Lead Generation: 5 Tactics Every Marketer Should Focus On

As marketers, we are constantly trying to multitask, generate and evaluate reports, and do whatever possible to ensure our marketing-related revenue charts are pointing north.

Marketers are often tasked with generating leads for the sales staff or the organization as a whole, but how do we scale those efforts while ensuring the leads we drive are high quality? Before anything else, in order to remain customer-centric and responsible marketers, it is vital we only send emails to users who have first expressed an interest in our product or service.

In the midst of everything we have to do and think about it, it’s important for marketers to slow down and think about one central question:

“How am I cultivating quality leads that can convert into paying customers?” or rather, “How am I making potential customers happy?”

A strong, effective lead generation campaign isn’t about clicks and impressions, it’s about the money and value that it generates.

Regardless of budget size, great marketers pay attention to ROI, making every dollar count.

With that in mind, let’s discuss 5 tactics every marketer should focus on when implementing a pay-per-click (PPC) program and email nurture program.

1. Your PPC landing page should be your top priority

One offense that many small businesses make when starting a PPC campaign is they bid on a bunch of different keywords and send all of their traffic to their homepage. Often this results in poor conversion rates and, for some, a belief that PPC just doesn’t work.

Unless your homepage has proven to garner incredible conversion rates with a subset of your traffic (which might be the case for branded keywords), it is important to segment your traffic so that your prospects can be directed to specific landing pages which are relevant to each of the keywords and ads in your campaign.

Each landing page should employ proper text, images, and a calls-to-action that outline the benefits of your product or service and ultimately entice your traffic to fill out your form or to place a call.

2. Never stop testing your messaging

Even a small uplift in your conversion rate can lead to a substantial increase in overall lead volume. And the best way to make incremental improvements is to experiment. The best marketers are always testing, even if the test encapsulates small iterations of what is already working.

Just about everything can be tested including:

• Headlines
• Content (keep text concise and easy to scan)
• Ad copy
• Images
• Navigation buttons (oftentimes fewer buttons are better)
• Form fields (the field count and form placement)
• Colors (especially the call-to-action buttons)

Remember to keep things clear, simple, and compelling with your headlines, forms, and imagery. For more on A/B testing strategies, check out SendGrid’s best practice guide, Your Guide to Email A/B Testing and Optimizing Your Call to Action.

3. Create a compelling offer for your prospects

Offers that only contain pricing, features, and self-serving promotional videos are not compelling because they serve you and not your customer.

However, instructive and educational items like guides, whitepapers, and webinars are compelling because they address a pain point that prospects are likely seeking answers for.

Tip: If you are requesting lead information such as email and other data, it’s paramount that you offer meaningful value in return. 

4. Upgrade your lead nurturing email campaigns

Lead nurture email campaigns enable marketers to maintain mindshare with prospective customers. Here are a few areas of opportunity to optimize your lead nurture efforts:

• First impressions are everything in marketing; create an attention-grabbing subject line and clearly state how the recipient will benefit from engaging with your email.
• Be very clear and concise about what you’re offering. Your readers don’t want to be stonewalled with two large paragraphs of text about your company’s background. Just like your landing pages, make sure you get to the point.
• What are the tips or industry insights you want to share with your prospects and how can they benefit from reading or subscribing to your blog?
• Limit the images in your emails. Image-heavy emails often get sent directly to the SPAM folder.
• Include links back to your website. For these emails, the links don’t have to be call-to-action links, you can link to additional free information (your blog, guides, whitepapers, etc.) and you can encourage readers to follow your business on social media.

5. Measure and track the ROI of your lead generation

Campaign delivery metrics (i.e. number of impressions) and response metrics (i.e. click-through rate) are crucial to understanding the reach and penetration of a message. However, the real value of analytics is that it equips marketers to manage their campaigns on a deeper level. This is where qualitative metrics such as cost-per-contact and cost-per-MQL are vital because it provides a better idea of your ROI.

As marketers, we should evaluate qualitative and quantitative metrics by channel to make smart decisions about where to focus our lead generation efforts. For instance, in a B2B setting, a small number of leads that are generated within in your organization’s target audience who are ready to buy may be substantially more valuable than a much greater volume of unqualified or poorly matched leads.

Planning and refining a successful lead generation strategy requires a thought out plan, but if done properly, it can give your business critical advantages: an increase in lead traffic, more appointments, brand awareness, and ultimately more sales!

For more information on other lead generation strategies that might work well with your email program, check out Lead Generation Strategies for Email Marketers.