Lead generation is a major challenge for the B2B marketing manager. In this quest, you may be tempted to use different levers. Good ones and bad ones. How to sort? Here are the wrong good ideas and the real good ideas to generate leads.
You have a new unread message. It is the sales manager who asks you for an interview as soon as possible.
Why this meeting? He wants to know how the marketing department can generate more leads to supply its sales force with fresh contacts.
Lead generation is a great challenge for the marketing department and a real source of turnover for your sales staff and therefore for the company.
To generate more leads to the sales department, here are the wrong good ideas, to avoid, and the real good ideas to implement right now!
False good ideas to generate leads
1. Using a telemarketing company
This is perhaps the first bad reflex when it comes to lead generation.
This practice sounds very "90s" and does not meet the modern buyer’s expectations who wishes to conduct his purchase thinking alone.
Making more calls on a larger contact base can bring more appointments in absolute terms. But of what quality?
I no longer count the number of times I have heard our customers and prospects complain about the very low signature rate of leads from a telemarketing subcontractor.
And I'm not even talking about the number of meetings that never actually took place.... !
2. Advertise in the media
And why not invest in online advertising?
For a modest budget of a few hundred euros (or dollars), you can invest in Google Adwords, Facebook Ads or sponsored Tweets.
Yes, but creating and launching an optimized campaign on these online tools cannot be improvised.
Investing more money on these platforms does not mean generating leads for sure. To start well on Adwords, you need the right reflexes. The same goes for a successful Facebook campaign.
In addition, by investing in media advertising for lead generation, when your investments are completed, lead generation will stop all of a sudden.
The cost of a lead can then be significant and ephemeral. Is that really what you want?
3. Send Mailings to generate leads
Attention the emailing is effective only if the recipients of your Emails gave their agreement to receive them. In this case, if your contacts already know you, they are not leads.
To generate leads with emailing you would have to send emails to unknown contacts. For that, only one solution: buy contact files.
Ineffective, expensive and especially very strongly discouraged or even outright banned recently, since the new GDPR law (General Data Protection Regulation).
If you want to generate leads with emailing, you are on the wrong track.
Come on, let's stop with the wrong good ideas or the real bad ideas and move on to the actions that pay off!
Real good ideas for generating leads
1. Create content
This is a theme that we have addressed many times on our blog. Once is not usual therefore, content creation is the basis of lead generation.
What kind of content to create? How many words in my content? Do I have to create a blog to feed my site with content? and many other very good questions that we have already dealt with in our blog.
As we are nice, we will deal with the following points in our next articles:
- The best content to generate leads
- The number of words in your blog articles
- 4 reasons to create a Blog
And we even give you some answers!
In a few words, the content you create on your website to generate leads must answer the questions your Persona *asks.
When your Persona searches online, he finds you and thus becomes a visitor to your website.
Over time, your content improves your natural SEO, your natural SEO brings you more visits and your visits generate more Leads.
Content creation is therefore an excellent idea to generate Leads over time.
2. Set up a "fast" conversion tunnel on your website
On average, we receive more than 30,000 visits per month on the SLNWeb.net site.
Among all these visitors some are curious and who will never make themselves known. That is, they will never fill out a contact form. They will remain anonymous visitors to our website.
On the other hand, for some of our visitors it is totally the opposite. They are behind their screens and have their hands up.
Hand up? And yes, as in a conference, they ask for the floor to ask a question.
For this type of visitors you must, as we propose in our main menu, suggest a direct contact.
In the form of an automatic reminder, an appointment on an online calendar, a quote request... there are many options that allow you to contact your highly motivated visitors directly.
By configuring one or more "fast" conversion tunnels, you offer hot and mature visitors to transform themselves into Leads.
3. To help you generate leads
On many occasions, we have heard: "We want to generate Leads on the Internet. We have some ideas but we don't know where to start."
From the beginning, of course.
But the beginning if we associate it with the starting point is not the same for everyone.
Also, depending on your maturity on Digital Marketing topics, your traffic, your current ability to generate leads, your ideal targeted customer, the technical quality of your website and the analysis of many other criteria, we will be able to make a diagnosis to accompany you in lead generation.
Find out more about our diagnosis:
https://www.ludosln.net/
Notes: A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Translation by Patrick Lemarié from the French article by Ludovic Salenne published on 26 June 2018 and authorised by him. https://www.ludosln.net/author/lsalenne/