5.4 Billion Degrees F of Digital Lead Generation Fusion

Leads Never Stop Once You Get Your Lead Gen Fusion Reactor Started... But It’s Not Easy!

Who doesn’t think that the premise and promise of fusion energy isn’t thrilling?

There was a great article in a recent issue of Time magazine (“A Star is Born;” Vol. 186, No. 18, 2015) about the future of fusion energy. With private, entrepreneurial companies reaching new milestones at a fast and furious pace, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that it’s now not a matter of how, but when. Of course, that “when” is a pretty big deal, and it will be interesting to see what comes first: Fusion or Chelsea Clinton’s run for President.

In fusion, once you get hydrogen soup (plasma) up to 5 billion degrees F or so and contain it, the merging (i.e. “fusing”) of atomic nuclei creates tremendous energy which theoretically can be captured, harnessed, and put to good use like powering “Chelsea for President” digital billboards... forever. It’s the forever part that’s really intriguing because once you get the reactor started, it keeps on cranking out cheap, clean, and unlimited energy using the fuel equivalency of powering a 1 GW coal fire powered station for decades with the lithium in your laptop battery.

Believe it or not, a lot of the characteristics of digital lead generation are the same as those of fusion: It’s relatively cheap, it has the potential to produce a huge amount of results for a moderate amount of “fuel,” it works on a 24/7/365 basis, and it comes with a challenging set of barriers that must be overcome in order to get to the 5.4 billion degree threshold where the magic happens.

An Example of Digital Lead Generation Fusion

A lot of companies approach lead generation as a sprint rather than a marathon. It’s built around a single activity, and when the finish line is crossed and leads collected, it’s tucked into the archive and forgotten. Then, at some point in the future, the company gets ready and runs another sprint… and another… and another.

A well-constructed digital lead generation campaign is designed to live forever and continually produce leads around an offer. It can also have many different lives, from a standalone offer to being part of a larger workflow and marketing automation campaign.

Take a look at this example from one of our clients: A professional services firm that created and launched an offer for a free corporate finance analysis tool in the fall of 2013.

Two years later, it’s still going strong, producing leads month after month to the tune of over 200 prospects that initiated a dialogue with this firm, 125+ of which were brand new.

That’s lead generation fusion: Clean, cheap, and continually producing.

What Needs to Get Loaded into a Lead Generation Fusion Reactor to Reach 5.4 Billion Degrees?

In the world of fusion, the reaction that is easiest to accomplish is the reaction between two hydrogen isotopes: deuterium and tritium. When their nuclei fuse, they form a helium nucleus, a neutron, and a lot of energy. (Science lesson now concluded.)

When it comes to lead generation, the fusion process produces energy in the form of a continual supply of hot, fresh new leads. But, we need to get 7 “marketing isotopes” fused to produce a reaction:

1. The Offer
   Lead generation fusion starts with an offer for a packaged piece of thought leadership—like a whitepaper or checklist—that a prospect feels to be of such compelling interest that they’ll be willing to provide you with their contact information for access. Of course, the more “evergreen” the content, the more it will continue to produce energy (new leads) over a long period of time. A word of caution here: Don’t load sales collateral into your reactor because regardless of what you think, nobody wants to give you their name and phone number for a sales brochure! That will bring the temperature in the reactor down to minus 5.4 million ⁰ F!

2. Call to Action Button
   The call to action button (CTA) is an icon that starts the fusion reaction when a prospect clicks on it to get to the offer. There are a fair number of best practices when it comes to the construct and placement of a CTA, but if you want to see one in action, check out the CTA at the end of this blog post.

3. Landing Page
   A click from a CTA will take your prospect to a page on your website where your offer will be presented and where that prospect will have the opportunity to provide contact information for redemption. Here’s an interesting fact that keeps landing pages in the fusion equation: They can be optimized for search and consequently accessed directly from a search engine result. Talk about sustainability!

4. Outbound Marketing
   You can’t create lead generation fusion if you can’t get eyeballs on your offer. That’s why outbound marketing should still be a critical part of the mechanics of lead generation fusion. This can include tactics like pay per click advertising, email blasts, eNewsletters, public relations, and so on—all designed to raise awareness of the offer while leading the prospect to a landing page.

5. Inbound Marketing
   Maintaining lead generation fusion is critically dependent upon two components of the inbound marketing methodology: Getting found though best search engine optimization tactics ranging from page optimization to blogging; and placing CTAs for an offer on strategic and relevant pages on your site where visitors can easily convert to a lead with one click and one completion of a form.

6. Measurement Tools
   Just like scientists measure the results of their fusion experiments, your lead generation fusion reactor will create a huge amount of valuable data that you can use to continually refine the reaction—if you have the right tools, like HubSpot, to collect and present data. This data can range from page views to form conversion rates to customer acquisition rates and a lot more.

7. Sales Accountability
   You need to hook up your lead generation fusion reactor to delivery of new customers in order to really determine the ROI of your investment. That’s why every offer needs to be conducted in coordination with a sales resource that can help move the prospect through the sales funnel once they convert. Smart money in marketing is flowing towards making the marketing/sales connection as strong as it possibly can be with tools like lead scoring, lead visit notification, and CRM.

How Do You Ignite a Lead Generation Fusion Reactor?

The big challenge for physicists and engineers is not only to reach critical temperatures, but to find a way to sustain those temperatures in a way that the energy used to do so is significantly less than energy delivered by the reaction.They’re still a ways away from making this happen, but you already have—or can readily get—all of the marketing isotopes you need to crank out leads. But even though you may have put all of the elements discussed above into your lead generation reactor, it still might not ignite and here’s why: lack of commitment, patience, and willingness to experiment (and fail if necessary) on the part of firm management.Once you get the reaction started with your first lead generation campaign, you’ll find that adding additional campaigns into the reactor becomes easier and easier. It won’t be unusual if your company has dozens of lead generation activities up and running simultaneously, and because they’re digital and work 24/7/365, they’ll continually produce energy in the form of a fresh supply of new leads.

The only question that remains is this: Can you get your lead gen fusion reactor up and running before Chelsea’s campaign launches?