Lead Generation Done Better: how to turn leads into loyal customers

Lead Generation doesn’t just mean increase sessions to the website or impressions on social media.

I don’t care about that – I mean – it’s important to do Brand Awareness to make your product or service visibile to your target, but it’s not enough.

Lead Generation means getting new leads that can be your potential clients, so:

• receiving quotes requests
• receiving questions about how to buy or use a product or service
• more sales
• more returning customers

Lead Generation is the step just before sales (and that’s why you don’t have to mix it with Demand Generation).

You can do Lead Generation with several activities: SEO, Ads, Email Marketing.

Personally, when I sign into my Google Analytics account, I often see that SEO+Email Marketing are the two first channels of Lead Generation.

If you want to know how to set up an effective Lead Generation Strategy, go here.

Lead Generation Strategy

A lot of people download a piece of content (Lead Magnet) and give email, but then don’t interact and especially don’t follow the sales process.

That’s why it’s crocial to create a strong Lead Generation Strategy focused on:

1. Goals, Timing and Budget
2. Content Creation
3. Content Promotion
4. KPIs

Goals, Timing and Budget

There can be 3 main goals:

1 Increase of your organic traffic to the website 

If your website isn’t visible online, you can’t grow your revenues or sales

2 New prospects, people who are not already ready to buy form you, but they’re just wondering if your product is the best for them

TIP: ask questions to your customer care to understand if you’re targeting the right audience

3 Getting new sales

As for timing, in mostly cases we need 3/4 months before knowing which is the right strategy for Lead Generation.

Don’t expect results right now: you have to keep going.. Also try to work with agile method: after 1 month you’re able to see if the strategy is ok or you’ll have to change something.

Content Creation

Your content has to be used by people who decides to download it.

1 Try to make people aware that your content is high value, practical, useful

2 Use these data to do retargeting with Social Ads, Google Ads and so on

3 People have to use your content to obtain some goals –> solve a problem they already have

How to create high quality content?

In my experience there are some pieces of content that perform better than others, but of course it depends on the brand, the target and the business objectives:

• very practical ebooks
• infographics
• webinars (yes, because content is not just written, but also multimedia)

In any cases, it’s important to highlight the message that free doesn’t mean low quality.

The risk is that people think: “ok, here’s another free ebook to download, its free, so it won’t be useful for me“.

When you create your piece of content to get new leads, pay attention to work hard on it.

I’ll tell you my secret: when I’m writing a Lead Magnet, I always think that I have to sell this piece of content, so I’m sure to deliver a very high quality content

When creating content, always start analyzing your target: remeber that you have to solve your problems audience and not show your ego.

How do to that?

• Listening, online social mentions, forums
• Ask to your Customer Care to know questions and doubts your clients have
• Use Quora and Reddit to discover topics your target is talking about
• Pay attention tot he language your target use: you’re gonna use the same language in your copy
• Create a Content Strategy, keeping in mind that you’ll have to create content for the platforms that your target uses. If your target doesn’t use Instagram, focus on others channels (even if you love Instagram!)

How much content do you have to create?

When you’re at the beginning, you have to create lot of content to know which performs better, there’s no escape.

But after some months you’ree able to know which is the best piece of content that can bring you results: that is the case to optimize the existing content and decide to invest your money in more platforms to promote this piece and reduce your new content creation.

Pay attention to not overwhelm your target with too many messages: think about ads. You have to know when’s the time to stop to produce more content that your target needs. Analytics can help you: if you go and analyze data, maybe you’ll see a decrease of timing spent on your website.

A/B testing

A/B tests are important both for content creation and for platforms.

For example, I create an ebook and promote it on Linkedin if i know my target is on that social. I create some landing pages to do A/B tests to see which performs better than others. I create lead magnets that should be prompted with Social Ads.

Testing is the only way to optimize timing, budget and efforts.

Content Promotion

Once you’ve created your content, you’ll have to promote is.

Here’s how:

1 Discover where your target is active (not just present) and promote your content on those platforms.

2 Consider that every platform has specific rules and languages.

Linkedin is powerful not only for brands but also for personal branding: if you’re a B2B company, it’s very important to show people behind the scenes. That’s why it’s strategic to not only run ads, but work with organic content. On Linkedin people want to learn more or understand if you can be the right person for theirs needs.

Tik Tok is not for youngers anymore. It helps you to create more empathy with your target, people can enter into your company mind. It’s a more human approach compared for example to Linkedin.

Facebook is more used for information, as a magazine, for repurposing content.

Facebook is still the main social platform, so useful also for B2B company, but you have to create an amazing strategy to be successful on Facebook:

• Create the right message to the right people at the right moment.
• Use retargeting.
• Test the audience, because retargeting is not always the best idea. Think about interest, job titles and so on.
• Run right amazing ads = doesn’t mean adding emojis, you have to use your target language.
• Create strong landing pages, please don’t use your website. Landing pages have been created to drive conversions. See how to create a compelling landing pages here.

KPIs

Track very action you do and analyze the most important Key Performance Indicators for your business:

• Number of sessions are important to create brand awareness, but not enough.
• Time spent on which specific pages: if the user is spending 5 seconds on your article, it’s not performing well.
• Bounce rate: it should be less than 60% to be good.
• Request of quotes, information, questions –> qualitative KPIs.
• Optimized keywords on Google.

Keep always in mind that you always should solve your target problems to get high quality leads.

You can learn more about how to do successful Lead Generation on my podcast for GetResponse: