3 Keys to a Successful Lead Generation Campaign

3 Keys to a Successful Lead Generation Campaign Ken Horst 612-251-8237 http://digitalmarketingwingman.com

If you haven t noticed, more and more companies are starting to use marketing automation and nurture marketing lead generation tactics to grow their business. While this has historically been more of a B2B strategy, a number of B2C industries are also stepping up their lead generation game such as real estate, higher education and any other B2C industry that sells a higher priced product or service. Whether you re a B2B or B2C business, there are a few best practices for lead gen that are universal and in this guide we will look at three of them; the offer, your call to action (CTA) and landing page. We will focus this guide on companies that sell bigger ticket products and services that generally require a longer buying cycle than companies that sell low cost products to consumers. Offer or Lead Magnet In order for a nurture marketing lead generation campaign to work, you have to come up with something that is relevant and useful to your prospects and there is enough perceived value that they are willing to trade some personal info in order to receive the offer. B2B companies have been using whitepapers with great success for many years because they are designed to answer questions that prospective customers have at various stages in the buying cycle. The document you are reading now is an example of a whitepaper or guide and the goal of this guide is to help you learn more about what you need to do if you want to deploy a lead gen campaign for your product or service. You were presented with a call-to-action on our website or you may have seen our CTA on Facebook, another website or when you did a search on Google. Since we are a digital marketing company and our prospective customer is one who wants more leads, it stands to reason that you may be interested in information about what makes a successful lead generation campaign. The key to the offer is to always be testing. When we created this document, we were pretty sure that people who downloaded it may ultimately be interested in working 3 KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGN WWW.DIGITALMARKETINGWINGMAN.COM 1

with a company who could just do everything for them. But you can never be 100% sure that your title or subject matter will hit the bulls-eye every time. For this reason, when creating your offer, it s very important to begin by having a basic understanding of the problems, pains and desires of your target market. During our brainstorming session for this campaign we came up with a number of ideas for what would make the best offer. Then we discussed the different ideas among our team of experienced digital marketers and settled on the one that we all agreed would have the best shot at attracting companies and decision makers who might eventually need our services. As a general rule, we try to keep our guides between 1,200-2,000 words as that is long enough to provide a decent explanation of the subject matter without being so long that most people never finish reading it. The key to the length of your guide is that the quality of the content is more important than the quantity. In addition to whitepapers and guides other examples of successful offers include infographics, slide decks, templates, checklists, assessments, etc. It s important to have a mix of different types of offers that you are testing as you may find in your business or industry that a template or checklist generates far more top-of-funnel leads than a guide. Call to Action Once you have decided on your offer or lead magnet, you need to come up with a set of buttons, banners and display ads to promote it. Knowing where you will promote your offer will help you determine which types of CTAs you will need to design. There are two areas on the web that you can promote your offer; on your organic properties such as your website, blog and your branded social media channels and/or on through paid channels such as Google AdWords, or paid social like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. 3 KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGN WWW.DIGITALMARKETINGWINGMAN.COM 2

Depending on how much traffic you get on your website, blog and social channels, you may be able to drive a significant number of leads through your campaign without having to spend any money. However, if you re like most small and medium sized business we see, part of your business growth problem is you aren t getting enough traffic to your organic properties. (This is another area where Mash Digital Marketing can help) That said, when we deploy a campaign, we generally order a set of CTAs for our organic properties; website, blog and branded social channels and a set of CTAs for paid search channels. On the paid side we generally go with Google and paid Facebook as starting point. For most companies we work with we generally create the following CTAs for our organic channels: CTA for the website home page CTA for internal pages on website 2 CTAs for company blog (One to imbed in related articles/blog posts and another for the sidebar) CTA for all branded social media channels (Each channel has different image sizes they accept) The good news is that each social media channel does a good job of let you know what size you need to make your CTAs and images ads to get the best visibility on their site. The bad news is they are constantly changing the layout/design of their platform so you have to keep up and be ready to recreate your CTAs in a different size in order to continue to get the best visibility and exposure. Facebook is notorious for this. The other very important thing about your CTAs is you need to always be testing. We generally create two sets of every CTA so we can run A/B split tests in order to optimize our click through rate and get the most leads possible. 3 KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGN WWW.DIGITALMARKETINGWINGMAN.COM 3

We also recommend a set of CTAs for the following paid channels: 12 images/display ads for the Google Display Network (Click here for a list of sizes for Google) 2-3 images/display ads for paid Facebook, LinkedIn or any other paid social channels we are using. (Click here for a list of sizes for Facebook) Here is a link to an article to help you create effective CTAs using a very affordable tool called Canva. Landing Page The last component of successful lead generation campaigns we will discuss in this guide is the landing page. Once you have determined the best offer and created all the CTAs you re going to need to promote it, you need to create a unique page to send your prospect to when they click on your CTA. The main reason you want to create a unique landing page for each offer or lead magnet is that landing pages, unlike website pages (more on this in another guide), are specifically designed to motivate a visitor to take action. That said, not all landing pages are created equal but the good news is there are some best practices that you can follow to seriously improve your results. Here is an images of a best practice landing page and a brief explanation of each component: 3 KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGN WWW.DIGITALMARKETINGWINGMAN.COM 4

1. Headline - K.I.S.S. Keep It Short and Simple. Your headline should be the largest font size on the page so it sticks out. 2. Sub headlines Use sub heads to highlight the second most important part of your offer. Sub headlines are important because most online readers are skimmers which means if the headlines and sub headlines don t grab their attention, they will leave your page before finishing it or filling out your form. 3. Copy Make sure your landing page copy is well written and grammatically correct. Every landing page should be reviewed by an editor before publishing. 4. Testimonials and Trust Badges Using client testimonials on your landing page is proven to increase conversion rates. Other trust badges include things like; 3 KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGN WWW.DIGITALMARKETINGWINGMAN.COM 5

Better Business Bureau logo, professional affiliations and social media likes and shares. 5. Call To Action Use a strong call to action like; Download Now, Sign-up Now etc. Make it very clear to your visitor exactly what you want them to do. 6. CTA Buttons Make sure your CTAs stand out and are highly visible. You can do this with different sizes, shapes, and colors and always make sure they are above the fold (see #9 below) 7. Links Limit the number of links that take people away from the landing page. (I generally don t have any links on my landing pages.) The goal of the landing page is to capture leads so every link that takes the visitor off your landing page is a distraction and can defeat the purpose of the landing page. 8. Images and Videos Always use high quality images that are relevant to your offer and target market. (e.g. don t use an image of a kitten on a landing page targeting home buyers ;)) When possible, add a video to your landing page if it is short, under 90 seconds, relevant and useful to the goal of getting visitors to fill out the form. 9. Above the Fold The most important info on the landing page, especially the form, should always be above the fold. If your most compelling info or bullet points are below the fold, many visitors may not see it because you didn t give them enough compelling reasons to scroll down the page. Summary Bottom line is that creating and managing a successful lead generation campaign is simple but not easy. The information I shared with you in this guide works and it is fairly simple to understand and implement. The hard part is doing the work on an ongoing basis because it takes time and/or money to build and maintain a digital lead generation machine in any industry. 3 KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGN WWW.DIGITALMARKETINGWINGMAN.COM 6

Contact me, your Digital Marketing Wingman, for more information on how I can help you generate exclusive leads on a monthly basis for less work and less money than it will take to do it yourself. As your Digital Marketing Wingman, I will teach you and/or your employees how to set up and manage a customized lead generation campaign for your business and industry. I also offer ongoing monthly consulting packages to help you keep things on track and provide recommendations for additional digital marketing tactics to keep growing your business month over month and year over year. Signup for our blog and monthly webinars and training to stay informed about changes in digital marketing and how you need to respond in order to stay ahead of your competition and continue to grow your business in a cost effective way. I look forward to helping you grow your business through the ever changing world of Digital Marketing! 3 KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGN WWW.DIGITALMARKETINGWINGMAN.COM 7