Lead generation is a key strategy for any company seeking sales and revenue growth—but it’s easier said than done. That’s why we’ve compiled this handy cheat sheet for easy reference as you develop your lead generation campaign.
Create a Clear Path of How You Will Generate Growth
Like any project, a successful lead generation campaign starts with a plan. The first step is to calculate the funnel math that will determine your sales and marketing goals.
For sales, you should start with your revenue goal and work backward from there. For example, if you want to make $2 million in new sales in 12 months, and your average deal size is $25,000, you must close 80 deals to reach your sales target. If your average closing ratio is 25%, then you’ll need 320 sales opportunities to reach your goal.
The same principle goes for marketing—if you expect your marketing efforts to generate half of the sales opportunities that close, then marketing must generate at least 160 sales opportunities. Working backward again, if 15% of the leads you nurture eventually contact sales, then you’ll need to nurture 1,067 leads to reach your goal of 160 sales opportunities. If 10% of visitors to your landing page become leads, then you’ll need 10,677 landing page visitors. This means that your ads must get 666,687 viewers, assuming an average click rate of 1.6%.
Plug your own numbers in to determine your plan for reaching your sales and marketing goals. Having these concrete, numerical milestones to strive toward will make your job a lot easier as you develop your lead generation campaign.
Set Up Your Demand Gen Engine
Before you generate any leads, you have to start generating demand. Demand generation content (demand gen, for short) is any content that increases brand awareness and drives traffic to sites where prospects can learn more. The clue is in the name—you want to generate demand for your brand and its products. This means that you must appeal to prospects who have never heard of your company before. To accomplish this goal, demand gen content must be shareable, easily accessible, and engaging.
This type of content can include:
- Blogs
- Infographics
- Checklists
- Videos
- Newsletters
Each of these pieces of content should fuel your demand gen engine by presenting useful information in a readable way.
Set Up Your Lead Gen Engine
Lead generation content (lead gen, for short) is content that goes one step further than its demand gen counterpart—this type of content captures contact information for outbound nurturing. With this goal in mind, lead gen content is typically gated, which means that prospects must share their contact information to access it. But prospects won’t give up their information for just any content. They need to be convinced that what they’re accessing is particularly valuable.
Some common types of lead gen content include:
- White Papers
- Maturity Models
- Webinars
- Solution Guides
Like demand gen content, lead gen content should be useful and engaging. It’s typically longer and provides a wealth of relevant information. In the short term, the goal is to capture leads, but you also want this content to establish your company as a thought leader in the ecosystem—this is what will increase your company’s growth in the long term.
Use Data Analytics to Win
Data analytics is an important tool to help companies receive actionable insights about the success of their strategies. Data is powerful—it can show exactly what is working and what isn’t.
The ideal metrics to track vary from one role to another. For example, the most important metric to a CEO is the company’s valuation. Heads of Sales should monitor sales growth, from new or existing customers. And Heads of Marketing should pay attention to measurable tactics that bring about growth, like sales from new customers, upsells, pipeline build rate, and more. These are just a handful of the metrics companies should track to achieve their growth objectives.
Test Everything
Testing is like checking your work. Now that you’ve built your high-growth lead generation campaign, you must know what to test and how to test to ensure that your strategies are successful. For example, to test the efficacy of your marketing campaigns, you’ll have to analyze how well your various ads are performing. But it’s not just about the clicks your ads generate—you must consider how many of those clicks actually turned into leads. This is what will help you optimize your landing pages and reach your growth goals.
Here are the three key principles to testing:
- Test one thing at a time until you know you have fixed that issue before going on to the next.
- Your goal in testing is to maximize effectiveness, not efficiency. It is about the quality of leads, not the quantity of leads. From a marketing perspective, that means figuring out how you can get the most Conversation Ready Leads (leads that are ready to talk to sales) at the lowest total marketing spend.
- Test from the outside in. Get your ads working better at sending the right visitors to your landing pages. Then, get your landing pages to work better at converting more and more of these visitors. Then, work to improve your nurture campaigns so you can generate more and more Conversation Ready Leads.
Next Steps
With this cheat sheet, you’re well on your way toward building a lead gen campaign that will increase your company’s growth. Start with a simple plan, then set up your demand and lead gen engines. Use data analytics and testing strategies to check your work and ensure that you’re on the right track. And that’s it—you’re on the path to deliver sales growth through revenue-focused marketing.
Looking for a more in-depth explanation of how to build a high-growth lead generation campaign? Download this playbook.