As a business, you can’t simply rest on your laurels and wait for your customers to find you by chance. Whether you’re a start-up just trying to make a name for yourself, or killing it as a mega brand, your continued success will depend on your ability to consistently attract new customers. That’s where lead generation comes in.
Lead generation is all about identifying and building a base of prospective customers, and there are many unique and creative strategies businesses use to warm up customers to their brands. As you prepare to enter a career in digital marketing, it will be key for you to understand how to run an effective lead generation campaign. With that in mind, we’ve come up with a few tips to show you how to get the job done smoothly.
1. Those with Digital Marketing Training Backgrounds Must Define Campaign Goals
Before you can set out to create a lead generation program, you’ll need a clear objective in mind for expectations on the outcome of your campaign. Ask yourself what exactly you’re trying to achieve with your new lead generation initiative. Are you looking to increase your social media reach? Are you looking to boost your number of blog subscribers? Do you want to bring in more website visitors, or is your latest campaign about bringing more traffic to a specific landing page? The goal of your campaign will form the basis for everything that follows.
2. Know Your Target Audience on Each New Campaign
Lead generation goals will change with every campaign—and therefore, so must your target audience. By clearly identifying your audience, you’ll have a better chance at succeeding in attracting your intended leads with your messaging. Start out by listing the simple, basic demographic details of the group you wish to attract, such as: single, middle-income women, aged 25-35, living in Chicago, U.S., etc. From there, you will have to determine the best methods for reaching that group. Those taking a social media advertising course may already know that re-targeting existing audiences through your social media channels is an effective option. You may also choose to target leads from your email contacts, or any other existing contact lists.
Some businesses will also take their targeting strategy to a new level by using data management technologies to accurately identify the online behaviours of individual customers, as well as their preferences, purchasing history, and other details. Targeting mechanisms can be created from there by marketers and data analysts, based on profiles and segments created from the data.
3. Base Your Campaign Goals on Conversion Metrics
If you’re taking digital marketing training, you’ll come to understand how important it is for a business to consider its budget on every campaign. To be sure your money isn’t wasted, return on investment should be kept firmly in mind for each individual program. To be able to compare the results coming from your efforts, it’s essential to set your campaign goals according to specific measurable parameters. On a single campaign you might choose to track and measure such aspects as the cost per inquiry or lead, the increase in number of followers on your social media channels, the increase in your website traffic, and so on. There are several measurable metrics you can choose to analyze and compare, all of them highly useful for indicating whether or not you’ve achieved success with your efforts. The data you obtain can also be leveraged to tweak parameters, avoiding the same mistakes twice while repeating methods that worked—lining up your next campaign to be even more successful.
4. Decide on Your Strategy and Medium
To attract new leads, it’s key for a business to come up with an offer that will naturally appeal to the target audience. Some examples of effective offers that can be used on campaigns include free webinars, free online tutorials, downloadable ebooks, and many other freebies. Marketers can also use strategies such as embedding lead-forms in videos, creating interactive tools or fun quizzes, and much more.
Once you’ve decided on your lead generation strategy, you’ll need to determine how you wish to reach potential prospects, whether it’s through a direct email campaign, social media channels, or some other medium. The businesses that succeed with their lead generation efforts will often explore a variety of media channels to see which of them turn up the best results.
5. Those Who Do Not Try Will Not Succeed
A final tip to remember when formulating your lead generation campaign is rather simple: just go for it! A lot of marketers spend too much time over-thinking their strategies, leading to delays and missed opportunities. Business is all about seizing the moment, and learning from your mistakes. In the process of “doing”, you will quickly find out what works and what doesn’t. This necessary learning process is what it takes to refine your lead generation strategies for optimal results.
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