Lead generation is nothing new. While the leads and objectives themselves vary greatly from company to company, the core strategy is always the same:
Finding people who may be interested in your product or service (suspects), educating them about your product or service (prospects), bringing them into your company’s sales funnel and getting them to initiate contact (leads) and ultimately converting them (customers).
In our Lunch & Learn on August 26, 2015, we took our audience on the journey from researching and planning to launching and continuously improving an integrated digital marketing campaign. To do this, we created a fictional fashion brand, Tilghman Street Clothing, and walked the audience through a three-phase process: Planning, Creating, Analyzing and Optimizing.
Planning
The first phase of a lead generation campaign is the planning phase. After giving the audience background on the Tilghman Street Clothing brand, we discussed:
- How to define objectives and KPIs by asking, “What are we trying to achieve?”
- How to identify suspects and prospects by asking, “Who is our audience?”
- How to execute the campaign by asking, “What is our direction?”
In the video below, Bret Ludlow, Liquid’s Digital Marketing Manager, elaborates on how to answer these critical questions and how to jumpstart your campaign planning phase.
Creating
Once we covered the campaign planning phase and the audience had a complete understanding of what we were trying to achieve, we then moved into the creating phase. Here, we discussed the creative elements of the campaign, including the messaging as well as the ad and landing page design. This included:
- How to develop a creative, engaging and consistent campaign by sticking to the design essentials,
- The importance of consistency in messaging,
- The impact of strong calls to action, and
- Tying the design elements to the objectives outlined in the planning phase.
Watch the video below to learn all about making a campaign come to life with our very own (and very British) Creative Director, Wayne Middleton.
Analyzing and Optimizing
After all of the marketing materials were designed and our campaign was launched for Tilghman Street Clothing for Women, we jumped into the final phase: analyzing and optimizing. The point we wanted to hit home in discussing this phase was the importance of not waiting until the campaign is over to start analyzing the results. Some additional topics covered were:
- Specific examples of ways we optimized our Tilghman Street Clothing For Women campaign, including budget optimizations and content and creative optimizations;
- Ensuring optimizations match primary objectives outlined in the planning phase;
- The difference between troubleshooting and optimizing;
- Seeing the bigger picture, taking inventory of what worked and what didn’t, and using the information gained to develop improved future marketing efforts.
In the video below, Ron Sears (me), Digital Marketing Strategist, walks you through what it takes to get the best possible performance out of your lead generation campaign.
As you can see, a lot of work goes into a successful lead generation campaign. While it may seem intimidating at first, by sticking to the phases outlined above and engraining these strategies into your organization, executing a successful campaign will become second nature.
With the new year right around the corner, we hope this recap will provide you with the insight needed to develop an effective lead generation campaign for 2016. Need some additional guidance? Give Liquid a call.