According to a 2019 study from the Content Marketing Institute, 85% of B2B marketers say lead generation is their top priority. Yet, 44% of marketers rate their efforts as “neutral” when it boils down to effectiveness. Why is that? Why aren’t lead generation efforts as fruitful as most organizations would like?
Our perspective is that lead generation is often viewed as a tactic and not addressed completely as a strategy. Many businesses may think lead generation is the responsibility of their sales force or an online campaign. However, it involves much more.
If you want to increase your qualified sales leads, it’s best to first take a step back and consider your entire sales and marketing process. Specifically, what roles do content marketing and the user experience have in that process? After all, we all know our prospects and customers are gathering information and making decisions about our companies, including sales decisions, based on what they see online. But, how many of us have developed strongly connected content marketing and user experience strategies to leverage this knowledge?
Content marketing involves sharing valuable, free content that attracts prospects and ultimately converts them into customers. The goal is to educate, entertain and inspire people while earning their trust and building brand awareness and authority. As part of that, a good content strategy designed with the end-user in mind should be in place to advance your organic online presence and drive more traffic to your website.
We realize this can get complicated. That’s why we recommend breaking content marketing down into three cohesive elements:
CONTENT STRATEGY AND DEVELOPMENT
It is important to understand that your content strategy is not the same as your content marketing. Your content strategy comes first; it largely addresses any and all content you distribute to your targeted audiences. Your content strategy should answer questions like:
- What types of content will you create? (In other words, what do you want to be known for? What will the audience value?)
- What is the purpose of specific content? (To build authority? Engagement? Trust?)
- Where it will be distributed? (Blog, social media platforms, email?)
- Which part of your website (or landing page) will it link back to?
- How will you measure success?
Without a thoughtful strategy behind it, your content marketing efforts can easily become wandering and subjective. In this case, posting content becomes more about what is easiest or what you think is important to your organization — rather than deploying assets based on research and analysis of what your audience really wants or needs.
EXPERIENCE DESIGN AND CONTENT DELIVERY
Experience design is the discipline of understanding and attempting to fulfill the experience expectations and needs of your customers and prospects. It aims to provide low-friction, positive experiences across a prospect/customer journey. Although we use the term here in reference to mostly digital engagement and prospect funneling, experience design can be used to cover broader experience initiatives as well.
Successful experience design and content delivery rely on knowing your audience and understanding their content “wants and needs.” Here we’ve listed a few recommendations for developing content. These apply to content delivered on both your website as well as your offsite engagement vehicles.
- Identify and prioritize your target markets. (We like the phrase, “The more people you write for, the fewer you reach.”)
- Work with a writer who truly understands the audience — someone who can write compelling content while employing meaningful search terms to help drive traffic to your site.
- Deliver original content. This is the best means for building authentic brand authority. Plus, copied content will cause your pages to be ranked lower in search results.
- Create something you want to share. The most effective content is shareable content. If you deliver content that has actual value to your readers, it will get shared and your efforts will be rewarded in multiples.
Remember, experience design is all about putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and figuring out how one might consume your content and use your website. And, make content discovery easy. Making this process harder than it has to be can completely wreck your lead generation strategy.
LEAD MANAGEMENT
The main objective of lead management is to provide prospects the information and motivation they need to continue through your conversion funnel. The steps outlined above to gain new leads take hard, thoughtful work. Now is the time to convert those initial leads to customers. Here are some key steps of the lead management process:
- Customer Inquiry. The lead management process typically begins when a prospect responds to an offer (additional content, consultation appointment, begins following your blog or social posts, etc.). This signals that they have an interest beyond your general, public-facing content.
- Identity Capture. Some prospect information is available through Google Analytics, while other information has to be obtained when a prospect offers an email or other contact information in exchange for a piece of content or other “offer.”
- Inquiry Filtering. Once identities have been captured, they need to be verified for accuracy.
- Lead Qualifying and Grading. There are a number of systems for qualifying and grading leads. This helps to discern between casual interest and knowledge seekers and actual potential buyers.
- Lead Distribution. Once qualified, leads are distributed to the marketing and sales personnel respectively — often with specific instructions and information. This is typically where marketing “hands off” the lead to sales. Then, specific sales systems, processes and protocols are incorporated.
We know there isn’t one easy answer to lead generation. It takes time and attention to design and deliver a program that not only makes strategic sense but is operationally achievable. That being said, we also know the reward is worth the investment. If you have questions or just want to have a conversation about your lead generation challenges, let us know. We love to talk marketing.