Keeping a finger on the pulse of your business’ performance is critical to its success. In New Zealand’s SME space, there are 7,100 $5m-to-$50m businesses – nearly five times the corporate market – competing.
To maintain a competitive edge in an ever-changing digital and consumer landscape, and workplace environment, business leaders must embrace strategic marketing measures – and lead generation is the first step in a business’ sales funnel.
Lead generation is the process of attracting prospective customers to your business, increasing their interest in you and your offerings/services, and then nurturing them to become loyal customers.
To be truly successful, lead generation should focus on building qualified leads. Buying any old leads from an outsourced company, or cold calling people, doesn’t work because customers are perceptive – they didn’t sign up to hear from your company so why should they? If they’re not actively opting in, then there’s a good chance your emails will be flagged as spam, and your phone call will be rejected.
So, how do you generate qualified leads? By engaging potential customers via inbound; outbound sales; marketing strategies.
Successful lead generation doesn’t preference inbound or outbound strategies – a combination of both in a sales funnel can take your business to greater heights. To learn more, click through to our ‘Inbound and Outbound’ article here.
Lead generation doesn’t end at implementation of inbound and outbound sales strategies – they have to be constantly measured and tested to ensure they are generating the right leaders.
This can be done by engaging tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Insights and AdWords Keyword Planner, to reveal and analyse what customers are looking for online, and also help with decision making around content placement, so marketing is directed to the right channels.
A/B testing across your ad campaigns also determines which offers or call-to- actions are performing the best – and then identifying which one is gifting a higher return in qualified leads.
And irrespective if you have inhouse marketing, or external agency support – you should make sure they’re doing all of this to deliver better quality leads to your business.
Lead generation shouldn’t be a shot in the dark, by engaging both inbound and outbound sales strategies, and testing and analysing the information data through these channels, you can continually upskill your marketing approach and keep those qualified leads rolling in.
If you want to learn more about best practice Lead Generation for your business, then there are plenty of really good articles and guides online you can review. One that you might fine really helpful is the ‘HubSpot Academy - Understanding the Fundamentals of Inbound Marketing’, which you can view here.
Otherwise feel free to reach out to us, and we’ll help answer any questions you might have about Lead Generation, and what you should be doing in your business.