6 steps to a winning B2B lead generation campaign

This article guides you in understanding the key stages necessary to create a successful multi-channel lead generation campaign.

1. CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVES

Define the scope of the campaign with its objectives. Put in place KPIs and commit to it even if it’s the first time, this will set the benchmark for future campaigns.

2. CUSTOMER PERSONA

Research and learn about your products, competitors, the wider industry and its challenges. Create a customer persona using internal/external sources, talk to your sales team, technical department and get some customer feedback. Fill the information gaps with research.

The customer persona will help you establish what your target audience care about, the challenges and pain points they face, their requirements in terms of product information, their preferred communication channels, platforms and a multitude of other information which is vital for the planning of your content strategy and the overall campaign.

3. CONTENT IS CURRENCY

Now that you've created your customer persona, it's time to find the 'sweet spot', right at the intersection of the customer's interest and the company's expertise. Finding the sweet spot will simplify and guide the content creation. Anything that does not complement it is not content, you want to spend time producing. Produce educational content that is insightful for your customers and it will also help with your SEO.

Sources of content: Create (recycle, adapt, build from scratch). Collaborate. Curate
Tell your story through ads, creative storyteller video, landing page, web pages, PR, email, brochures and other marketing collateral
Develop an operational plan that outlines all the actions needed to produce the content; who's responsible, procedures and deadlines

4. GETTING YOUR AUDIENCE TO SUBSCRIBE

Use social media to promote your content and drive traffic to your landing page. Once on your landing page, visitors will consume your content and in exchange if the content is insightful, they will subscribe to your mailing list. Use both organic and paid social media channels.

Drive quality traffic to your landing page and get visitors to subscribe with a search strategy including both, organic search and paid search (PPC). Establish important keywords that are relevant to your product and audience with a good volume of traffic. Optimise your website content accordingly.

Re-market to website visitors across paid social media and PPC campaigns.

5. CONVERTING SUBSCRIBERS INTO CUSTOMERS

Create engaging email content based on the customer journey. Keep your email design simple clean and templated for consistency, promoting one single idea at the time with a clear call to action.

Build a program that automatically enrolls new subscribers every day, and send emails to the subscribers at specified intervals moving subscribers through the customer journey. 

6. TEST, MEASURE AND OPTIMISE

Testing is a very important part of the process in order to run a successful campaign. Testing and optimising the different elements (creatives, target audience, content, Ads format etc..) of your social, search and email campaigns allows you to adjust, reinvest on what’s working better to make marginal improvements and get a better ROI.

Use a well structured Digital Marketing & Measurement model. The best model I found is from Google evangelist Avinash Kaushik https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-and-measurement-model/

CAMPAIGN CHECKLIST

• Paid social media: don't ignore paid social media, with some platforms holding over 1,000 of data points about their users, research shows that paid social media is now a more cost effective strategy for content marketing than building organic social audiences.

• Landing page: make sure your landing page is search engine friendly and relevant. Keep the design simple, make sure the page loads fast and displays correctly on all screen devices. 

• Form design: ensure that the form and process to capture users information adheres to the GDPR guidelines, asking only for the minimum information necessary. 

• Attribution: use Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to track goal and event conversions across all the channels.

• Automation: automate your processes whenever possible. Be effective with content distribution on social media, use Hootsuite or a similar tool to plan and schedule posts across all the platforms all in one place.

• Smart testing: priorities element for testing that will make the most impact for your campaign. For example A/B testing different types of audience will have more impact than testing different colour type of CTA buttons or subject lines. When testing only change one variable at the time, i.e. don’t test different Ad formats and creatives at the same time.

• Remarketing: as a rule of thumb unfortunately in my experience using remarketing with Google Ads (PPC) or paid social won’t work if your target audience is small.

• Remember it’s not about you: be where your customers persona are. Make sure to test different platforms, it's not about what social media you or your boss like it's about being where your customers are, therefore test test and test again to see what success you are having and optimise platforms spent accordingly.

• Email content: work on your email editorial first, making sure it’s of quality and flows without any images. Then add simple graphic/image to complement your copy. Too often we see emails having a lot of images distracting the reader from essential information.

Ultimately the success of your marketing multi-channnel lead generation campaign will come down to how much effort you put towards testing, failing, learning and improving at the 6 stages we’ve just covered.

And in Google's words always Be There, Be Useful, Be Quick...