Written by A lead is a company (or individual at that company) who has some interest in, or need for, what you offer. So, of course, generating leads is a vital part of getting new customers – new customers start as leads, after all.
Leads can be generated through various different channels – traditional marketing, digital marketing, telemarketing, inbound, and so on. There are plenty of different ways to generate leads, and plenty of lead generation companies (like us, hi) out there who can help you generate more leads for your business.
So, when you’re building your lead gen strategy, what should you include.
The goal
Before you start any activity, you need to know what you’re trying to achieve. What’s your goal? 10 leads? 20? 500?
If you want to be able to measure whether or not your activities are working, you need to know what you’re benchmarking them against. If your revenue targets mean you need to generate 500 leads, there’s no point in continuing working on something that only delivers 5. Having a clear goal will help you prioritise your time, resource, and budget to get the best results.
The channels
This is the big one – which channels will you be using? These need to be planned out as part of your strategy.
- Digital Marketing – this encompasses a whole lot of different activities, so you’ll need to separate them out as part of your plan. Will you be using paid ads on Google? What about different social media platforms? Will you be doing email marketing? How about content marketing? Plot them all out and build them into your strategy.
- Traditional Marketing – this covers things like magazine advertising, TV and radio ads, sponsorship, trade shows (when those start up again), trade press, billboards, direct mail – pretty much anything non-digital. These activities can be a lot harder to measure, but they’re very popular in some industries. Add them to your plan.
- Telemarketing – many businesses are surprised at how effective telemarketing is for lead generation, but it’s a big industry for a reason. Lead generation is the whole point, and having someone dedicated to drumming up interest in your products and/or services gets straight to the point.
Once you’ve chosen your channels, put them into your strategy and then we move on to testing and measuring…
The checkpoints
Different channels take different amounts of time to generate results – SEO, for example, can take six months, while PPC and Telemarketing show more action within a couple of months (they’ll usually show something sooner than that, but take time to settle in).
So, you need to build in your expectations and checkpoints so that you can review how things are going. You don’t want to pull the plug too soon, but you also don’t want to wait too long and waste time and/or money. Plot in your review points and work out how you’ll react to different levels of results – some things will need tweaking and optimising, while others might no longer be the right approach for you.
The budget
Each channel you use will have some kind of cost to it – whether that’s the cost of using an outsourced provider, or simply the cost of the time taken by an in-house resource. Tools, ad fees, and design costs all add towards this.
Having a budget for each element means you can keep track of how much you’re spending (and therefore how much you need each to generate in order to be profitable). Take a look at our post about the 3 commercial questions you need to ask yourself for more on this.
Keep an eye on your budget, and the results you’re getting – but as we’ve already said, don’t leap to conclusions until you’ve given everything enough time to get going.
The resources
The last thing you want to do is get halfway through your lead generation strategy and find you can’t continue.
Work out who will be doing each element, and what they’re going to need to do it. Take a look at your pipeline and figure out if anything might be coming up that would take resource away. Do you have enough coverage if someone is on holiday or off sick? Building momentum is a key part of getting leads, so you want to avoid sudden halts.
If you’re using outsourced providers, you have less issue with this, as they’re responsible for resourcing your project to the agreed levels. You don’t have to worry about holidays, sickness, someone leaving, and so on.
Keep track of everyone in your strategy document – you might have multiple different providers, in-house resources, and ad-hoc support. If you’ve got all of this planned out from the start, you’re in a much better position to get started and keep rolling without issue.
If you’d like to talk about telemarketing for lead generation, give us a whistle. It’s what we do.