Three Steps to Building a Lead Gen Framework

[Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 14 seconds] Do a quick Google search on ‘How to generate more leads’ and you’ll find a variety of articles offering advice on the best strategies and tactics. But, before even getting started, it’s really important to make sure you have the following framework in place:

1. Understanding your target audience. In order for your lead gen strategy to be effective, you must first dig deep into understanding the persona(s) you are trying to reach. What does that mean? It means do your research, interview your customers or survey prospects so have a good understanding of their background, motivations and pain points and where they consume their content.
2. Developing compelling content. Once the persona(s) have been developed, you now have a guide to help with determining the content structure as well as the topics you should focus on. The goal is to then develop engaging and targeted content for a variety of different communication channels, in a variety of different formats and throughout all stages of the buyer’s journey.
3. Implementing a lead scoring system. To be successful in identifying a warm lead, it’s an absolute necessity to set up a lead scoring system. The lead criteria and scoring are usually depended on how likely the lead will make a purchase. So, for example, if a lead watched a webinar and downloaded a white paper, their intent to purchase is warmer than a lead who watched a video.

Once the framework has been built, it’s time to develop your campaign plan. Because lead generation is all about building and nurturing relationships, it’s important for your campaign to have a cross-channel approach to be most effective. By combining tactics – such as marketing automation, social media posts, retargeting, blog posts and paid media – you provide multiple ways for your potential prospects to engage and gain awareness about why your product or service solves their business problems.

On a final note, what I love about lead generation is the ability to experiment and test these different tactics to see what resonates with the segment(s) you are trying to reach. Additionally, I am a big fan of analyzing the results and making changes in real time to see if it made a difference. Lead generation is robust and always evolving. By also detailing and measuring your results over time, you start getting a better idea on the quality of your lead and also the effectiveness of your campaign.

As with any lead nurture campaign, sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t. As long as the framework is in place, you should be one step ahead of the game.

Have questions or comments on your own lead gen framework? Connect with me on LinkedIn.