Lead Generation Do’s, Don’ts and Tips

To communicate with customers and potential customers and generate responses, you can use a broad range of marketing vehicles, including search, banners, links, public relations, trade shows, print and broadcast advertising, seminars, email, telemarketing and direct mail. If you touch your target audiences with credible, relevant communications, they’ll usually respond — but only if you pay attention to these do’s, don’ts and tips:

Online Demand Generation

Online demand creation, using banners, text links, etc., allows buyers to stay hidden as they learn and gather information anonymously. Many buyers interested in your products and services feel intimidated by sales people and annoyed by unsolicited communications. They want to drive the timing and direction of the “conversation” on their own terms. Online advertising allows them this opportunity. It is your job to provide content and offers aligned with different job titles/ functions and potential stages in the buying cycle, so that anonymous visitors have the incentive to eventually identify themselves.

Similarly, buyers responding to your Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing arrive at your website with a purpose — looking for some piece of information or specific offer. It’s common practice these days to trade information, that is, to ask for information before providing information. Visitors tell you a little something about themselves, you share a little something about your company and its products, they tell you a little more, you tell them a little more — and over time, you create a mutually beneficial learning relationship. Through this process, you gradually gain insights into their circumstances, so that you can send additional relevant information.

Trade Shows & Events

Events are useful for both branding and lead generation. To the attendee, face-to-face events serve two primary purposes: education and networking. Attendees learn about products, services, technologies, companies, industries and trends. In addition, they meet people they may want to hire, get hired by, or partner with. Online events – webcasts – are primarily educational activities for the attendee. These events trade educational content for registration information. Again, provide a compelling call to action, or conduct a promotion that requires a business card for participation.

Email Marketing

Email is no longer a new phenomenon. In fact, email blasts to rented lists are illegal. More than that, from a marketing standpoint, they are ineffective. But don’t abandon email as a credible demand-generating tool. Email is still relatively inexpensive to execute and you can achieve a solid ROI if you use it properly. Spend most of your efforts building your marketing database.

Gather opt-ins from all other touch points, including events, your website, mailings, telemarketing, and so on. Next, craft your email messages with offers relevant to the audience based on their job function and their inferred information preferences. It goes without saying, but don’t over-blast them. List fatigue is the main cause of declining open and clickthrough rates. Your response rates will be low compared to direct mail or telemarketing, but since the cost per touch is also low, your cost per qualified lead can still be attractive.

Direct Mail Marketing

Postal mail is making a comeback. With the growth of online direct response advertising, many technology marketers have simply stopped using postal mail as a part of their marcom mix. This means mail boxes are less full than email inboxes these days and the lack of clutter enables your next mailing to stand out.

With the growing sophistication of direct mail technology, the latest electronic databases and slice-and-dice psychographics, today's marketers can implement sophisticated direct response campaigns to smaller and smaller segments of their target audiences. The benefits of tailoring your message to ever-narrower market segments are extraordinary. You can deliver a brand message to a target audience, and measure the response. If the additional work — more versions of the same mailing, more drop dates, more approvals — makes it hard for you to do more than simply get the pieces out the door, try outsourcing project management and/or creative and production.

Print Advertising

Print advertising, while traditionally not regarded as a strong demand generation tool, is a very strong brand builder. Technology buyers continue to browse credible magazines and web sites to stay abreast of trends, ideas and news they otherwise would be unaware of. As a result, you can count on Print to deliver a broader reach than direct marketing, while providing a focus and clarity that online media has yet to achieve.

Print advertising excels at supporting direct marketing, both on- and off-line. Direct response marketing campaigns that follow a print campaign can expect to produce results 10-25% greater than standalone direct campaigns. Similarly, telemarketing that references a print article or ad produces considerably higher reach and conversion rates.

The key to making print advertising effective for lead generation is to provide a compelling call to action. While nearly every advertisement includes a website URL on the bottom, most do not include a strong incentive to visit that URL. (“For more information” is not a compelling incentive.) If you include a specific offer and call-to-action in your print ads, you can expect numerous inquiries from prospects who may not have responded to — or even have been exposed to — traditional direct marketing offers.

Telemarketing

It’s a fact: nobody likes to receive cold calls. So what should your telemarketing team do? Contact a highly targeted list of individuals by phone with an offer relevant to what you already know about them. Time your telemarketing campaign to coincide with your print, online and postal direct mail campaigns. Voila! This works because you’re not making cold calls, you’re making credible business follow-up calls, which a majority of recipients will appreciate.

Bottom Line

Try to resist personal preferences when choosing lead generation vehicles. Test several to ensure you maximize the number of inquiries you can generate, while still staying within the cost-per-lead targets your business requires.