What is a Good Lead Generation Strategy?

02 Jan 2018

Want to generate more prospects and more sales? A Lead Generation Strategy is designed to help your business identify and create more sales lead opportunities.

It can help you establish a sales pipeline. So you can nurture, manage and convert prospects into customers.

With buyers prepared to go online and do a lot of the research legwork themselves before they make a final purchasing decision. It’s important that you find the most effective ways of connecting with buyers online. Ideally, generating new leads automatically. And qualifying the ‘sales ready’ status of your new leads before they are passed to your sales team (ie: they are sales-ready).

After all, your buyers are using the internet to get up to speed, they’ve done their research on potential suppliers. And 70% of the buying decision has been made before any contact with your sales rep or telesales team. Further, because they know you and your competitors, 90% of buyers say they’ll contact you when they’re ready.

Find out what is a good lead generation strategy

So marketing and sales managers need to find more effective ways of taking back some of the control when it comes to controlling the buying process.

So what does a modern, effective Lead Generation Strategy look like and how can a business like yours start to craft out a winning approach?

Good lead generation strategy: The rise of Inbound Marketing as a tactic

Inbound Marketing is part of the answer. It has come onto the scene since customers decided that they were happy connecting with your company online. Rather than in person or over the phone.

The way people buy and sell has changed. And the internet gives the customer access to a wide range of information. It empowers them when it comes to controlling the purchase decision.

This changing landscape has caused businesses to re-vamp their lead generation strategies to better meet the needs of their target markets.

Inbound Marketing revolves around providing prospects with content they find valuable. And they want it in different forms. For example, explainer videos, blogs or premium content to best fit their needs. If supplied to them, you can slowly but surely build a relationship because you’re answering their questions and becoming valued.

By providing valuable content, you can nurture them along the sales funnel, toward your offering. 

Converting anonymous website visitors into actual prospects

So how do you get this valuable content to your prospects and control how it is delivered?

Many businesses have found that Marketing Automation is the best solution, like that provided by Perfect and SharpSpring. Marketing Automation enables content to be supplied to leads when they want it. So these leads can be automatically nurtured towards becoming sales-ready leads for your sales team to convert.

But it’s the ability of MAPs to segment leads into smart lists, to prioritise leads by a ‘lead score’. This is driven by the number of connection points a lead has had with you. You can also track visits and report on successes, making it ideal as part of your Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Strategy.

Valuable content that creates an emotional attachment

If you don’t capture data about a visitor when they visit your website, then you’ve lost an opportunity to build a relationship. This makes it hugely important then, to find out who they are, what they want to know about your products or services, before they leave. A MAP can do this, and track behaviours as they move along the sales funnel.

So an effective Lead Generation Strategy must consist of a well thought out, effective Inbound Marketing strategy – and we recommend that a MAP should be firmly placed at the centre of this strategy.

Perfect is a SharpSpring Platinum Partner and leading Customer Acquisition Agency. Specialising in Sales Lead Generation, through Marketing Automation. If you find our blog interesting then please take 2 minutes to make contact, so you can start benefiting from our experience and ideas.