Essential tips on how to optimise your lead generation activities

I had the pleasure of attending the Technology of Marketing Expo back in September. Filled to the brim with expert marketers, exciting technology-led exhibitors and inspiring guest speakers – I was keen to get stuck in!

There were some really interesting trends identified but one thing that kept cropping up was how quickly the average consumer is changing. Essentially, marketing teams are having to spend a lot more ‘time’ with a prospect now than ever before; guiding potential customers in the right direction, targeting them with the right message(s) and ultimately convincing them to choose you over another company.

As marketers, we need to evolve and adapt in-line with this shift. Below are some key pointers to consider when optimising your lead gen plans.

It’s all about the data

Data collection is imperative to insight, but the leads you may have today are only ever as good as the data you keep. Knowing everything you can about your prospects is key – are they interacting with you on social, what behaviours are they completing on your website, how many times are they opening your emails? Insight into how and where someone is interacting with you can be powerful. With this information to hand, you can plan your future communications with the prospect, making sure you interact with them at the right time with appropriate information that will resonate best.

Qualify those leads

Whilst they require investment, CRM and marketing automation tools can be an essential part of your toolkit. With the ability to track, store, and even score prospects based on specific behaviours, you can both identify your strongest targets, but also improve the process in which this is achieved. Insight such as this can ensure you are then able to nurture your leads at different stages, with different material, so you can push up their lead nurture scores accordingly. You are then in a stronger position to supply qualified, interested and relevant leads to the sales or new business team.

Test, test and test again

Customers are changing all the time, and so are the ways in which they interact. It’s all well and good creating a fancy email campaign with a beautiful landing page to send your leads to, for example, but if it’s not working hard enough and delivering you the leads you need, then you need to try something different. It’s so important to test what works best for your audience, what gets them clicking that button or typing their details into those boxes?

Using the campaign landing page as an example, make sure you test things such as:

• Form fields – try testing a form with a smaller number of fields.
• The position of the form – does it work harder above the fold for instance?
• Brand consistency – are you maintaining the design and colour palette consistent with your brand and not the platform you are using e.g. LinkedIn?

For emails, make sure you review things such as:

• Sender alias – did you know that females tend to increase open rate?
• Test out emojis in subject lines – we’ve seen over 100% engagement increase on these!
• Try reducing the images in your email or cut to plain text only.
• Send before 9 am or after 6 pm (Or for C-Suite, weekends tend to work better)

And finally, track that lead

To be able to fully understand how leads are moving through the buying cycle and how they finally convert into revenue, you must continue tracking the lead even whilst they are with the sales team. This is crucial for future learnings and for being able to prove your worth within the marketing team.

With insight such as this to hand, you’ll become more than just a lead generator, but a revenue generator too.