9 Tips For Successful Lead Generation (Insights From Expert Brands) via @sejournal, @hethr_campbell

Building a quality pipeline right now is a challenge, and Google isn’t making it any easier.

Changes in how traffic and leads are coming to your site have probably shifted, yet lead generation is still a top priority.

It’s critical to start by understanding that the customer journey has never been more important. Also, be aware that the final stages are where the most failures happen, such as not having your CRM and sales team ready before a campaign launch.

In a recent webinar, Brent Csutoras and I talked about the shifts that need to happen at an organizational level, not just within your marketing department.

Keep reading for a takeaway of the nine insights we took from the webinar, and watch a full on-demand version here.

9 Tips For Successful Lead Generation

1. The Customer Journey Has Never Been More Important

Understanding customer journeys is crucial for successful lead generation.

Brent and I highlighted the shift in how users navigate online, emphasizing the need for content that addresses pain points throughout the funnel. Quality content that solves problems and adds value at every stage is the key to engaging and converting users effectively.

2. Generating Quality Leads Takes Quality Content, Which Takes Research, Testing, And Budget

Creating content that converts begins with thorough audience and market research.

Regular testing, optimization, and diverse formats like blogs, videos, and emails ensure you can reach potential customers via a media channel that appeals to them. It’s not going to be free, so make sure you allocate a content budget when talking to leadership.

3. The Channels Are Working Fine. It’s Your Content And Execution That Are Not Working

Tried-and-true channels still work. It’s just that too many marketers focus on only the bottom of the funnel because it’s easy to track and attribute.

While some leads will convert from a single content piece, you must prepare for those who require more nurturing before they convert. Considering most of the content you create should be top- and mid-funnel, spend time matching the channel with intent.

These are just a couple of examples of channels that work. Watch the on-demand for more ideas.

• Email marketing remains a powerful tool for lead generation, especially when focusing on segmentation and personalization.
• Leveraging internal experts and influencers can build trust and credibility with your audience.

Here’s a snapshot of the channels we used to drive leads for this webinar:

4. “Sweat The Assets!” Meaning Use One To Make Many

Maximizing the value of each piece of content is essential for scaling your efforts. Repurpose and tailor content for different platforms and audiences to ensure it serves multiple purposes.

It’s also important to budget for both content creation and promotion, recognizing that quality content requires investment.

5. You Should Expect To Pay Quality Money For Quality Leads

Investing in quality resources for lead generation may mean higher costs, but it can lead to higher quality leads and lower overall Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). Consider all costs, including advertising and human resources. Optimization and continuous assessment are crucial for optimizing budget spend.

Plus, low-quality leads take your valuable sales resources who could have been working on legit leads. A good lead-scoring strategy can help reduce resource drain.

6. The Key Is An Always-On, Full-Funnel Strategy

A common mistake is relying on a single piece of bottom-funnel content for all stages of the buyer’s journey. Brands must engage their audience consistently from awareness to consideration, conversion, and retention to build loyalty and keep the cycle running.

7. Know What Efforts Are Working For Your Goals

Continuous evaluation is key to understanding the effectiveness of your lead generation strategies. However, with these shifts in customer demand and creating more top-of-the-funnel content, engagement is one of the most important metrics you can track to tell you if your content is resonating.

Catch the on-demand webinar to hear more about metrics we think are important to track.

8. Outside Vendors Impact Your Lead Gen Success

Leveraging external resources can enhance your lead generation efforts, especially if you’re a lean team. Treat vendors as team extensions, sharing goals and KPIs. Listen to their audience insights. Most importantly, ask if they offer real-time lead delivery to keep leads fresh and your brand top of mind.

9. The Most Important Piece: No Follow-Up = No Leads

Don’t overlook what happens when a lead enters your system. Ensure your customer relationship management (CRM)/customer data platform (CDP)/marketing tech is ready. Set up lead scoring, automation, and dashboards. Prepare your sales teams to smoothly handle new leads, reducing launch day stress for everyone.

It’s All About Building A Customer-Centric Experience

The bottom line is that the way customers want to interact with brands has changed. These strategies outlined above aren’t new. We learned about them in Marketing 101, but they’ve been pushed aside for product-focused marketing over the years.

Customers are really looking for brands who get them, and provide a solution to their pain. Then, they’ll repay you with loyalty.

So, ask yourself – “How is the quality of my leads?” Then, assess how much-focused effort you are putting into their journey.

Discover How You Can Supercharge Your Lead Generation Efforts

As a publisher, we serve as an agency to our advertisers (those looking to reach marketers and SEO professionals). That means we’re marketing to marketers – some of the smartest out there –and that’s you!

And what we’re doing to drive quality leads is working.

Whether you’re an expert or just getting started, Brent Csutoras and I put this webinar together for you. It’s full of functional takeaways that even the savviest marketers tend to forget, or worse, that leadership doesn’t see the value in.

This on-demand webinar has insights that we’ve been taking note of for years, and so should you. You can use this for strategy and to sway others in your organization to change the way you think about – and drive – leads.

Trust us, you don’t want to miss this!

Watch now.

Featured Image: Olivier Le Moal/Shutterstock

Building A Lead Generation Plan via @sejournal, @BennyJamminS

This is an excerpt from the B2B Lead Generation ebook, which draws on SEJ’s internal expertise in delivering leads across multiple media types.

You must communicate with leads correctly to provide a good experience and move toward a sale. What that looks like depends on what problems they face, their proximity to readiness to purchase, and how they became a lead.

It helps to start from your end business result and work backward toward your lead.

You need to know exactly what information you need from leads and how to use it to provide them with a good experience.

This helps you understand how to treat leads based on how they first interact with you – and which next steps you can reasonably ask for.

Starting this way also helps you build content that is attractive to leads in the first place. Pushing this line of thought further eventually gets you to SEO content, where it’s helpful to understand people’s specific problems and the intent behind their searches before you begin writing.

The critical distinguishing factor between successful and unsuccessful content is whether you complete the journey from your business goals to your audiences and do the research to understand the situations they’re in, what they need, and what success looks like for them.

“The time to think about business goals is at the start of your content strategy. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of creating content that grabs a lot of eyeballs but contributes nothing to your return on investment (ROI),” says Curtis del Principe, Sr. Marketing Manager at HubSpot.

He adds, “And we’re not immune to that either. We’ve got an old blog from the early days of content marketing (that will remain nameless) that still generates over half a million views per month but nearly zero conversion. And it’s not even in our niche, so you can’t make the argument of brand awareness, either.

But we’re stuck spending time and resources on this blog because if we ever stopped, it would absolutely crater our traffic key performance indicators (KPIs).

The lesson we learned is that you have to start from your business goal – whether that’s leads, sales, signups, or even just brand awareness.

When I’m working on content strategy, I’ll look at what products or offers we want to prioritize this month and then analyze the conversation around them. What questions do consumers have? What comparisons are they making? What pain points are they looking to solve?

Then, you draw a line between those questions and a conversion goal that’s appropriate for that question’s decision stage. Maybe it’s downloading a whitepaper, maybe it’s scheduling a demo, maybe it’s making a sale.

And I find that the act of drawing that line often shows me what shape a piece of content will take. It makes you think about how you’re going to scratch that itch.”

Exclusive Webinar: Learn how we, here at SEJ, create holistic content campaigns to drive leads.

Lead Sources

There are many different sources of leads; not all rely directly on content marketing. Platform ads like Google Discover and social media ads can be very helpful sources of leads. And, of course,
there are the old-fashioned but still relevant direct lead generation techniques, like conferences, cold calling, and direct referrals.

You have many options for targeting and building ads to generate your desired leads. You can usually “qualify” them easily as marketing qualified leads (MQLs) or sales qualified leads (SQLs).

Leads from direct interaction or referrals often communicated with a sales professional already. These are likely sales qualified leads, although they may not always be.

The more direct the lead process, the easier it is to move people in your desired direction.

Generally, you would handle those leads differently than a relationship that begins with organic or gated content.

People coming to you through a content conversion or download can have less predictable journeys, so it’s critical to map their intents and needs to the types of content you create.

For example, at SEJ, we have different types of lead generation products. Here’s a breakdown of two of them:

Webinars

When someone signs up for a webinar, they invest their time into an experience to learn about something specific.

They’re looking for an interactive experience. They might actively have questions about the topic for which they’re seeking a direct answer from an expert.

These make great leads because they’ve already interacted with you after attending a webinar.

Ebooks

Ebooks at SEJ are a little broader. Depending on the scope and topic, an ebook might serve as a teaching tool, a reference guide, or an assistant in setting a strategy.

Someone downloading an ebook could seek a more self-directed experience, and their needs might be less immediate.

These also make great leads because they are invested in learning new things or are seeking help making impactful decisions.

Principe shares, “One of my favorite methods is to mention your offer/tool/product organically within a larger educational topic. For me, that often means discussing how our products or services are used to accomplish our readers’ goals. Here’s an example of that:

Screenshot from blog.hubspot.com, June 2024

Or, it might look like an offer presented as a “pro tip.” In other words, I’m telling you how to do X, Y, and Z … Oh, and pro tip: HubSpot users can do exactly that by going here. Here’s an example of that:

Screenshot from blog.hubspot.com, June 2024

When done right, this tactic helps to give a viewer valuable context for your offer that you simply can’t include in a traditional call to action (CTA). The caveat is that, when done wrong, you end up sounding like a bad 1950s product placement.”

He further explains, “The secret is to forget your marketing vocabulary and talk like you’re explaining it to a friend. If I’m telling a colleague about a great feature, I’m not going to say, ‘Sales Hub’s unique prospecting features enable businesses to optimize your pipeline for conversion,’ right?

The benefit of this tactic is that you tend to get high-intent, low-funnel leads who know exactly what they’re there for. But I will warn that it gets lower overall clicks than a traditional CTA, so you’re definitely trading conversion rate (CVR) for clickthrough rate (CTR).”

This is where you might want to start thinking about software. If you’re just getting started with a lead generation strategy, you might be able to get it by sending lead form responses into spreadsheets and organizing them yourself. If you don’t want to do in-depth lead scoring and only have a couple of different sources of leads, this can work fine.

But even if you’re not engaging in advanced scoring functions, volume will be an issue sooner or later. There’s much to be said for the integration power and quality of life improvements that come with software services.

For now, write down the sources of leads you want to engage with and do the work of understanding what people using those channels want.

Setting Up Your Lead Database

To generate leads using content, you need:

• SEO and social media content to attract interest and generate subscribers.
• Lead generating content that provides value in exchange for information.
• Forms to capture leads. These could be on landing pages that gate off lead generating content or appear alongside/after the content for users to engage with as they read.
• Integration from those forms into the software you choose to manage your leads, whether you’re taking the hands-on approach with spreadsheets or purchasing a service.
• Decisions about how you will categorize and follow up with your leads.

Again, it helps to work in reverse order here. Clarify your process and how you plan to handle leads first.

How you categorize leads and what information you need will guide how you prepare your database. In B2B, some lead sources like referrals and content or LinkedIn ads are likely more valuable to you. A lead from signing up for a free trial of your software is likely much closer to a sale than a lead from downloading a white paper.

Your database is where you will apply qualifications and scoring. It’s also where you decide who should contact a lead and how they should do it.

Depending on the scope of your project, you can run a lead database by hand using a spreadsheet, or use one of many customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions on the market. The advantage of CRM software is automation, especially when it comes to integrating with different potential lead sources.

If you’re running an experiment or just getting started, investing in software may not make sense, but setting up may require more technical skill and a greater ask of your web development team.

Want an exclusive peek into tactics we use when developing our own lead gen campaigns? Check out our upcoming webinar.

Qualifying Leads & Lead Scoring

Qualifying a lead tells you who should reach out to the lead.

Using what you understand about a lead and how they entered your pipeline, you determine how to best engage with and nurture them. They might be ready for sales outreach, or they might only be ready to review more content via an email campaign.

Lead scoring is particularly important for B2B sales. It’s deciding which leads are relevant and how valuable they are. You assign numerical scores to leads based on a variety of attributes and use the numbers to prioritize marketing and sales activities.

This goes hand-in-hand with qualification and helps you prioritize time and resources.

This process alone deserves its own book, but Alex Macura wrote an excellent lead scoring model for us.

We can’t tell you which tool or system to use, but if you know clearly what you want to accomplish and what information you need, you can select the right software more easily.

The core of your model is tags and scores. You should know what specific information you need, and how each piece of information is weighted.

Is There Such Thing As Too Much Information?

When it comes to leads – yes, absolutely.

Some people might balk at that. Today’s marketing advice is full of people saying you must provide tailored and personalized experiences. You must build authentic relationships. And to do that, you need to know as much about people as possible.

Data is power.

To that, I say, sure! That can be true. Sometimes.

But a lead is a transaction. The more information you ask for, the higher the price – both the literal cost of the lead and the price in terms of the value of the information you owe in return.

So, if you ask for too much and give too little, you could be chasing off customers.

In your quest for personalized experiences, are you making your barrier to entry too high?

It depends. (Everyone, get out your SEO bingo cards and cross off “It depends.” It’s next to “high-quality” and the free space.)

Lead generation requires some barriers to entry. That makes a lead a lead: They took an extra step.

There isn’t a single right answer here. If you have an expensive product or service that you only market to executives, it might make sense to either:

1. Require a large amount of information to weed out all but the most qualified leads. That way, you waste fewer resources on leads that don’t pan out. However, the leads are more expensive to acquire, and you may miss opportunities to build trust with users further away from purchasing.
2. Ask for minimal information from leads because one sale justifies the resources spent on leads that don’t pan out. This way, you don’t miss opportunities to get leads into your database, and you can always score them after the fact to mitigate waste. The risk is in the muddy lead database and potential resource waste.

For example, suppose you screen out Gmail email addresses and only consider leads with company domains. In that case, each lead will be more inherently valuable, but there are also plenty of reasons a potential customer might use their personal email.

This might be the best strategy for you if you don’t have a robust marketing and remarketing strategy to keep leads further away from buying engaged. It might also work well if you’re not using a CRM and scoring leads by hand, so you don’t have to weed out junk.

As you build out your content marketing and upgrade how you handle leads, it might make sense to relax the kinds of leads you accept.

Of course, everyone will have a different happy medium.

On the other hand, asking for more information that disqualifies a large number of leads could be critical to making the best use of your resources.

“When you’re evaluating lead capture, don’t get sucked into focusing on the wrong numbers,” Principe suggests.

“Lead volume seems important on its face, but only if they’re quality leads. I used to work for a medical supply company, and the sales team would constantly complain about uninsured leads. We couldn’t service those customers.

So, we added a field to our lead capture form asking for insurance information. Our form abandonment rate skyrocketed. Our lead volume dropped like a lead balloon. Our sales leaders started to panic.

Until we noticed that our qualification rate went through the roof and took our conversion rate with it. In the end, we boosted our ROI, even while our lead volume decreased.”

It’s a delicate balancing act we’ve been doing at SEJ for a while. When you signed up for our ebooks, you agreed to become a lead for our sponsors and receive their emails.

We like to think that you and readers like you agree to this because we treat you as a reader – and a person first.

This business model works because you’re a valuable reader whether you personally engage with those sponsors or not. We respect you by doing our best to provide valuable content.

We’re confident in the value of our leads because we’re confident in the value of our content. Readers like you trust us to do right by you by providing value for your data and time. Enough valuable readers, treated the right way, eventually become a sale.

More resources:

Featured Image: Ivelin Radkov/Shutterstock

Barriers To Audience Buy-In With Lead Generation via @sejournal, @Juxtacognition

This is an excerpt from the B2B Lead Generation ebook, which draws on SEJ’s internal expertise in delivering leads across multiple media types.

People are driven by a mix of desires, wants, needs, experiences, and external pressures.

It can take time to get it right and convince a person to become a lead, let alone a paying customer.

Here are some nuances of logic and psychology that could be impacting your ability to connect with audiences and build strong leads.

1. Poor Negotiations & The Endowment Effect

Every potential customer you encounter values their own effort and information. And due to something called the endowment effect, they value that time and data much more than you do.

In contrast, the same psychological effect means you value what you offer in exchange for peoples’ information more than they will.

If the value of what you’re offering fails to match the value of what consumers are giving you in exchange (read: their time and information), the conversions will be weak.

The solution? You can increase the perceived value of the thing you’re offering, or reduce the value of what the user “pays” for the thing you offer.

Want an exclusive peek into tactics we use when developing our own lead gen campaigns? Check out our upcoming webinar.

Humans evaluate rewards in multiple dimensions, including the reward amount, the time until the reward is received, and the certainty of the reward.

The more time before a reward occurs, and the less certain its ultimate value, the harder you have to work to get someone to engage.

Offering value upfront – even if you’re presenting something else soon after, like a live event, ebook, or demo – can help entice immediate action as well as convince leads of the long-term value of their investment.

It can even act as a prime for the next step in the lead gen nurturing process, hinting at even more value to come and increasing the effectiveness of the rest of your lead generation strategy.

It’s another reason why inbound content is a critical support for lead generation content. The short-term rewards of highly useful ungated content help prepare audiences for longer-term benefits offered down the line.

3. Abandonment & The Funnel Myth

Every lead generation journey is carefully planned, but if you designed it with a funnel in mind, you could be losing many qualified leads.

That’s because the imagery of a funnel might suggest that all leads engage with your brand or offer in the same way, but this simply isn’t true – particularly for products or services with high values.

Instead, these journeys are more abstract. Leads tend to move back and forth between stages depending on their circumstances. They might change their minds, encounter organizational roadblocks, switch channels, or their needs might suddenly change.

Instead of limiting journeys to audience segments, consider optimizing for paths and situations, too.

Optimizing for specific situations and encounters creates multiple opportunities to capture a lead while they’re in certain mindsets. Every opportunity is a way to engage with varying “costs” for time and data, and align your key performance indicators (KPIs) to match.

Situational journeys also create unique opportunities to learn about the various audience segments, including what they’re most interested in, which offers to grab their attention, and which aspects of your brand, product, or service they’re most concerned about.

4. Under-Pricing

Free trials and discounts can be eye-catching, but they don’t always work to your benefit.

Brands often think consumers will always choose the product with the lowest possible price. That isn’t always the case.

Consumers work within something referred to as the “zone of acceptability,” which is the price range they feel is acceptable for a purchasing decision.

If your brand falls outside that range, you’ll likely get the leads – but they could fail to buy in later. The initial offer might be attractive, but the lower perception of value could work against you when it comes time to try and close the sale.

Several elements play into whether consumers are sensitive to pricing discounts. The overall cost of a purchase matters, for example.

Higher-priced purchases, such as SaaS or real estate, can be extremely sensitive to pricing discounts. They can lead to your audience perceiving the product as lower-value, or make it seem like you’re struggling. A price-quality relationship is easy to see in many places in our lives. If you select the absolute lowest price for an airline ticket, do you expect your journey to be timely and comfortable?

It’s difficult to offer specific advice on these points. To find ideal price points and discounts, you need good feedback systems from both customers and leads – and you need data about how other audiences interact. But there’s value in not being the cheapest option.

Get more tips on how we, here at SEJ, create holistic content campaigns to drive leads in this exclusive webinar.

5. Lead Roles & Information

In every large purchasing decision, there are multiple roles in the process. These include:

• User: The person who ultimately uses the product or service.
• Buyer: The person who makes the purchase, but may or may not know anything about the actual product or service being purchased.
• Decider: The person who determines whether to make the purchase.
• Influencer: The person who provides opinions and thoughts on the product or service, and influences perceptions of it.
• Gatekeeper: The person who gathers and holds information about the product or service.

Sometimes, different people play these roles, and other times, one person may hold more than one of these roles. However, the needs of each role must be met at the right time. If you fail to meet their needs, you’ll see your conversions turn cold at a higher rate early in the process.

The only way to avoid this complication is to understand who it is you’re attracting when you capture the lead, and make the right information available at the right time during the conversion process.

6. Understand Why People Don’t Sign Up

Many businesses put significant effort into lead nurturing and understanding the qualities of potential customers who fill out lead forms.

But what about the ones who don’t fill out those forms?

Understanding these values and the traits that drive purchasing decisions is paramount.

Your own proprietary and customer data, like your analytics, client data, and lead interactions, makes an excellent starting place, but don’t make the mistake of basing your decisions solely on the data you have collected about the leads you have.

This information creates a picture based solely on people already interacting with you. It doesn’t include information about the audience you’ve failed to capture so far.

Don’t fall for survivorship bias, which occurs when you only look at data from people who have passed your selection filters.

This is especially critical for lead generation because there are groups of people you don’t want to become leads. But you need to make sure you’re attracting as many ideal leads as possible while filtering out those that are suboptimal. You need information about the people who aren’t converting to ensure your filters are working as intended.

Gather information from the segment of your target audience that uses a competitor’s products, and pair them with psychographic tools and frameworks like “values and lifestyle surveys” (VALS) to gather insights and inform decisions.

In a digital world of tough competition and even more demands on every dollar, your lead generation needs to be precise.

Understanding what drives your target audience before you capture the lead and ensuring every detail is crafted with the final conversion in mind will help you capture more leads and sales, and leave your brand the clear market winner.

More resources:

Featured Image: Pasuwan/Shutterstock