Generating leads is usually a process that happens inside a predefined funnel. For agencies, there are several core elements to getting traffic to your website: acquisition, or lead capture, and engagement.
There are a lot of ways to get someone’s contact information, but you’ll need to give something in return. This compensation of users for their personal information is called a lead magnet and can take the form of:
After you have collected a visitor’s contact information, you can then proceed to the next stage of the process, which is lead scoring. As you expand your business and the number of potential customers grows, you can automate this part of the process.
A lead that scores highly can be classified as a marketing qualified lead. This person is interested in your product, but is not ready to purchase it yet. Once the lead has been passed onto the sales team, they will continue to nurture the customer until they are ready to make a purchase.
Before you can create a strategy for your agency, you need a process in place that will enable you to qualify any leads you attract. It is important to be able to identify if a particular lead is worth the time and resource investment of your sales team in order to be efficient with time and resources.
If leads are properly qualified, it prevents missing out on possible customers, with 67% of sales being lost due to unqualified leads. A well-structured qualification framework is essential to ensuring quality outcomes.
1. Define your ideal customer.
2. Create a scoring system.
3. Start the nurturing process.
How to create a lead generation marketing campaign for your agency
1. Determine your target audience
There’s no point in generating leads if they’re not going to turn into clients who are a good match for your agency. You need to do some research to figure out who your targets are.
Look at your current customers. Who are they? What are some things you would want to learn from interviewing your best clients? Their background, goals, where they spend their time online, their biggest challenges, and the process they go through before hiring an agency are all things you could learn. But don’t stop there.
After researching your target audience, customize your lead generation marketing campaign to fit their preferences in terms of messaging and traffic channels.
2. Set campaign goals
A successful marketing campaign starts with specific goals. “To generate the most leads possible” isn’t a goal. You can use past performance as a benchmark to help you set goals for visits, leads, and conversion rate. Having specific goals will help you stay on track and measure your success.
3. Determine what offer will attract your ideal client
Do you remember when it was easy to give away free stuff online? The demand for ebooks, tip sheets, and white papers was high, and generating leads was simple.
So easy, in fact, that some marketers got lazy. The company started to see a decline in leads when they started doing less work to generate them. Soon, people realized that not all lead magnets were the same.
Because of this, they became very choosy about what they said online. Today it’s not enough to create a cookie-cutter offer. In order to be successful in lead generation marketing, you must be original and truly helpful to your potential customers. In order to make an impressive offer, you need to understand who will be taking advantage of it, as well as where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Awareness
- Social media: 83%
- Blog posts: 81%
- Infographics: 81%
Consideration
- White papers: 78%
- Websites: 75%
- Web-based events: 72%
Purchase
- Website: 56%
- Case studies: 47%
- Research Reports: 39%
- Videos: 39%
Remember that your offer doesn’t have to be content-based. marketers use tools and free consultations to generate leads for their agency
4. Build your post-click landing page
Now that you know your audience and what you want to offer them, you need to convince them that your offer is worth their time. This is where your post-click landing page comes in.
Pages that are designed to persuade the reader to take a specific action, that are not connected to the rest of the website via navigation links, and that use elements that have been shown to increase the likelihood of the reader taking the desired action, are more successful than pages that lack these features.
Here’s what those elements are:
- A benefit-oriented headline
- Engaging media
- Skimmable copy
- Social proof
- A well-designed form
- Less is more on forms
- A strong call-to-action button
5. Design your “thank you” page
After a visitor agrees to your offer on your lead generation marketing campaign page, they are redirected to a “thank you” page. The purpose of this page is often underestimated, but it actually serves several important functions. The goal of a thank you message should not only be to say “thanks for downloading,” but also to continue the conversation with that new lead.
After a person fills out your form, let them know where they can find the resources they need. If someone downloads something from a website, will they download it immediately or will it be sent to their email?
Second, it should attempt to route them to another resource they might find useful — preferably one related to the offer they just claimed. If you offer a template with the “How to Create Buyer Personas” ebook, you can direct leads to it on the thank-you page.
This “thank you” page works for three reasons:
- “Keep watch on your inbox…” lets leads know where they’ll find their resource.
- “Head over to The Layout for daily articles…” drives them to the blog where they can consume more of Flywheel’s content.
- The image of the ebook forms good message match with the previous post-click landing page, making prospects say “Ah, good! That’s the ebook I ordered!”
6. Integrate with technology
Technology stacks are groupings of software that help you to better accomplish key marketing goals. In this case, they can be used to help you more effectively generate leads. Lead generation software can include…
Remarketing tools like Adroll and Google Dynamic Remarketing can be used on visitors who don’t convert immediately. The software will show ads on websites that you select in order to bring people back to your post-click landing page to look at your offer again.
The software will then sort your leads into different categories so that you can follow up more effectively.
After that, email marketing software like MailChimp and GetResponse will help you turn those leads into customers. There is no single best way to do things, or perfect software for the job. The size and industry of your agency will affect what it is trying to accomplish.
7. Test your campaign
This step is crucial before driving any traffic. You should test both the front end and back end of your lead generation marketing campaign.
Walk through the steps of what a potential customer would experience when they click on an advertisement for your business and are taken to a post-click landing page. Make sure that the links to your post-click landing page are working by checking them in email, PPC networks, and sponsored social media posts. Do all your pages look the same on every browser?
If the links and appearance are set up, start interacting with the page. Abandon it, adjust the window size, convert. Are the error messages appearing when they are supposed to? For example, if you do not input all of the required information for the form. Is your CTA button working? If you leave the page, are you targeted with ads? When you change the size of the window, does your post-click landing page change accordingly?
After that, evaluate your “thank you” page. Do the links on it work? Or do you find yourself clicking ‘send’ and then heading to your Sent folder to check that it’s gone? Do you check your inbox to see if your content offer email has been sent after clicking ‘send,’ or do you automatically go to your Sent folder?
What questions should I answer? What can I do on the back end of my campaign? Ensure your system is registering when users take specific actions on your site, that your coding is functioning properly, and that you have the ability to accurately categorize and evaluate prospective customers so your staff can connect with them accordingly. To have a successful campaign, the process must be running smoothly on both ends.
8. Drive traffic
There is no one correct way to drive traffic, it all depends on your agency and who your target audience is.
Use your buyer personas to figure out where your prospective clients spend their time online, and then compare those locations to your agency’s most profitable channels. It is more important to focus on bottom-funnel metrics rather than top-of -funnel metrics.
For example, you might normally get more leads from Facebook at a cheaper cost, but they don’t always turn into the high-paying clients your agency needs to stay profitable.
although you may have generated fewer leads from LinkedIn in the past, they may have been higher quality leads that are more likely to convert
9. Analyze, optimize your lead generation marketing
Most top marketers don’t get everything right the first time. The biggest difference between leading performers and average ones is the adoption of analytics software. A report from Aberdeen states that best-in-class marketers are more likely to use analytics tools as part of their marketing strategy.
Some tools that can be used to collect data are Google Analytics, Instapage’s A/B testing platform, Crazy Egg’s heat map software, and Kissmetrics customer journey analyzer.
The insights you gain from the tools will help you optimize your campaign, whether it means using a different form, headline, or traffic source. You can only improve your campaign if you know how it is performing.
To reduce your cost per customer acquisition, be sure to connect all your ads to personalized post-click landing pages. If you want to start making post-click pages, you can sign up for an Instapage Enterprise demo today.
How to Improve Your Lead Generation
In order to generate leads successfully in the future, you can’t simply set everything up and then forget about it. Lead generation is an ongoing process that you need to keep working at to improve your chances of success.
As a starting point, ensure that you:
1. Continue to optimize your website. In particular, your content should:
- Be consistent throughout in terms of tone, delivery, and quality.
- Be benefit-driven and provide genuine value to readers.
- Contain visuals such as images, infographics, charts, and diagrams.
- Contain bullet points and other text breakers that make the content easier to digest.
- Display social proof and trust factors such as reviews, testimonials, and external ratings from sources such as Trustpilot.
- Have a clear CTA and a short form that makes the pathway as clear and simple for your prospects as possible.
2. Implement relevant CTAs across all your content. If your potential customers don’t know how or where to take action on what you just told them, you’re losing out on leads.
3. Optimize your lead forms. There are numerous reasons why a prospect may or may not be willing to fill in your form. You need to understand these reasons. Perhaps you have too many input fields, or you aren’t explicit about what will happen to the person’s information. You should always be analyzing how users interact with your form to see what needs to be changed.
4. Conduct A/B tests of pages, forms, and CTAs. It is crucial to understand which elements of your materials are working and which aren’t. There is no other accurate way to obtain this information than by split testing. Track your results when testing and only test one element each time.
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