Now that Christmas is over and the New Year is in full swing – or, at least, people are starting to get back to work – I’ve been looking over the articles I wrote last year in order to come up with some different areas to cover in 2020. Which is where this update comes in – outlining the fundamental elements of a successful digital marketing lead generation strategy.
What is a Lead?
Anyone who works in an industry that relies on a continual stream of leads for its ongoing sales will be able to define what constitutes a lead for them. (Whether that be personal injury leads for claims firms, B2B leads for tax accountants etc).
The shared characteristics of each of these leads is that they will consist of contact details for someone who has expressed an interest in the product or service on offer. Ideally, these people will fall into the demographic ranges of the desired target audience – eg age, gender, location. Additional levels of qualification might provide information about the timescale for when they might be interested in the service, figures for how much turnover they have (if for an R & D tax credit, for example), where the accident took place (for personal injury claims) etc.
One way of looking at things is that you have put out a message saying “this is what we offer” and a lead represents each person who ‘raises their hand’ to say “I might be interested in that”.
How to Track a Digital Marketing Lead
Anyone working in the industry will be familiar with the idea of placing tracking code / pixels on a website in order to identify actions and behaviours that are taken by the site’s visitors. And developers will tell you there are multiple methods of tracking all manner of things, such as how long people spend on the site, which links were clicked, which areas of the site appear to be most attractive to visitors etc.
All of these can provide useful information, of course, but the single most important element to track for lead generation is the submission of a form that includes relevant contact details for a potential customer.
Despite what techies and developers are keen to have you believe, I’ve found that the only truly effective and reliable means of tracking this type of form submission is to have a separate success / thank you page that people are directed to once they’ve successfully completed the form.
Taking this a step further, having multiple success pages that relate to different lead criteria is potentially a very useful feature for tracking the success of your campaigns.
Lead Criteria
Not all leads are created equal. That is, some people who express an interest in your offering will be more likely to convert into a customer than others. And some will be of no use to you for conversion purposes.
In order to identify these different categories of people and send them down the correct path for your purposes, you should incorporate questions within your forms that help to filter the desired criteria.
For example, for personal injury claims you might be most interested in people who’ve been injured at work. For B2B leads you might be looking for engineering firms who develop their own tooling. Within the field of patient recruitment there will be multiple ‘exclusion criteria’ that will make an applicant unsuitable for a particular trial. (Age, gender, medical conditions etc). And so on.
Using the questions on your form to filter out ‘unwanted’ characteristics enables you to generate highly-targeted leads that are most likely to be suitable for converting into sales.
Targeting the Right Message to the Right People
Digital advertising is a highly effective means of getting your message to the type of people you want to attract. The various platforms include Facebook Ads, Google Ads, YouTube, Twitter, native ad networks (such as Taboola and Outbrain) and many others that will enable you to reach a much wider audience than you’ll find in other forms of marketing. With the added advantage that you can drill down into behaviours and interests so you’re really reaching out to the right type of people.
Crafting a persuasive message for this audience, then presenting it to them, is the key to success with digital advertising. If you get this combination right, you’ll be able to generate an ongoing stream of leads from people who are keen to find out more about what you can offer them.
Swift and Effective Follow-Up
Generating the leads in the first place is very important. However, in all the years I’ve been involved with delivering leads to clients across multiple industries, one thing that’s been very clear to me as a potential bottleneck is the quality of the follow-up process.
Generating a hundred leads a week or more is one thing. Following them up quickly and effectively is very much another. From a digital point of view, this follow-up may include email autoresponders and a sequence of ongoing email / text messages that help ‘keep the lead alive’.
But by far the best method for converting a lead in the areas I’ve mainly operated in is to have a system in place for phoning the person back as soon as possible – ‘striking while the iron is hot’ so there’s little or no chance of the lead going cold.
Lead Generation Service
I’ll be adding more articles relating to lead generation in the future. In the meantime, if you’re interested in having a continual stream of high quality leads delivered to you every week – get in touch for a chat about how I might be able to help.