Digital marketing partners for results-focused lead generation

Whether you’ve never invested in lead generation/digital marketing, or have years of historical data but are unsure or unhappy with the results; the first step is to look at things objectively.

By evaluating historic marketing and sales data, you can:

• Understand the finances behind success (acquisition cost, return on investment)
• Drill down on which customers you want more of and which products to promote
• Unpack campaigns, channels a messaging that has been successful
• Identify potential campaigns, channels a messaging that are yet to be leveraged

Armed with the insight from an Objective Marketing Analysis, this next step can be easily broken down across the following questions:

• Who do you want to target?
• What products will you focus on?
• Where will you target/engage with them?
• Why will they engage (pain point/value offer)?
• How to structure campaigns for maximum effect?
• When will all of this be executed?

As a side note for this step, the key to all successful lead generation and digital marketing is making data-driven decisions. So it’s important to set a plan whilst also staying flexible enough to adjust once data starts flowing in.

This step is all about creating material that will attract target customers whilst promoting engagement and building credibility/authority.

Leveraging the who, what, where, why, how and when from the previous step, the key elements are ad copy, ad creative and lead magnets.

Lead magnets are pieces of content that target customers will want to engage with and are willing to share their details to do so. The key to success is to offer value and/or solve a pain point. Examples include:

• Checklists
• One-page cheatsheets
• eBooks
• Industry reports
• Calculators

Before going live with any campaign, tracking needs to be correctly installed. This includes

• Channel integrations / pixels
• Google Analytics configuration
• Goal tracking
• Conversion tracking
• CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) tracking

It’s also fundamental that the marketing team have visibility over the company’s CRM and sales process as this will allow for a feedback loop that accounts for pipeline progression and sales data. 

Finally, regularly clarifying the key metrics that matter for the business stakeholders and campaign management will ensure that campaigns are working towards the objectives that matter.

Circling back to the Objective Marketing Analysis and Strategic Plan of Action, it will be clear what channels to run campaigns on. Potential channels include:

• Google Ads
• LinkedIn
• Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram)
• X
• YouTube
• Display
• TikTok

In this step campaigns are created and go live. 

Remembering the importance of data-driven decisions, it’s important to stay flexible and make decisions based on the data and insights that these campaigns generate. Scale what works, whilst also being willing to divert budget away from campaigns that aren’t performing.

The following are common denominators of high-converting websites:

• Social proof
• Authority amplification
• Conversion pathways
• Logical page structure
• Good page speed
• Responsive design

Landing Pages:

Most companies don’t gauge the role that landing pages play in successful lead generation. These pages are designed to run parallel to the existing website, but speak specifically to a campaign and its audience.

A good marketing partner will design landing pages for each campaign, thus enhancing ad conversion without the need for a costly and timing website rebuild.

Typically a lead will take many touchpoints before converting to a sale (the numbers vary by industry). So creating content that will nurture leads following their first engagement will comprehensively increase conversion.  This includes:

• Email nurture sequences
• Display retargeting
• Meta Ads retargeting
• YouTube retargeting 

Good nurture content is designed to build on the first engagement whilst assisting the sales process. Good marketing partners will collaborate with the sales team to achieve this effectively by proactively addressing sales questions, highlighting social proof via testimonials and increasing engagement and authority by sharing additional resources.

Marketing automation is a broad term, but with regard to lead generation strategy it covers:

• Automating and tailoring nurture sequences
• Sharing marketing insight with the sales team
• Sharing sales activity with the marketing team
• Summarising campaign activity to assist with enhancements

There are many recurring tasks in the marketing and sales process that can be automated to not only improve a team’s capacity but also ensure accuracy and timeliness.

Successful lead generation requires collaboration between sales and marketing. Which is sadly where most digital marketing relationships fail.

It’s important for a marketing partner to report transparently and on the metrics and objectives that matter most to the client. But it’s also crucial for the client to provide both quantitative and qualitative feedback on the leads being generated.

From this, strategy will continually iterate. When a great lead or eventual sale comes in, a good marketing partnership will reverse engineer it, by tracking back to the ads, copy, lead magnets, landing pages, nurture points and sales processes that contributed.

These nine steps may sound simple when broken down like this, but the vast majority of companies have failed to grasp the collective dependencies of each step.

Like a sports team, performance requires each position (step) to work together, achieving the respective roles in conjunction with the rest of the team and an overarching strategy.

If you’d like to discuss any of these steps more, book in a free strategy session with our team to better understand how this approach could enhance your business’ lead generation.