The 11 Elements of an Effective Lead Generation Strategy

Business GrowthDigital MarketingAdvertising

Apr 14

If you want to continually attract your ideal audience and encourage them to take a step toward working with you, you need an effective lead generation strategy.

And, that doesn’t mean simply adding a contact form to your website.

To effectively and consistently generate quality leads, you need a variety of elements that help you reach the right audience and encourage them to take action.

11 Elements of a Lead Generation Strategy

To build a fully functional lead generation strategy, use these eleven elements.

1. Audience Definition and Targeting

Effective lead generation, like all effective marketing initiatives, starts with discovery and strategy. Before you jump into any other tactics, define and research your audience. Knowing who you want to target will make it easier to set up strategies to attract and convert them. Create audience personas that outline your target audience:

Demographics
Psychographics
Behaviors
Geographic locations
Position in the sales funnel

2. Great Website User Experience

Before you drive prospects to your website for lead generation, make sure it’s ready for users. You don’t want to drive traffic to your site and then have users leave because of a bad experience. Ensure that your website:

Is mobile responsive
Loads quickly
Utilizes a clean, modern design
Has high-quality content
Uses intuitive navigation
Has a well-designed funnel that leads users from the homepage to opt-in opportunities

3. Landing Pages

One of the biggest lead generation strategy mistakes that brands make is driving all of their traffic to their website homepage. Traffic is more likely to convert when it is directed to a targeted landing page, not a general homepage. A landing page is focused on one specific message and conversion. Create specific landing pages for each of your lead generation strategies including those that support advertising efforts, and drive targeted traffic to those pages, instead of your homepage.

4. Content and Offers

In addition to targeted landing pages, an effective lead generation strategy also needs content and offers to attract and convert audiences. Create free content that meets audiences where they are in the sales funnel. For example:

Create informative blog posts that educate audiences and end with an opportunity for them to sign up to learn more.
Develop gated content that encourages audiences to enter their information to receive a valuable content asset such as an ebook, checklist, webinar, or PDF guide.
Promote offers such as discount codes and coupons that give audiences a reason to sign up and share their contact information.

5. Call-to-actions

A call-to-action is a directive you give to audiences so they know what to do next. A lead generation strategy will struggle to produce results if it doesn’t include these clear conversion points. As you create lead generation content and landing pages, always include call-to-actions that tell the audience how and why they should sign up.

6. Lead Capture Forms

It should go without saying that you can’t capture leads without a form that allows you to collect information from prospects. Design lead capture forms that collect essential information from audiences, and match your form fields with the type of opt-in. For example, you may only need to capture an email address on a coupon opt-in, whereas you may want to capture name, job title, and company name on a form to sign up for a webinar.

7. Audience Segmentation

Starting audience segmentation early in your lead generation strategy will make things easier for you in the future. Audience segmentation -- the process of tagging and communicating with leads based on their actions and information -- allows you to set up personalized, nurturing email marketing campaigns. Start using audience tags early in your lead generation process.

8. SEO

To drive people into your lead funnel, you need to drive them to your website. One way to do that is through organic search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of creating content and optimizing your site so it shows up when users search for information related to your industry, products, or services. Create a content marketing and SEO plan to target key terms your target audience searches for to reach interested prospects.

9. Paid Ad Strategy

SEO is a powerful way to drive people to your website, but it is a process that takes time. While you’re waiting to build your organic SEO, focus on driving audiences to your website through paid search and display ads. Paid ads can put your audience targeting to work as you can reach people based on their habits and interests through display and social media ads. And, through PPC search ads, you can target audiences based on their keyword searches.

10. Retargeting Ads

The marketing rule of seven says that a prospect needs to hear or see a brand message seven times before they take action. While the number of touchpoints varies for industries and types of offerings, it is true that audiences often need multiple introductions before they choose to engage with a brand. Retargeting ads move prospects through this process faster. It identifies people who have engaged with your brand in the past (visited your website, followed you on social media, etc.) and targets them with ads to drive them closer toward your lead gen offers.

11. Analytics

A key to building an effective lead generation strategy is looking back at your past initiatives and determining what you can do to improve next time. Utilize analytics from your campaigns to identify which campaigns performed well and which fell flat. By looking at the data, you can make tweaks to improve conversions, drop strategies that aren’t working, and ramp up efforts that are producing a high number of quality leads.

Build a Stronger Lead Generation Strategy

Simply having a contact form on your website isn’t enough to attract ideal audiences and convert them into quality leads. If you want to build an effective lead generation strategy, put the eleven elements mentioned in this post to use to attract and convert your ideal prospects.

Do you need help creating any of these elements? Or, are you starting a lead generation strategy from scratch or hoping to optimize an existing strategy?

SpotOn is here to help. See how we can help you create or improve each of these elements of an effective lead generation strategy. Contact SpotOn today.

lead generation

Robyn Spoto