The Business Lead-Generation Playbook — 6 Steps to Successfully Grow Your Business

A solid lead-generation system is the heart of every successful business plan. That’s why it’s important to continually seek new and innovative ways to grow sales and build interest in your organization’s products and services. In this month’s feature, I share six essential steps from FulcrumTech’s Business Lead-Generation Playbook to help you effectively grow your company.

1. Establish your goals and objectives. One of the best ways to align an entire organization’s marketing and lead-generation efforts is to clearly define measurable goals and objectives. Perhaps your company could set a goal to increase brand awareness, for example, boost lead conversions, or improve customer loyalty and retention. When establishing your objectives, be sure they are S.M.A.R.T. — specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. Goals and objectives that meet these criteria have a much better chance of being accomplished.

   Here are a couple of good examples of specific objectives:

   • Increase the leads from your organization’s website by 25% in 90 days.
   • Grow online orders by 10% in the second quarter.
2. Know your unique selling proposition. What is it about your product or service that makes it better than the competition? Answer that and you’ll have your unique selling proposition (USP), which can then be used to help your organization generate leads and target sales more effectively. To create a USP, put yourself in your customers’ shoes to determine their reasons for purchasing your product rather than your competitors’ products. Then, be sure your USP demonstrates benefits, solves a problem, tells what’s unique about your product, and/or makes a promise.

   Domino’s Pizza provides a great example of an effective USP: “Pizza delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free.”

3. Understand your market. Who are your optimal and most profitable buyers? The more you know about them — their concerns, personality traits, and how they would react in certain situations — the better you can design marketing messages and websites that will convert.

   When it comes to optimizing a website for lead generation, it’s more profitable for organizations to apply psychographic versus demographic information. In a ClickZ article, marketing author and speaker Bryan Eisenberg describes a situation that illustrates the difference between psychographics and demographics. He suggests imagining that someone finds a lost wallet on a street in New York City. Will that person pocket the money or look for the owner? If you’re told only that the person who found the wallet is a male between 30 and 44 years old, you have no idea about what he would do in that situation. But if you’re told that George Costanza from the situation comedy Seinfeld found the wallet, you know he’d pocket the money.

   So do the necessary market research to really understand and create personas for your primary target audience. And, also do the keyword research to uncover the language that resonates with your market and converts. Collecting psychographic information may not be a quick and easy process, but you’ll find it’s highly effective in delivering the lead-generation results you’re looking for.

4. Develop a lead-generation strategy. Let’s start at your website. Do you have an effective sales funnel in place? To answer that question, first take a look at your calls to action. Are they clearly written and in the eye path? Do they match customer persona needs? Then, do you take prospective customers directly to a landing page dedicated to the specific campaign? The landing page is where you do the selling, so be sure you provide enough information to close the sale. Include pricing information, incentives, and sense of urgency, as well as trust-building content such as warranties. Plus, don’t forget to include a lead-collection form.

   As you choose which lead-generation tools to use to drive people to your website, consider the following statistics about inbound online marketing (e.g., social media, search engine optimization [SEO], and content marketing such as blogs) versus outbound marketing (e.g., email marketing, transactional emails, and shopping-cart recovery). According to HubSpot’s The 2012 State of Inbound Marketing:

   • The average cost per lead of inbound marketing is $135 versus $346 for outbound marketing. This means that the cost per lead of inbound marketing is typically 60% less than outbound.
   • Leads from SEO convert 14% of the time versus 1.7% for outbound leads.

   Then, to help you choose which tools to use to generate leads and drive people to your website, we suggest leveraging Forrester‘s POST methodology:

   People — Who are you trying to reach?
   Objectives — What do you want to achieve?
   Strategy — How will relationships change as a result of what you put in place?
   Technology — Which technology will deliver the best results?

   For more information about developing a lead-generation strategy, check out the detailed Lead-Generation Toolbox in my free infographic — The Business Lead-Generation Playbook, available at: https://fulcrumtech.net/leadgen.

5. Establish your metrics dashboard. There are myriad metrics to measure for social, SEO, and email, as well as numerous tools available to measure those metrics. Where to start? Measure what matters for your individual business. Numbers of fans and followers, popular hashtags, website visit volume, and terms that convert are just a few examples of metrics to measure. For a listing of what to measure and examples metric dashboard tools, download my lead-generation infographic.

   Plus, check out the following useful sources to help you set up your metrics dashboard:

   • Google Analytics: About Goals and Funnels, which shows you how to set up goals and funnels
   • Wordtracker’s e-book: SEO for Profit: The Ultimate SEO Guide
   • FulcrumTech’s ROI Goalsetter^® tool — an email dashboard tool for planning and to help you achieve your goals
6. Continually improve. To create a successful business lead-generation system, you must relentlessly pursue continual improvement. Establishing measureable goals and knowing your metrics are integral parts of improving your lead generation. Then, every month, try to add at least one new strategy to your own lead-generation playbook — whether it’s expanding efforts to grow your organization’s social media friends and followers, adding a blog to your website, or creating an email newsletter. In this way, you’ll generate more qualified leads and more sales conversions, leading to greater business success.

Need help in developing a more effective online marketing strategy for generating new business leads and growing your organization? Turn to the experts at FulcrumTech. Email us or give us a call at 215-489-9336 and get started today.