Get Your Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Campaign Off the Ground

After investing in inbound marketing, you’ll want to start doing lead generation and make that investment pay off. There are a lot of moving pieces to do lead generation the right way, and this post is meant to be a primer for those firms looking to pump up their game or those new to inbound marketing.

Step 1: Pick a Hot Topic

The very first step is to think about the challenges, issues, fears or concerns that your prospects have. They’ll be searching online for solutions to their pain, and you’ll want to appear in searches with your thought leadership on how to solve that pain. While picking a hot topic needs to be directly related to the solution you bring to the table, you don’t want to be advertorial. That will come later as you develop a relationship with the person or organization that requested your ideas.

Step 2: Select the Type of Offer You Want To Present

Lead generation offers come in a lot of different forms, from white papers to checklists to videos and a lot more. You need to select a vehicle for delivering your thought leadership that can be executed in a creative, compelling way, and it must be of value to the prospect. You’re going to be asking your prospect to give you their contact information, so, in addition to building your offer around a hot topic with innovative thought leadership ideas and perspectives, you’ll need to package it creatively.

Step 3: Build Your SEO Strategy

From the title of your offer to any online support you’ll give to your offer, like paid advertising or blog posts, you’ll want to include key search terms. An effective way to think about this is to consider the question a prospect might ask about the topic, and to use that insight as the basis for SEO research.

Step 4: Put Your Infrastructure in Place

In addition to whatever form your offer will take, there’s a lot of other infrastructure that needs to be put into play before you can execute a lead generation campaign. Forms, landing pages, call to action buttons, social media capabilities, metrics and more will be involved in the process of getting prospects to see and acquire your offer.

Click here for a great checklist on marketing infrastructure that you’ll need to do lead generation successfully.

Step 5: Design a promotional plan

Without a comprehensive promotional plan, your offer will not get the traffic and results you expect. Promotion can take many different forms, from the strategic placement of call-to-action buttons on a website to multi-channel social media posts to email, and a lot more. Each element of your promotional plan will require thought and most likely, a significant amount of copywriting.

Step 6: Put Your Pieces Into Play and Execute

We like to write a comprehensive lead generation campaign plan that has an action plan and all the pieces of that plan, including copy, in one document. When all is said and done, a simple plan might be 10 to 12 pages long. For more complex plans that include top, middle and bottom of the funnel offers and materials for executing a marketing automation workflow, we’ve written plans that have exceeded 30 pages. Even with a plan of 30 pages or more, all the pieces were in place before the campaign was launched.

LeadG2 has quite a few resources on lead generation in the Resources section of our website, and we welcome you to capitalize upon the lessons we’ve learned and the battle scars we’ve earned along the way. 

We will guarantee, however, that once you catch the lead generation fever, you’ll be hooked on how effective inbound marketing can be for your company!