Lead generation is a marketing process that involves initiating interest in order to develop a sales pipeline. As the B2B buying process has changed, marketers have needed to find new ways to reach buyers by building new and continuous relationships. By ensuring each lead meets a certain criteria, outbound lead generation campaigns can prove to be more cost-effective marketing tactics than inbound marketing techniques or social media, particularly as it allows you more control over the leads that are generated.
In this blog post, I’m going to briefly run through the steps necessary in setting up an outsourced lead generation campaign. The benefits of this type of campaign mean that you get a guaranteed volume of leads for your spend, a better chance of ROI in terms of the amount of time spent on the campaign, and the new audiences you can tap into. So let’s begin the 72 hour countdown to getting that campaign live…
Day 1
The first step is to determine your target audience:
- Which region are you looking to target?
- What type of companies do you want to target? This can be segmented by
- Employee size
- Company turnover
- Vertical sector
- Which job titles are you looking to generated?
- Which of your personas are you wanting to speak to?
Once you’ve thought about and have clearly defined your target audience, it’s time to start thinking about content. It’s no good using any content, you need to think how interesting, relevant and informative the content is to make sure each prospect wants to download it. If you’re targeting Decision Makers within IT departments, an HR Compliance guide or even a Case Study about how brilliant you are won’t do the job.
Take the time to review the content you have and modify it where necessary. If you’re looking to create new content specifically for the campaign then this stage is going to take a little longer but we can help speed this up – discover more about our content creation services.
Day 2
Once you’ve got your content sorted and defined your audience, its time to start thinking about the campaign itself.
You may already have a trusted vendor that you work with on lead generation campaigns, but if you don’t then this is the time to do your research. By speaking to media partners like us, you’ll be able to ensure that the campaign reach is magnified in order to have the greatest impact and the best quality of leads.
Your trusted vendor should know what they’re doing and should be able to offer advice and options that you may not have previously thought of, including;
- Which pieces of content will resonate the most with their audiences
- How to maximise the content you have through clever copywriting or potentially repurposing
- The best suggested questions to ask each lead during the capture process to help the sales follow up
- How long the campaign will take to be delivered
- How to achieve the highest lead volumes and lowest cost per lead (CPL) prices
- How to report the leads back to you for speed and ease of lead management
As lead generation specialists, we have a dedicated sales team and creative copywriters who know how to get you the most for your money whilst providing the best quality leads possible to maximise your chances of ROI.
Once you’ve agreed on all the finer points of the campaign and you’re happy with what your media partner is offering, you’ll be able to sign off the budget and get the ball rolling.
Day 3
All that’s left is to hand the content over to your chosen vendor, who will go ahead and produce everything for you in terms of copy and creative previews. After that, it’s simply a case of waiting to check that against your brand’s tone of voice, then providing sign off. As soon as a go live date, all that’s left is to prepare yourself for the leads. This includes briefing your sales department. It’s vital they know what to expect and how to follow up the leads, otherwise the whole campaign will be a waste of time and money.
By employing external experts in handling your lead generation, you will find that you have more time to focus on other aspects of your marketing and exploring new ways to reach your customers. But it’s not just time that you’ll see more of but the actual ROI of your marketing budget. The deliverability of the campaign will be vastly improved and will allow you to focus on the lead nurturing side of things, ensuring that a higher percentage of hot leads will convert into sales.
