For the last 25+ years, WSI has helped 100,000 businesses navigate the complexity of digital marketing. Attracting more qualified leads online is just one of the topics we have covered in webinars intended to educate and share best practices on aspects of digital marketing.
Managing director at an Atlanta-based WSI Agency, Gerardo Kerik draws on his years of experience at Fortune 500 companies where he launched brands and products in the US, Europe, South East Asia, and Latin America.
What is a Lead?
“A lead is an individual or organization with an interest in what you are selling. The interest is expressed by sharing contact information, like an email ID, phone number, or social media handle.”
Leads vary from cold to warm or hot leads, depending on how engaged they are with your products or services. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) are engaging with your marketing activities, e.g., a webinar. Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) are high-quality leads showing a clear intent and ability to buy.
Ideally, you want to scale up the quantity of quality leads to achieve your goals.
The 7-Step Framework
1. Goals
Using a mathematical formula, you can enter the average sales price of your product and your average lead-close rate to calculate the number of leads you need to achieve your revenue objective. Including the average cost per lead will return your total budget.
If you don’t have these figures for your business, use industry averages in the meantime.
2. Buyer Persona
“A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”
To find out the interests, pains, and challenges of your ideal customers, consider interviewing customers, studying your contact database, leveraging website forms, and getting feedback from your salespeople.
Then brainstorm with your team to create buyer personas from the info you have gathered. (Get our eBook, How to Create Buyer Personas, from your friendly WSI Consultant.)
3. Buyer Journey
Map the process buyers go through to:
- Become aware of a need.
- Consider options to solve the need.
- Decide to purchase the solution.
Be sure to match journey touch points to your type of business (B2B vs B2C).
4. Content Mapping and Offers
An effective strategy to maintain engagement with your business delivers the right type of content to each buyer persona at the right time.
Generate leads with an offer that will motivate your prospects to share their contact information in exchange for it, i.e. a lead magnet.
Your local WSI Consultant can assist you with a content audit.
5. Conversion Path
What digital path is followed to convert an anonymous website visitor to a lead to a buyer?
Four basic elements include a download offer landing page, a conversion form, a thank you page, and in return you get an email address lead.
6. Channels
This step can only be addressed as a consequence of the previous steps. Now you determine what marketing tactics will achieve your revenue goals.
Each channel (paid or organic search, social, display, email) has its own benefits and is mapped to steps on the buyer’s journey.
7. Reporting
Use data and insights to close the loop between marketing activities and sales results. Getting feedback lets you make campaign changes that increase the number of quality leads.
For one-on-one help with your online lead generation strategy or any other aspect of digital marketing, contact WSI without delay! Or catch up with our full webinar recording below:
