In our last article – Does your lead generation need to go back to school – we looked at five tips to improve lead generation. These tips were:

• Cross channel: needing to know which channels are working best
• Knowing your customer: understanding why your customers are led to you
• Clear messaging: being clear about your brand and mission
• Quality vs quantity: identifying and focusing on where the higher quality leads are coming from
• Retargeting: following up leads in a more personalised manner to coax them further down the funnel

In this article we look more specially at:

1. Inbound Marketing
2. Paid Advertising
3. Lead intelligence
4. Email marketing automation

There are four main pillars which should be viewed as part of a combined strategy, with the various aspects feeding into each other.

1. Inbound Marketing – Search Engine Optimisation, Content, Social marketing

Inbound marketing is essentially anything that draws people toward your business and makes them feel, ‘this is the place I belong too and want to be part of’.

Effective inbound marketing aligns the content you publish – be it blogs, social media updates, infographics, eBooks, videos and webinars – with the interests of your customers. This will attract inbound traffic that you can then call to action and ultimately convert.

One client with whom Xcite Digital has used inbound marketing successfully is Loans 2 Go. Loans 2 Go is a provider of personal loans, and the market leader in the provision of logbook loans throughout England, Wales and Scotland.

We conducted a multi channel audit of Loans 2 Go, then helped them develop an ambitious multi channel marketing strategy that included various aspects of inbound marketing such as content, backlinks, infographics. The results have been astounding, with CPA reduced to £14.

2. Paid Advertising – Lead generation on demand PPC, AdWords, Social Advertising etc

This is the means by which you generate interest not only in your product but also in capturing contact information. Examples of strategies you might use for this include paid searches (such as PPC), social media, any kind of advertising; email marketing and networking such as conferences, trade shows and speaking engagements.

These opportunities nudge prospects towards an opt-in decision and, once contact details have been obtained, enable you to build data profiles for contacts that may eventually convert.

An example of how Xcite Digital has used this is with Whatcar. We used several channels – including PPC – to capture the audience and generate interest in the early stages of the buying cycle, following through to educational messages and brand awareness to drive conversion.

Again results were fantastic and surpassed WhatCar’s expectations with 12% increase in conversion and a 30% reduction in CPA.

3. Gathering lead intelligence

This is so vital that at Xcite Digital we use it with all our clients! Through the use of analytical tools such as Google Analytics, AdWords, Moz and Spyfu, to name a few, data can be analysed on the behaviour of your prospects.

By taking into consideration the pages visited, the time spent on your website overall, the type of content that is being accessed and the searching/form filling being done you can build a picture of how your prospects are interacting with you.

By putting all this intelligence together you can develop a progressive profiling approach that enables you to interact more meaningfully with your prospects in future marketing campaigns and hopefully keep conversion rates high.

4. Marketing automation – Email marketing workflows

It can seem impossible for marketers to fully keep up with all the necessary marketing activities – but help is at hand! There are a variety of marketing automation tools on the market that can streamline different aspects of the marketing workflow.

This enables teams to focus their efforts on other core tasks. It also helps to categorise the leads from different channels and segment them into different target groups, which can then be the focus of specific marketing campaigns.

An example of how we have used this is with Venture. Marketing automation workflows have made it easier for Venture to manage promotions such as Black Friday, Christmas and various promotions. They have also facilitated the process of sending and managing everything through the website including retargeting users for advocacy and loyalty.

Isn’t it time that you had a truly effective lead generation strategy? Not as a one-off but on an ongoing basis. A strategy that will not only identify leads but convert, close and ultimately delight your target audience!

For further help and advice with effective lead generation why not browse through more of our case studies then do get in touch if you feel we may be able to help you in this area.