4 Ways to Refine Your Lead Generation Strategy for Today’s Marketing Landscape
By Dmytro Spilka
As the world looks towards a future in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, marketers are making moves to anticipate and adapt to a "new normal" landscape. With virtually all businesses affected by the coronavirus, the process of lead generation in this unfamiliar climate has become more important than ever.
Lockdowns around the world have forced brick-and-mortar stores to close, and more businesses have tried to tap into the potential of online marketing. Companies are reaching out to customers who seem to be constantly online, and who are consuming more digital content than ever.
According to HubSpot, marketers largely believe that lead generation is the biggest challenge they are facing. As we enter the world of the new normal, many marketers are having to review and reset their approaches to generating leads when it comes to winning customers.
Let’s take a deeper look into how marketers can adapt to the changing world around them by refining their lead generation strategy to optimize funnels for better lead generation in the post-pandemic era.
Lead generation in a "new normal" business world
First, let’s remind ourselves what lead generation actually entails. Lead generation is the process of identifying prospective customers who are interested in buying your products or services. This is an integral part of marketing because it involves correctly identifying your market while also getting your sales funnel in line to welcome visitors who will likely buy from your business.
In this regard, lead generation keeps companies from wasting money on strategies like cold calling or emailing in favor of more strategic, streamlined approaches, such as content marketing, email marketing, and social media campaigns.
Most businesses acknowledge the importance of lead generation and allocate the majority of their marketing budgets accordingly. However, the disruptive influence of Covid has led to fundamental changes to how lead generation should be conducted today.
Owing to the chaos that the pandemic has caused, marketers have been forced to adapt their lead generation strategy to winning sales ahead of their competitors. Let’s explore how sales and marketing funnels may be best optimized in the wake of Covid-19.
4 ways to refine your lead generation strategy for today's landscape
1. Expand your use of video marketing
Even before the disruptive arrival of Covid, video marketing had been an emerging trend. Today 86% of businesses use video as a key marketing tool, and 93% of marketers agree that video is an important part of their marketing strategy.
Video-based content, such as webinars, webcasts, live demos, streams, and expertise-driven informational videos on websites and social networks continue to perform well in the marketing landscape. The driving force behind this trend is consumers who prefer watching video-based content rather than reading text. Also, in a new marketing ecosystem where more workers are home-based, they have more time and freedom during the day to watch videos on the internet.
Furthermore, businesses are more likely to engage, impress, and win sales via videos that strike a chord with customers on a psychological level.
One business that’s been successful with video marketing is UK energy company, Bulb. The firm ran collaborative campaigns with several healthful drink companies to promote its efforts to help health-conscious and sustainable businesses. The campaign gained more traction thanks to the added brand value of the companies that Bulb works with.
2. Partner with social media influencers
Today, more brands are looking to influencers as a key facet of lead generation. Fundamentally, influencers are individuals, brands, or digital entities who possess a higher level of authority in the niche a company is trying to reach. While they largely operate on social media, influencers come with different levels of stature and different approaches of marketing to their audiences.
Some businesses build relationships with micro-influencers as a means of boosting their reach and engagement. Micro-influencers typically don't have as many followers, but they tend to engage more with their followers and peers, and as a result, give brands the potential to generate more trust from their leads.
One of the most significant reasons behind the growth of influencer marketing is that consumers have become weary of company voices. In the United States, over 77% of adults say "it has become harder to trust what companies say and do."
Influencers offer many benefits beyond overcoming a lack of trust from consumers. Businesses can use the advocacy of individuals who are influential within an industry niche and then use performance-based marketing platforms to compensate the influencers based on results alone. Influencer marketing platforms like Grin and Upfluence are great when it comes to setting up performance-based tracking to ensure a company only pays for the leads that influencers generate.
Furthermore, influencers typically use analytics and data to better understand their market. By enlisting the help of influencers who understand their niche well, companies have a better chance of understanding the behavior of their audience.
More articles from AllBusiness.com:
- The Trick to Capturing More Customer Leads on Your Website
- Get Better Leads: 5 Ways to Improve the Quality of What Goes in Your Sales Funnel
- The Fundamentals of Creating an Outstanding Sales Funnel
- 6 Tips for Creating Social Media Videos That People Can't Help But Click On
- How to Generate More Leads from Your Webinars
As an example, Dunkin’ Donuts looked to use the power of influencers across its social channels in a National Donut Day campaign. Throughout the day, eight influencers took over the Dunkin’ Donuts' Snapchat account and offered followers the chance to listen to non-corporate voices on the company's social media account, as well as the opportunity to enter special promotions.
The campaign was a success. Dunkin’ Donuts achieved 10-times more followers in 24 hours than they typically gain in a month. The campaign itself reached around three million people with 40,000 engagements.
If you’re looking to bolster your presence across social media platforms in 2021, it’s worth using influencers to help generate interest and trust in your product in a manner that may not be possible otherwise.
3. Incentivize current customers to provide referrals
In marketing, nothing comes close to the power of word-of-mouth. If you offer a high-quality service, your customers are more likely to recommend you to their peers. These recommendations play a pivotal role in the optimization of sales funnels for more customer growth.
Constantly optimize the quality of your customer service to ensure you are offering high levels of customer satisfaction. You can also incentivize your current customers by offering them a discount or a free product for every person they refer who becomes a new customer.
Upserve, a restaurant management software provider, offers a great example of a small business referral program. The company rewards users with a $200 donation to the Clean Water Fund for every successful referral.
It's also worth including positive reviews of happy customers in your marketing emails and social media campaigns. With the help of user-generated content (UGC), these customers become powerful advocates of your brand.
4. Monitor campaign performance closely with analytics tools
The pandemic has caused a level of disruption that’s led to widespread financial uncertainty for many companies. Because of this, it’s never been more important to invest more care and commitment towards your bottom line. Avoid wasting time and resources that aren’t converting enough leads.
See how your campaigns are performing in terms of how new visitors interact with your website’s pages. Analytical platforms like Google Analytics and Finteza can help you see where your traffic is coming from and how new arrivals are using your pages. For instance, if your video campaigns are winning more email conversions, but your webinars are underperforming, you can reassess how you create and market your webinars to your audience.
Your lead generation strategy must adapt to today's world
As businesses begin to recover from the pandemic, following a more adaptive lead generation strategy will allow companies to have an advantage over rivals and win those all-important conversions at a quicker rate.
RELATED: 10 Ways to Turn Employees into Brand Ambassadors for Your Business
About the Author
Post by: Dmytro Spilka
Dmytro Spilka is CEO at Solvid, a long-form content creation agency based in London. His work has been published in Zapier, WordStream, Shopify, IBM, Entrepreneur, BuzzSumo, Campaign Monitor, and Tech Radar.
Company: Solvid
Website: www.solvid.co.uk