10 Pieces of “Gotta Have” Marketing Infrastructure for Lead Generation Campaigns

Business Development Tips For Professional Services Firms

CPA, consulting, financial services and law firms can grow their top line and get more ROI from their investment in marketing and business development by executing lead generation campaigns using a combination of on-site call to action and conversion and tactics, and off site outbound marketing activities.

It’s critically important to have the right infrastructure in place in order to reach, capture and convert leads to engagements. Here’s my top ten list of “gotta have” pieces of infrastructure:

(Let’s add to this list by adding your comments, below, and click on one or more of the social media buttons to help get a dialogue going!)

(1) Optimized Website - Websites need to engineered in order to “get found first”. This involves a combination of having a keyword strategy, page configuration, great copywriting, and continually adding content through vehicles like blogging.

(2) Blog - Blogging serves a number of purposes, from adding optimized content around keywords as part of a “get found first” strategy to its use as a vehicle for publishing thought leadership that generates leads.

(3) Great Lead Gen Ideas - Lead generation is a combination of art and science, involving both left and right brain creativity. It’s the hardest part of inbound marketing.

(4) Assignment of Accountability and Responsibilities - Marketing, sales and partner/owners need to be on the same page, each with a different set of responsibilities in order to make inbound marketing effective. Analytics will expose the hard cold truths of who is (or who is not) performing their responsibilities effectively.

(5) Landing Pages for Conversion -  Once you get eyeballs to the website, you need to have an on-site mechanism to convert them to leads. This is done through landing pages, which serve to capture information and degree of interest of a prospect

(6) CRM - “Closed loop inbound marketing” includes a CRM system that “talks” to lead generation capture data, and serves to outline and record nurturing tactics

(7) Software for Analytics - Key analytics for inbound marketing include items such as key word graders, sources of traffic, social media reach, lead gen campaign conversion metrics, site visitors, and more. There are many tools – a number of them free – that are available to these ends, or use a tool like HubSpot that has all of them under one roof.

(8) Social Media Accounts - Social media accounts like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook serve two purposes – they can be used to promote thought leadership, drive traffic to the website for conversion to leads, and are keys to listening and responding to conversations that can lead to new business opportunities

(9) Backlink Strategy - A key part of getting found first is based upon search engine page ranking, and search engines like Google look to see how many other sites link back to yours as a measure of the site’s authority. This is a difficult and arduous task that takes time, but one that needs critical attention by the marketing staff

(10) Outbound Marketing Infrastructure - Some of the eyeballs that come to your site will come through “organic” searches, others must be driven to the site, and once there, converted to a lead. You need to reach those eyeballs with an outbound marketing promotional strategy that can include, direct mail, email, pay per click, and so on. One critical part for outbound marketing success – you need a great database!