Lead Generation: How to Do It Successfully

Lead Generation: How to Do It Successfully

Breaking Down Successful Lead Generation

Lead generation: It is the ultimate goal for all of your marketing efforts. Putting in hard work, energy, money, trust, and endless research into a marketing piece with the hopes of it getting to work for you and generating tons of new leads. The official definition—the one in the Oxford Dictionary—describes lead generation as “the action or process of identifying and cultivating potential customers for a business’s products or services.” Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, there is lead generation, and then there is successful lead generation. If you’re ready to take your marketing up a notch and get started with successful lead generation, this article is for you. Keep reading to learn more about successful lead generation and our top tips for getting there.

First Thing’s First: Understand Your Audience

When it comes to successful lead generation, not every business will have the same roadmap. This is true even if it comes to two businesses in the same industry. Your business is unique to your target audience, and it is essential to know what they want before you begin making any sort of marketing material.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. What is my target audience’s demographic?
2. What are their ages?
3. What are their pain points?
4. Where do they like to find news or other information?
5. Where do they spend most of their time online?
6. What other sorts of companies are they interested in?
7. How do they like to be spoken to?
8. What time of day are they usually online?
9. What sort of imagery do they like to see?
10. Do they like to be contacted directly?

If you do not have the answer to most, or even some, of these questions, it is time to analyze your audience. We have written tons of blogs about audience persona, so start there or reach out to us for help before you get started on any marketing strategy.

Lead Generation Using Video and Display Ads

Exciting visuals: People love them! They are quick to capture people’s attention, can be funny, go viral, be thought-provoking, or are just otherwise downright interesting. Video and display ads encourage your audience to take action by clicking, and then they get taken to a landing page to make a purchase (more on that later). Want to create a video display ad that is so attention-grabbing that your target audience can’t resist a click? Let’s break it down.

1. What’s the goal? Is the goal of your video ad to attract more leads for a specific product, offer, or service? Or, maybe you’re trying to get more traffic to your website in general? More social media followers? Build brand awareness? Or, maybe all of the above? Set a clear goal so that your message is clear and concise.
2. Hyper-target! Don’t waste money showing your ad to people who will never make a purchase or who aren’t in your target audience. Get as specific as possible when you’re in the ad placement section and target, target, target!
3. Tell them exactly what to do. Don’t leave them guessing; urge them to CLICK NOW, SIGN UP, or ACT QUICKLY! Telling them exactly what to do (take an action) and when (giving them a sense of urgency) will give you the best possible results.

Creating a Great Video Display Ad

Here comes the hard part: Creating a great video display ad that generates a ton of leads. As marketers and creatives, this is where our expertise comes in. We research your target audience down to the bone and come up with a plan that will work specifically for them.

Here are some examples:

• Comfort. Are you a dental office or another type of healthcare office? You want to make sure people feel comfortable walking into your office and trusting you with their needs. Nothing is scarier than the unknown, so creating a video that shows off your office, your staff, procedures, and more will help them feel more comfortable with the thought of choosing you.
• Solving a problem. Does your product or service solve a unique or specific problem that people have? Use that to your advantage to create a great video ad that will capture their attention.
• Limited time offer. With the holidays just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about your winter offerings. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other holiday sales are a great time to pump out some new display ads with a sense of urgency.

B2B Lead Generation Using Social Media

If you’re a B2B business, you will face unique challenges when it comes to lead generation. You have to make your business known to important decision makers of other businesses, and largely while they are on their “time off”. Luckily, there are a few successful ways to do it, such as on social media—more specifically, with LinkedIn and Facebook lead generation.

LinkedIn B2B Lead Generation

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions offers some B2B lead generation options. According to LinkedIn, working with them for B2B leads is unique due to three important factors that they offer:

1. Professional Data. Position, seniority, industry, location – these details help you reach the right people in the right way.
2. Business Context. Members come to LinkedIn to research business topics and advance their careers, creating a receptive mindset for B2B messaging.
3. News Feed Products. Ads on LinkedIn appear alongside content in the news feed for a seamless experience

Here are the different ways you can advertise content on LinkedIn:

• My Company tab. This is a feature that optimizes employee advocacy directly on your LinkedIn Page. Using this feature, marketing can easily equip the workforce with customized content to share, increasing its reach and authentic impact with audiences. This proves especially helpful for alignment with sales, as the marketing team can distribute documents for reps to share on social feeds and during prospect engagements, while also receiving feedback on what’s resonating.
• Sponsored Content. With the right targeting parameters in place, Sponsored Content will be hugely helpful in your LinkedIn lead gen efforts. These native advertisements fit seamlessly with a user’s experience on the platform. While often used to deliver value-adding content branding objectives, this method can also be used for promotions and events to drive leads more directly.
• Message Ads. Enabling you to reach prospects through their LinkedIn inboxes, Message Ads combines the strength of email marketing and instant messaging in a format professionals trust. Message Ads are easy to personalize and are very CTA-friendly – use them to generate leads through promotions, event invitations or downloadable content. We find that Message Ads are an especially effective product for promoting webinars.
• Text Ads. These performance-based ads are easy to create, and can help you generate quality leads with limited resources. Target your premium professional audience, select a budget that works for you, and let them go to work highlighting webinars, product info, blog subscriptions, and more.
• Carousel Ads. Visual storytelling continues to emerge as one of the most impactful styles of content, and Carousel Ads are very much conducive to it. Use this format to feature a series of images that compel viewers to click through and take action. For lead generation, you can use Carousel Ads to highlight various products and services, or to hone in on a single solution in greater depth.

Facebook B2B Lead Generation

LinkedIn is just one of many channels you can use to attract more B2B leads. Another one is Facebook ads, and it can be used similarly to B2C businesses but in a slightly different way.

It’s important to remember that B2B decision-makers are always on the lookout for something that is going to save them money, make their job easier, or somehow save them some time. That is the direction to grab and run in when it comes to positioning yourself on Facebook.

Luckily, Facebook has a specific campaign type that is dedicated to generating leads. Facebook is quick to convert ads, too—your target audience doesn’t even need to go to a landing page. A quick form will pop up for them to fill out, or you can program it to be pre-filled, so all they need to do is hit send. It’s as easy as that!

Google Ads Leads

The Granddaddy of all ads: Google! If you are not advertising on Google, you are leaving money on the table. Google Ads lead still works—and here’s how.

Similarly to Facebook, LinkedIn, and display ads, you need to pick a goal. According to Google themselves, campaign objectives are the KPIs used to gauge the success of a specific marketing campaign. We recommend you keep a close eye on return on ad spend (ROAS). Make sure all your goals support each other by involving the right people — from account managers to senior decision-makers. From measuring proxies like CPA or CPL to measuring actual business outcomes, with KPIs like Return On Ad Spend or Lifetime Customer Value.

At Navazon, with any ad that we run, we make sure that your conversion optimization is spot on and work on lowering your cost per lead. We do this through careful targeting and monitoring, then tweaking the ad’s demographics and nuts and bolts until you have perfect conversion optimization.

Landing Page Design

With most lead generation efforts, you will need to have a great landing page to lead them to. The ad will draw them in; then, the landing page closes the deal. Keeping this in mind, you need to make sure your landing page design is on point. Here are some tips:

• Make sure it looks great. This one might seem like a no-brainer, but bad design will put a bad taste in people’s mouths. Make sure it looks great, is done professionally, matches the rest of your branding, and speaks to your target audience.
• Make sure your forms work. Test, test, test your forms, then test them again! Bugs and issues happen all the time, so make sure your forms are working all the time. On that note, make your forms as simple as possible, easy to use, make your form stand out from the rest of the page, and only ask them for the bare minimum. You can get more information from them later down the sales funnel.
• Include testimonials. Give your target audience peace of mind with testimonials from happy clients and customers! Whether this is through five-star reviews, video testimonials, or social media shout-outs, give them something to relate to.
• Create urgency. You’re most of the way there. You’ve attracted them with your ad, they’ve made the click to learn more, and now you have to make them act. What’s the incentive? That it has to happen RIGHT NOW. Make your offer limited—heck, include a countdown clock on there, too!

Get Successful Lead Generation with Navazon Digital

Ready to generate tons of leads for your business? We are experts in that.

Navazon helps businesses increase profits through data-driven marketing that expands opportunities and reduces risk. As marketers and entrepreneurs, we understand the value of developing a memorable brand through creativity and consistency. This is accomplished through targeted graphics, videos, and websites that reflect our proven, time-tested methodologies and detailed analytics. It is an approach that’s proven effective for companies of all sizes, from start-ups and medium-sized businesses to large firms with an international presence.

We are content creators who listen to our clients so that we can formulate ideas and strategies based on your unique goals and philosophies. Thinking through those goals with our analytics-based approach, we study not only your tendencies but those of your competition and the market as a whole.

Equipped with this knowledge, we develop a powerful plan, test it and then roll it out on a modest scale. Once we arrive at the winning formula, we can scale up rapidly to meet even the most optimistic growth projections.

At Navazon, we do not believe in “one size fits all.” Every part of the marketing plan is customized to address your unique niche and positioning strategy. It’s how we excel. It’s why we succeed.

Schedule a free consultation with us now! Visit us at navazondigital.com for more information.