Every marketer well knows it is pretty useless to cast your lead generation net far and wide, hoping to get at least some leads, because all you will get is mostly unqualified leads. If you infuse your marketing outreach with vague messages, they simply won’t work for a wide audience. If your proposal is not narrow enough, targeting a too generic audience would be a waste for you. However, there is only a limited number of strategies to use for lead generation. Typically, you:
- Identify potential leads
- Target qualified leads
- Keep leads engaged
- Nurture leads to close
What should you do to make your b2blead generation more effective? Target your marketing outreach more precisely. Craft a specific message and direct it at a target audience by using the method of targeted lead generation.
Overall, targeting is the key concept for any today’s marketing efforts. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that all marketers start with creating an ideal customer profile and researching demographic groups that fit that profile. However, lead generation is such a marketing process that requires continuous tweaking and adjusting to respond to any changes in your audience moods or the market environment or any other variables. If you’ve already had successful marketing campaigns, you can use that data to optimize your lead generation and keep targeting your marketing tools more and more precisely. Here’s a list of basic tactics for your effective target lead generation.
4 Basic Tactics of Targeted Lead Generation
How to target specific audiences that use specific language, can be found outside of mainstream websites, and are characterized by specific behaviors online? You will definitely push their pain points in your social media activity and optimize your landing pages with SEO keywords. You will run AB testing and pull up data from focus groups. These all are very legit and well-working tactics. However, there are also some basic steps you can take to re-evaluate your past successes and leverage the data sales reps can provide.
Run Data Mining on Closed Deal
Review the basic information on closed deals and you will get a lot of valuable data you can use for adjusting your current campaigns. In addition to deal size and revenue, also look at deal plans, buyer persona traits, and ideal customer profile fit. If you find out new characteristics in a number of customers, update your Ideal Customer Profiles or expand your set of buyer personas. To help your data mining, choose among the best lead mining software like Leadfeeder, ZoomInfo, LeadInfo, Lead411, D&B Hoovers, Lusha, Octopus CRM, VisitorTrack, and Oceanos.
Companies Look for the Best Leads (Sales Qualified Leads or other)
Next, review what you currently have. Marketers distinguish between marketing qualified leads (that have just been engaged by marketing efforts) and sales qualified leads (that have taken action and indicated their interest in your product). Find out the number of each type of leads and which channel brings you the biggest number of qualified leads. You should know what means a ‘qualified lead’ for your business and how many leads from each channel are qualified. Finally, figure out how many sales you get from each marketing channel (while calculating the percentage, do cost per lead too – Belkins may fork over up to $100 per sales lead but a lot depends on an industry). Once you know percentages, you will understand what channels are the most efficient for you. This information will further specify your buyer personas as it is essential to know which channels work better for different products/services.
Get Feedback from Sales
Now is the time to back up your findings with some hands-on experience your sales reps must have had. While you may have thought that a social media marketing funnel supplies excellent qualified leads, sales reps know firsthand that current content marketing tactics bring leads that are hard to close. Or you will be surprised to learn that the latest outbound email outreach has brought leads that took very little work from sales reps in contrast to leads that come from the lead magnets. Human experience always supplements analytics and statistics superbly.
Optimize Your Lead Generation Strategy
Finally you have all the data you need to see the overlaps and come up with some complementary strategy. Once you identify the most effective campaigns and channels, find ways to optimize KPIs. Once you spot channels and tactics that do not deliver on the money you invest in them, you can redirect the budget to better performing channels and strategies. Shy away from tactics that require you to spend more and cling to those that are easier to pull off.
Make Sure You Got Your Back Covered
What does it mean to get your back covered in terms in lead generation? While you’re fumbling with targeted lead generation, make sure all the aspects of lead generations are highly effective and smoothly running.
- Check out your email marketing efforts. Subject lines should be crisp and personalized. Email content needs to be impeccably written and formatted. Drip email chains should be manually adjusted.
- Improve your landing page performance. Is your landing page simple? Does it still have navigation elements? Do you show people social proof? Is there a sales pitch video? Look at your landing page with a fresh eye and run AB tests to make sure it works at the peak of its productivity.
- Hunt for targeted leads on LinkedIn. In terms of social media marketing, LinkedIn is much more effective for lead generation than Facebook and Twitter taken together (2.74% against 0.77% and 0.69% respectively). LinkedIn is good not only for posting your resumes but also for running ads and creating valuable content.
- Upgrade your software. Never underestimate the power of using the latest tools on lead generation. From email deliverability to appointment setting, all what can be outsourced to machines should be outsourced. It will make more cognitive space in your head for higher goals and ideas. In particular, we are proud owners of Folderly, an email checker able to make the life of marketers and sales reps much easier. In addition to keeping a mailbox score and ensuring email deliverability, Folderly handles domain health analysis and runs background maintenance.
Grow Better with Targeted Lead Generation
Lead generation is a quirky process that is never stable. Tweaking and adjusting is the banality of a marketer’s day-to-day routine. We need to check in and see how it is going all the time. All the merrier! It disrupts the monotony of office hours and throws down a challenge to us. On the plus side, the steps toward targeted lead generation will definitely improve your relationship with the sales team. As you’ve seen from the advice above, human interaction is essential in all that lead generation affair. However, if you feel you would be much relieved to outsource not only many day-to-day tasks to your software, but also lead generation in general, remember about professionals out there ready to pick up the slack.