Few decisions a company can make will have more impact on their success than optimizing their lead generation process. By discovering better and faster ways to win more customers, you can justify planning for exponential growth. But the way you do it matters, so let’s take a look at the five steps you need to focus on most.
Attracting: Starting the Lead Generation Process by Getting People Interested
How do potential buyers even know that you exist and can solve their problems? It’s all about putting enough high-quality marketing content out there for them to find, and to help them find you.
To supplement the informative power of your main website, you need to keep a blog that you update on a regular basis. You’ll want to center the topics of that blog on certain keywords. Careful research is critical here, because some keywords will work better for you than others. They should relate not only to what you provide, but also connect to where you work and who you provide your services to. You need to know your target audience and buyer personas, in other words.
In larger organizations, sales and marketing teams should work together very closely here. You can craft original and beneficial content that helps everyone. If you do that, strangers who see your content in search engine results pages will be more likely to become visitors.
It’s also important to ensure that you’re using social media to full advantage with your content. Sharing it across different platforms in a variety of formats vastly increases your marketing reach. Experiment with recycling and recombining your content. You can share quotes on Twitter, articles on LinkedIn, interviews on YouTube, and links to everything from Facebook. The possibilities are essentially endless.
Converting: Diving Into the Sales Funnel
Of course, once you have visitors’ attention, the trick is to keep it, and turn it into real interest. This will depend to a great degree on the quality of your content, but it’s also a matter of where your content leads.
Your content should always include a clear call to action. This could come in the form of a simple invitation like you’ll see at the bottom of this post. Many companies find it useful to design a landing page for visitors that offers a free download in exchange for their email address. There are other types of forms that you can build and use to help visitors become viable leads you can later contact directly.
The point is that you never want your marketing content to be purely informational. As a critical component of your lead generation process, it should always be aimed first at helping the reader see the value in working more closely with your organization. After that, you always want to make it easy for them to choose for themselves to establish that relationship.
Closing: Making Deals That Work for Everybody
Once a lead shows you that they’re interested in exploring a business relationship, the next step is to grant their wish. This is the point where you start reaching out directly, whether over the phone, via email, or in person.
To manage this step successfully, it helps to be able to rely on established and successful sales techniques and processes. You can augment those processes through the use of CRM software.
For companies that are dealing with a high volume of leads, it’s helpful to have the support of a team of sales development representatives. Our friends over at Boom Demand are great at helping growing businesses scale their sales operations in this way. Working with SDRs is a powerful way to reduce the workload of your top sales staff. That way, they can spend more time building stronger relationships and closing more deals.
Delighting: Turning Customers into Ambassadors
It can be easy to relax after a deal is signed, and focus on getting the next one written up. This is not a good idea. If you aren’t careful about maintaining and improving your relationships with existing customers, you’re throwing away a huge chunk of your lead generation process.
Happy customers aren’t just a revenue source; they’re a revenue multiplier. They provide both repeat business and referrals, but only if you show them it’s worth it. Trusting your company to take care of their friends and associates is a huge compliment. What does your organization do to deserve that sort of praise?
This can include simple gestures like sending out company christmas cards to every customer, and it can include bigger initiatives like customer appreciation events and discounts for referrals. It also means keeping up your interactions with your customers’ brands and activity via social media and joint marketing efforts. The key is to always exceed your customers’ expectations. That delights them and turns them into ambassadors for your brand to other potential leads.
Evaluating: Finding Room for Innovation in the Lead Generation Process
Even if you always pay attention to each of the preceding steps, no lead generation process is ever perfect. There are always more and better ways to build your customer base. It’s just a question of constantly analyzing your efforts and experimenting with new ways to create interest in your solutions.
You should always be doing A/B testing on your website and marketing materials to see what gets more attention and leads to more prospects. Constantly ask, “what more can we do to provide a better customer experience that helps us grow in the long run?”
The answers to questions like that will lead to as-yet undiscovered heights of business success.
If you want to improve your lead generation process, be sure to reach out to Smart Funnel! We help our clients strengthen and enhance their marketing and lead generation efforts. Our performance solutions include establishing affiliate relationships and improving the quality of raw lead data. Contact us today to get started!
