Lead generation marketing captures interest for the sales pipeline, though in recent years, the mission has transformed from finding customers to being found; from representing the company to representing the customer.
Marketing is a communication process to engage with your customers to build a relationship and inspire change. It may sound complicated, but the concept can be broken down into smaller chunks:

• Message: a piece of information
• Receiver: the customer who is seeking the information
• Behavior: the message causes the receiver to take action based on the information, their desires and their emotions

Part of the process of composing the message is reaching the audience in the digital information world. Current consumers are information-seeking: they turn to the web, and their network, for information on products and services, and place the highest importance on personal referrals. This makes your website an important marketing piece.

Once you’ve earned the traffic, your website should provide the information that the user is looking for, make it easy to communicate with you, and make them feel so confident in trusting your business with fulfilling their needs, that the user then becomes a customer. Your marketing should also aim to build that relationship, so that your past and current customers continue to refer their network to you. The communication process never ends.

Lead Generation Tactics:

1. Lead-generating website
   • Local SEO
   • Contact forms
   • multimedia messages
   • Trust seals
   • Content development: persuasive writing
   • Balanced, custom design
   • analytics
2. Compelling Content with trust-building CTAs: give the user something before you ask for something. You must provide value to the user to influence their next step in the process, keeping them in the funnel
3. Technique: Develop a campaign with landing pages. Each campaign should have a single focus to draw users in for that specific purpose and serve as your brand first impression.
4. Relationship-nurturing: Follow-up communications that encourage users and customers to ‘stay tuned’ to your business via newsletter, social media, fresh website content and even traditional marketing channels (phone calls, postcards – its important to ask for reviews).

Primarily, we focus on inbound marketing, which is an attention-earning based approach to marketing. However, we do not discount traditional outbound marketing strategies, which remain highly beneficial to many industries, and in some cases have earned new focus recently. In fact, we do recommend that a combination of both marketing strategies be balanced accordingly.

According to Hubspot, Lead Generation actually falls in the second stage of the inbound marketing methodology. After you’ve already attracted the customer, this is the value offering and information-collecting stage, which makes the landing page and CTA key lead generating tactics.

Conversion Rate Optimization:

Conversion rate is a marketing metric that measures performance of a marketing piece in the sales process. It is the measurement of the action a prospect takes as a direct result of your marketing campaign piece (your content, page or ad).

For example, you design a landing page for a google ad for your new service, offering information about the importance of your service. You detail what can go wrong if the prospect neglects the problem that prompted their search for your service, include a testimonial from someone who has used your service, and offer a CTA (Call To Action), like a calculator and contact form. The number of users that submit the contact form divided by the number of users who visited your page is the percentage of new customers earned from that advertisement.

Your website should include your NAP (Name-Address-Phone), but if you implement a call tracking number for a particular advertising piece, you can track the number of phone calls generated from that ad. Divide that by the number of visits to the page (or the number of ads circulated), and you have another conversion rate measuring the performance of your campaign. The metrics that you choose to measure are key performance indicators, which drive your business to meeting your marketing goals.

Some lead generation tactics are the same for improving conversion rates:

• Social Proof/Credibility/Trust: testimonials, reviews, BBB rating, security seals, refunds/guarantees (or the bolder no-guarantee guarantee)
• NAP: your main contact information
• Content/Landing Page Optimization: Headlines can influence conversion rates as well, but if you page is not performing, change the offer/value proposition or the organization of content and information flow in a focused, strategic manner. Remove obstacles that may be preventing qualified leads from converting.
• Nurture: Offer customer satisfaction, make the closing appealing to their needs, or build the relationship for longer sale processes
• Testing: Try out different offers and landing pages to find the content and organization that converts best (WordStream calls this the Landing Page Unicorn)

Finally, it is important to note that the conversion rate is not the only measure of a successful campaign. The aim is to earn qualified leads, unless your aim is to increase exposure, as higher visits or views will always push down your conversion rate. Conversion rates only measure the percent of actions taken. Other important metrics include engagement indicators such as time on site or number of pages visited.