: creating successful lead gen campaigns
Time to read: 5 minutes
The days of cold calling and door knocking to generate leads are dwindling as organisations deploy increasingly sophisticated ways to find new customers. Often, that means attracting them within digital spaces.
Of course, digital marketing brings with it many opportunities for automation, collaboration and efficiency. Salesforce customers have seen a 27% reduction in customer acquisition costs, and 29% increase in sales productivity.*
In this article, we’ll look at the seven steps that make up the process for lead generation campaigns, and how you can reduce costs, become more efficient, and boost your ROI.
But first, let’s start with what we mean by ‘lead’ and ‘lead generation,’ along with why it’s so important to your business and what it means for a lead generation campaign to be successful.
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What is a lead?
A lead is someone who has an interest in what your organisation has to offer. They might be someone who has had some exposure to your brand before, or someone learning about your business for the first time. They could be someone who is very likely to convert into a customer, or someone fairly unlikely to ever need what your organisation offers. You’ll sometimes hear these kinds of leads referred to as ‘warm’ (for likely customers) or ‘cold’ (for unlikely prospects).
So your aim will often be to qualify whether a lead is likely to convert or not, prioritise your warmest leads first, and nurture them until they convert into customers.
What is lead generation and why is it important to my business?
Lead generation is the process, either through short campaigns or constant always-on activity, of attracting new potential customers to your organisation. This typically involves igniting their interest in your products or services.
As the first step in the sales journey, lead generation is an essential part of driving success and growth for your business. Whether it’s a startup in its early days, a new or established small business, or a large multinational, every business must generate leads to secure new customers.
What’s the difference between inbound and outbound lead generation?
Outbound lead generation is when sales reps reach out to a contact directly via email, phone, social or cold calling. You can think of it as going out hunting for leads.
Outbound lead generation can be challenging or even counterproductive if leads aren’t ready to hear from you yet, or if the sales reps don’t yet have all the information they need about who the lead is or what they need.
Additionally, customers are wary of how their information is used and want transparency from organisations about how they’re protecting their privacy. A cold call from an organisation you’ve never had anything to do with, or emails from a company who pre-checked the ‘Send me updates’ box when you filled in a form, don’t fit well with growing expectations for trust and transparency.
Inbound lead generation is when the lead interacts with your marketing and actively hands over their information. The lead is opting into communication with you, effectively saying they’re interested in your business.
With the right personalisation applied to an inbound lead generation campaign, leads can be wowed by an experience tailored to them. For example, Salesforce customers reported a 32% increase in customer satisfaction due to personalised and relevant experiences.
What does the process of lead generation look like?
1. Set a clear goal for your campaign
Defining success early is important so you can keep investing in what’s working and adjust anything that’s not.
For example, your goal might be to collect 500 email addresses on a landing page form, 50 downloads of a whitepaper, or 100 click-throughs on an Instagram profile link. Your goal could be based on sign-up numbers or revenue generated. Either way, using the SMART framework can be a good way to ensure your goals are strategically aligned to your business’s growth.
S: Specific: define specific targets for your lead gen campaign and you’ll be able to clearly determine whether you reached your goal or not.
M: Measurable: there is no value in setting a goal you can’t measure because you won’t be able to clearly determine whether you reached it or not.
A: Achievable: most importantly for a small or medium business, setting a target that reflects your position, room for growth and budget is crucial.
R: Relevant: any lead gen campaign you run should be relevant to the type of growth, or the type of leads you’re looking to generate. This may mean targeting the right audience, or generating interest in a product you want to increase sales in.
T: Time-bound: your lead gen campaign should have a timeline of when it is deemed successful or unsuccessful, to avoid overinvesting in a strategy that may not be working.
2. Establish your target audience
When growth depends on bringing in lots of new customers, it can be tempting to see your target audience as ‘everyone.’ But this can hamstring your lead generation campaigns.
Instead, try to be as specific as possible to maximise success. This is where being aligned with your sales team and sharing an integrated CRM can really help.
With Customer 360 you’re able to put your customer at the centre of everything you do. Every employee has the apps and data they need to create experiences that wow your customers and grow lasting relationships.
PaySauce, a New Zealand-based payroll software business, is a wonderful example of how this strategy can be employed. Even in its early days, it used an integrated CRM to give its marketing and sales teams real-time information on lead numbers and conversion rates. With that information, both teams could coordinate their efforts, and target the leads most likely to convert.
3. Decide where and how your campaign will connect
If you’re aiming to attract leads to your website, then you’ll want to look into optimising key pages for search engines (called Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO). Maybe you’ll be using Google or Facebook ads. Perhaps a shout-out from an Instagram or TikTok influencer is the way to go. Regardless of the route you choose, establishing your target audience will help you decide what platform to choose for your lead gen campaign.
One simple way to increase leads while decreasing costs is to consider your SEO and website health, even if paid clicks or influencer marketing is your primary acquisition method. By improving your site speed and the quality of your content, you can ensure any leads that land on your website have a better chance of being impressed, and signing up for your services.
Also, having better site relevance and domain authority for a certain keyword can reduce how much you need to bid for it in your paid ads. So if you’re investing in paid Google search, optimising your organic rankings first is a great way to reduce your cost per click (CPC).
4. Develop your lead magnets
5. Qualify your leads
This is where you figure out whether a newly acquired lead is worth spending time and resources nurturing. When it comes down to it, you want to know how likely they are to buy. Your lead generation campaign will have helped you establish this by delivering some key information about your lead.
That can include information like:
- which sorts of topics or products seem to interest them
- how often they’re interacting with your website, social media or emails
- how long they’ve been engaging with your business or its channels
- any relevant demographic information they’ve shared with you, such as age, gender, or the country they live in
6. Nurture your high-scoring leads
Not all leads are ready to buy right away. In fact, most leads will require some nurturing, especially if it’s a product or service that requires a little more consideration.
Celebrity Ink, a group of tattoo studios that delivers a highly personalised tattoo experience, uses its CRM to help nurture high-scoring leads with the best content possible. By understanding the colours, patterns, designs and interests of its leads, it can serve personalised content tailored to their interests.
“Being able to give that personalised touch back has been great for growing our brand, and our retention’s been great. So as we plan ahead for the next 12 to 24 months, we’re aligning to our CRM to see how we can improve our strategy, and adding that personalisation.”
7. Close the deal and make things easy for customers
It’s understandable to see a newly converted customer as the happy ending to any lead generation campaign.
But generating leads is just the beginning of the story. Closing the deal depends on your ability to engage a lead with the right information at the right time. And, even when a lead becomes a customer, you’ll need to continually deliver relevant messages, add value to their experiences, and ensure every subsequent interaction with your business is a seamless one.
There are many ways to ensure these steps happen, but a CRM solution is one of the most important tools for doing that. CRM technology can unite all the information you have about a lead or customer, giving you a 360-degree view of each one, and can automate the work necessary to ensure personalised experiences at scale.
How will I know if my lead gen campaign has been successful?
‘Success’ will depend on what your business is trying to achieve. Put simply, a successful lead generation campaign usually means driving more leads into your sales pipeline and ensuring those leads are more likely to one day turn into customers. Ultimately, the goal is to expand your customer base and increase your revenue, but most lead generation campaigns are a little more focused on the earlier steps of finding and nurturing new leads.
As for what a successful lead generation campaign might look like, let’s say a pet supplies business has done the research and concluded that its most profitable and reachable customer segment is new puppy owners. Because it finds that these types of customers are more likely to do lots of research online before bringing a puppy home, the business creates a free guide on how to prepare for a dog’s first week with their new family. In exchange for the guide, visitors fill out a form with their name, email address and dog breed.
If prospects fill out the form and consent to marketing communications, then they become leads. The business now knows just enough to be able to email them with relevant follow-up messaging about dog foods, toys and collars. At some point, these leads may decide to purchase products for their new puppies and will convert to customers.
If enough people download the guide and become leads, the business can say it reached its campaign goal. And, once leads start converting to customers, the business can assess how many customers the campaign helped it reach and whether it achieved the return on investment (ROI) it was hoping for.
This is just one possible example, and there are all kinds of ways to generate leads. The more you know your business and your customers, the better you’ll be at identifying the most successful lead generation strategies to suit them.
*Source: 2022 Salesforce Success Metrics Global Highlights study.
Data is from a survey of 3,706 Salesforce customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of Salesforce. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
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