Make Your Marketing Work: How to Develop a Lead Generation Strategy

If you’re in the same boat as 65% of businesses, generating leads is your biggest challenge.

It’s tough to draw traffic to your website, let alone turn those visitors into leads and convert leads into customers. Business owners that don’t understand lead generation strategies can fail to generate or nurture leads, losing out on key opportunities for a sale.

How can you avoid making these same mistakes? Your first step should be to keep reading, so you can develop a winning lead generation strategy.

Define Your Goal and Set an Objective

If your current marketing strategy isn’t working for you, it could be because you haven’t defined your goals. What is it you want to achieve? What’s your campaign objective?

You can have more than one goal, but you need to clearly define these goals before you can hope to generate leads. Doing so allows you to tailor your marketing strategy.

Examples of business goals and campaign objectives include:

• Boosting traffic
• Raising brand awareness
• Grow revenue
• Drive more sales
• Get more newsletter subscribers
• Gain social media followers
• Increase click-through rates

Define a Successful Conversion

What do you consider a successful conversion? Is it a visitor that signs up to join your email list, downloading an e-book, or purchasing an item?

Chances are that you’ll have a few different conversion goals. Figure out what you want a visitor to do in order to consider them a lead.

Once you know this, you can start tailoring your content marketing strategy to guide them to take that action.

You might encourage visitors to add their email to your subscriber list to get a promo code, therefore growing your email list. Urging visitors to get a free quote on a new roof encourages them to contact you to get a price. Maybe you want them to share a blog post with their friends, bringing more people to your website.

Identify Your Target Audience

Who are you trying to reach? Your lead generation strategy will likely be different depending on your target audience. For instance, maybe you sell all-natural products, and you’re trying to reach people within a certain age group trying to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle.

Understanding your audience will help you identify their pain points, write content, create an effective call-to-action, and even design an appealing website.

Once you know your audience, you can figure out what type of ad to use and where to start advertising. If your target audience hangs out on social media, you can monetize social media platforms to bring in more leads.

Create a Successful Lead Generation Strategy

These are the foundational steps in designing a lead generation strategy, and the more you follow them, the easier it will be for you to hone your marketing tactics and find what works.

If you want to know how to generate leads, you need to continue to educate yourself and go through some trial and error. To learn more tactics and tips, take a look at our digital marketing section.