Based on the amount of time spent discussing how to generate leads, you would think that the process is akin to rocket science and that only expert digital marketers could develop effective lead generation campaigns.
In reality, it’s not that complicated to start getting some results with a lead generation program. You can get started in three simple steps: create an offer, develop a landing page with a form/lead capture mechanism, and drive traffic to your landing page.
When deciding what type of offer you should create to generate leads, it’s important to think about two things:
What product or service are you looking to generate leads for?
Who is your target audience?
Once you decide on these two items, you can begin to develop what the offer should be. Do you want to create a top-of-the-funnel eBook or guide that gets a large number of leads into your funnel, or do you want to generate sales-ready leads with a more bottom-of-the-funnel offer, such as a demo or complimentary consultation?
Regardless of which type of offer you choose to develop, you will need to move on to the next step before you start generating any leads: creating a landing page with a contact form.
Most Content Management Systems (CMS), be it WordPress or HubSpot, have a fairly easy way to develop landing pages and contact forms. In WordPress, you would create a page and then use a form plugin to develop the form that prospects would fill out. The information is then captured by the form plugin, and the lead’s information stays within the form plugin’s database.
Software that’s designed specifically for lead generation, such as HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot, make it easy to not only generate your offers but also to build the landing pages and forms, and then keep your contact information in a central marketing database.
Now that you have gotten your offer created and placed it on a landing page with a contact form, you are now ready to start driving traffic to your landing page and generating leads.
Here are three ways to generate traffic for your new offer:
Send an email promoting the landing page and offer to a segmented list of prospects.
Post the offer’s landing page to social media (LinkedIn and Twitter, for example) a few times over a several-week period.
Promote the offer on your website’s homepage or blog, and look for other opportunities to promote the content.
The three steps outlined above can easily be done in less than 30 days, and if your company already has some good content already, you might even be able to make this happen much more quickly. During the Inbound Planning Day, we conduct with each of our clients, one of the first things we do is look for content that’s already been created that we can develop landing pages for and immediately begin to start generating leads with.
If you have questions on how you can start generating leads online for your company, you should consider signing up for the Lead Generation Toolbox, which includes several resources to get you started generating leads.