The Best Lead Generation Campaign for Every Channel

Lead generation campaigns vary. They depend on several factors, including the nature of your brand, your business objectives, and the needs of your target audience. These campaigns also incorporate your creativity. For these reasons, lead campaigns are not a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. 

Given the varying nature of lead campaigns, what can we call the best lead generation campaign? It is the one that will run successfully and meet your business objectives. 

If you are at a loss to create the best lead generation campaign, let’s explore some of the things you need to know about it.

Lead Generation Campaign Basic Terms

Lead-Generating Website

The overarching goal of a lead-generating website is to generate and nurture business leads. Lead generation websites vary in nature. For example, some lead-generation websites recruit new customers, and others generate business partners. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System

A CRM system is a tool for collecting prospects’ information. Such information includes websites, phone numbers, emails, content downloads, and open opportunities. Notably, you can customize your CRM system based on the information you need about your prospects. 

Content Marketing Strategy

A content marketing strategy is a strategic plan for consistently generating and distributing informational content to your target audience. Such a plan aims to guide your target audience through the funnel of your content, gain its trust, make it see you as an expert, and make it take action.

Content Calendar

A content calendar is a tool that marketers use to schedule all content marketing activities. It applies to both online and traditional marketing activities. A content calendar enables you to visualize and strategize your content distribution.

Lead

A lead is a potential prospect with a high probability of becoming a customer. Such a prospect has an interest in your business offers and is willing to share their information with you. 

Qualified Lead

A qualified lead is a prospect that meets your business standards and criteria, and you consider them as highly likely to become your customer. 

Lead Generation

Lead generation is the starting point where a prospect inquires about or shows interest in your products and services.

Lead Generation Campaign

A lead generation campaign is the process of generating interest in a product or service to develop leads. This process involves using a strategy via a specific media source to present an offer that creates inbound leads. 

Nurturing

Some leads are early qualifiers, while others take some time to qualify. Sometimes, it takes frequent communication and interaction before a lead gets ready for direct contact with your business. 

Hard Offer

A hard offer refers to an offer that warrants an immediate action of a prospect. Such offers are limited, or they have an expiry date.

Soft Offer

Unlike a hard offer, a soft offer doesn’t require immediate action. A perfect example of a soft offer is an email newsletter subscription offer. 

Lead Capture

Lead capture entails using automated tools to gather prospects’ contact information from email campaigns, landing pages, or web forms, among other sources. 

Landing Pages

Landing pages refer to the pages that open up after a prospect clicks an offer link. 

How to Create a Successful Lead Generation Campaign

The creation of a successful lead generation campaign is procedural. In other words, it follows a few simple steps. However, the process depends on your target audience, business objectives, and preferred media channel. 

Here are five steps that can help you create a successful lead-generation campaign:

1. Set Campaign Objectives

Lead generation campaigns do not have standard objectives. They depend on what you need your business to achieve. However, you can begin the process by defining the number of leads you want and the revenue every lead will generate. 

The following considerations can help you define your lead generation campaign’s objectives:

• Your target audience
• Means of reaching them
• What you want them to do
• Call to action
• Your offers
• Means of following them up
• When to carry out a follow-up
• Who will undertake the follow-up?
• Details to use during the follow-up
• Means of recording and reporting the lead results
• Who needs these results?
• When to evaluate lead generation efforts
• Expected success level

2. Identify Your Campaign Target

You can target your existing contacts or identify a new target audience with your lead generation campaign. Regardless, ensure that you identify your target group's pain points and the needs your business seeks to address. 

3. Identify Your Preferred Media Channels

Media channels range from ebooks and guides to email marketing. Notably, whenever a business generates 60% of its leads online, it's twice profitable as its competitors. For this reason, opt for generating online leads using webinars or email campaigns, among other online channels. 

4. Create an Offer

To identify a lead, you must present your offer to your prospects. Such an offer can be a free webinar registration or guide download. Whenever a lead responds to your offer, capture its information. 

After capturing the prospects’ information, the next step is to nurture the leads until you close a sale. 

5. Develop a Communication Strategy

Your communication strategy must include your follow-up process. It should capture how you will respond to any queries your leads raise. It should also detail the content you will share, the person making the follow-up, and the design of your proposals. 

Best Practices for Creating a Successful Lead Generation Campaign

Now that you know the steps you should follow when creating a successful lead generation campaign, let’s explore some of the best practices you can employ during the process:

Use Scarcity and Exclusivity

Scarcity refers to a limited-time offer. It seeks to increase the value of your offer. For example, you can come up with summer offers that end when the season ends. In other words, the offer will have a timeframe and be exclusive for the summer season. 

Give Before You Get

Giving away valuable freebies is usually a compelling deal. The move creates a value proposition where you present your brand as a solution provider rather than a business-centric brand. 

If you give a valuable offer free of charge, you lure your prospects to share their information with you. In other words, you make the prospect feel like returning a favor by engaging you after receiving your free offer. 

Find the Right CTA (Call-To-Action)

Always create an enticing CTA that tells your readers what will happen next after they click the provided link. For example, according to lead generation companies in Dubai, if you use the phrase “Book Now” and link it, readers will feel the urgency to take action before the offer ends. 

You can also opt to use a picture or a video of what the reader will have or experience after taking action. Such visuals enable readers to imagine how it will look when consuming the product or service.  

Content Types Ideal for Lead Generation Campaigns

Are you at a loss when selecting the type of content you want to use for your lead generation campaign? Well, here is the list of the content that leading marketers use for their lead generation campaigns and the percentage of marketers who use them:

• Videos: 59%
• Blogs: 48%
• Images: 46%
• Infographics: 45%
• Case studies: 42%

Here is also the type of content you can use for your lead generation campaign:

• Authoritative posts: If you are a subject-matter expert, you can write authoritative posts. Such posts give readers a better understanding of various topics. In other words, they are informative posts.
• Solid opinion pieces: If you want to create brand awareness, use solid opinion posts. These posts are not necessarily your impromptu thoughts. Instead, they are persuasive option pieces with research and data backing. 
• Original research: This form of research comes from industrial consumption. It focuses on unresolved issues or data sets requiring refreshing. 
• How-tos: This content provides tutorials and tips that address prospects’ problems. At the end of the day, your prospects leave your page with answers to their problems. 
• Trending content: This type of content enables you to leverage popular topics. For example, you can create a blog post featuring the latest breaking news.
• Infographics: Turning information into more understandable visual bits makes the information easy to consume. Also, it lures your prospects into sharing the images. 
• Videos: The marketing realm has seen a surge in the creation and consumption of videos. Do you know that 72% of all prospects prefer watching a video over reading your business content? Now you know. If you do not have an in-house video production talent, consider outsourcing it. 

The Bottom Line

According to Yaddly, a revenue-focused marketing agency, generating leads and scoring leads are two different exercises. It is possible to generate leads and score them poorly, leading to a useless following up of a lead and a waste of time and other resources. 

So, how do you qualify for a lead? One of the ways is by scoring it. This technique seeks to qualify leads quantitatively. It involves assigning a numerical value to a lead to determine whether a lead is interested or ready for a sale. 

Whereas scoring is at your discretion, it depends on the actions the prospects have taken, the provided information, the level of engagement, and other parameters your sales team deems the best for scoring leads. If the lead scores high, it's closer to becoming a customer. 

Now that you have a lot of information on the best lead-generation campaign for every channel, it is time to create your campaign and generate a zillion leads!