Short of time and looking at a quick checklist to ensure you are on the right track to a successful lead generation campaign? Over the years I have consulted for several startups and also deployed lead generation techniques that work. This is our own checklist of ideas and points we follow to either brainstorm and come up with more ideas with the rest of the team. Use this checklist in cases where you have started several campaigns and noticed the results or conversions are not coming through, or if the leads have suddenly stopped, then look also at ensuring you are up to date with newer strategies or techniques that are coming out to market.
Below are the Ultimate Lead Generation Checklist:
Note, lead generation is not a sit and forget campaign, once you deploy your first one, you will need to innovate and come up with smarter ideas.
1. Improve Your lead generation
You can’t have solid lead generation strategies if you’re not checking up on it regularly. You need to analyze it and adjust along the way, so that you manage to stay on top of things always. Importantly, ensure you understand your audience:
- Persona—industry, title, role, company size, revenues. One of our favourite templates located here and it’s FREE
- Engagement—the basics such as number of visits, unique page views, repeat visits, form conversions, email opens and clicks.
- Buyer stage—clicks and conversions on specific content indicating a lead lifecycle change, such as revisiting your site or calling your business and then coming to visit you.
- Velocity—recency of engagement, volume and timing of events indicating triggers they will buy from you.
Related:
Are You Making These Enterprise B2B Lead Generation Mistakes?
21 Successful Ideas for Lead Generation
2. Repurpose existing content
You should always look to repurpose your content, because it is a great way to catch your customer’s eye. Get your most popular content, and turn it into an eBook or into a webinar, and you have a great way to not only attract clients, but retain interest as well. It is one of the most effective lead generation strategies that is around today. Wordstream has an amazing blog on how to do this.
3. Integrate CTAs into relevant areas
You must have high quality CTAs placed strategically at relevant areas on your website, because there is no other way that you will be able to generate quality leads. CTAs are necessary for high conversion rates, and if you have some placed strategically on the website then you need to check if there are other areas where more can be placed.
4. Generate viral content
While this is probably one of the hardest areas of lead generation, you can easily create high quality premium content that will help you showcase the experience you have in the industry. Viral does not necessarily mean it has to be funny, stupid or witty. Some of the viral content we have seen shared across our customer platforms include highly educating infographics or short videos, amazing offers, provocative webinars and thought leadership events. Kissmetrics has an amazing guide to creating viral content here. Their case studies while several years old still proves relevant today.
5. Optimize landing pages
Among the best lead generation strategies around today, one is optimizing your landing page content. It is important for your business, and will allow your customers to reach your content any time. If your landing pages aren’t optimized, you will lose out on valuable business, which you can’t afford. By optimizing the landing pages, you will be able to generate more leads. Unbounce has a great guide here. Interestingly, I would go straight to Chapter 14 first to understand whether the landing page is right for you or not!
6. Use progressive profiling
One of the least understood and used methods is progressive profiling. Rather than sending potential customers to a static form, ask them relevant questions. For example, if you know their name and email already, now you can ask a leading question to see if they are interested in products or enquiring about a demo, this way, you are asking questions specifically about their timeframe to purchase and understanding their intent. If you’re struggling to generate leads, and are looking for lead generation strategies, you should use progressive profiling. It is very effective, because it helps shorten the forms, and improves landing page conversions for the business. It helps save time for the clients, and that is valuable to them, which is where you will score big on lead generation. Kissmetrics has a great intro into this.
7. Create forums
One of the best lead generation strategies that you can choose to employ is to create forums for your website. This will allow you to capture more leads, because the questions being answered will only help provide you with vital client information. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re from, if your goal is to generate leads, then you can easily do that through forums.
There are no short cuts when it comes to lead generation strategies, and if you’re wondering whether your lead generation strategy is up-to-date, follow some of the leading industry experts in their field, subscribe to their newsletters and test our their ideas on your audience. The strategies change every month!