Dating Skills Could Be The Key To Revolutionizing Your Lead Generation Strategies

 

“The lead generation process is very similar to the beginning stages of a relationship, where the level of comfort and intimacy is built over a period of time through a number of pleasant and mutually rewarding experiences, where each party feels the other understands and can relate to them and their needs.”

When employing lead generation practices, it is to your advantage to run these leads into a marketing automation software, whether it is through a CRM platform first or not. This will allow you to enter prospects that have engaged with your business into an automated campaign, real-time, built with the purpose of nurturing their engagement, qualifying them as a lead, and moving them to the next stage of your purchasing process.

All marketing automation platforms come with the ability to build a lead generation flow or “sign up forms” which will push contacts into specific lists and will gather demographic, geographic and firmographic information based on the fields you include. When building a lead generation form, it is always a good idea to provide the contact with options of different areas of your business that may be of interested to them, providing them the option to opt-in to the different types of communications they would like to receive from you.

 

Secrets To Lead Generation Success

The trick is balancing your lead generation flow, between a quick, and easy process that will require little effort from the contact and collecting sufficient data that will allow you to optimize and personalize the contacts experience with your business. In most cases, the data collection can be broken down into steps and included in the on-boarding process. Although users are starting to view data collection from the perspective that the more you know about them, the better their experience is going to be, the majority of people are still selective with what they are comfortable sharing.

“To be honest, in my experience its best to treat the data collection process as if you just started dating this new contact.”

To be honest, in my experience its best to treat the data collection process of lead generation, as if you just started dating this new contact. The process is very similar to the beginning stages of a relationship, where the level of comfort and intimacy is built over a period of time through a number of pleasant and mutually rewarding experiences, where each party feels the other understands and can relate to them and their needs. When looking at this process from that perspective, it is best to break down the data collection over a period of time, while offering the contact something of value in return. Marketing automation platforms can help you achieve this through personalization paired with the capabilities to “set it and forget it” by creating what is called a rolling nurture campaign.

 

Here is an example of how this could be set up in a B2B environment:

Step 1: Acquiring the basics, your foundation for the future

A prospect comes across one of your Facebook ads promoting a new ebook you just released. They fill out a lead generation form that requires their first name, last name, email address, and company. Within seconds of hitting the submit button, they are directed to a thank you page which also features content related to the ebook they signed up for, and they receive an email with a link to the ebook.

 

Step 2: Related, helpful, quality content offered with no gate

1-2 days later your marketing automation campaign will deploy an email to your new prospect with the top blog posts that relate to the topic of the ebook or that build upon it, with a message saying something along the lines of “we thought these might be of interest to you, while researching xxx topic” (no information is collected, the content is free and completely ungated).

 

Step 3: Upcoming live or on-demand webinar (80/20 split on content and promotion)

1-2 days after the content email, your marketing automation platform will reach out to the new prospect with a retargeting ad, informing them of an upcoming webinar along, the same line as the initial topic as the ebook and blog posts. When registering for the webinar, the form will pull the contacts information into the fields that they have already filled out and new fields will appear below, asking the contact to input their job title, size of company and role in purchasing to complete their registration for the webinar. After the webinar they receive a thank you email with the on-demand link so they can re-watch it at their leisure.

 

Step 4: live demo (100% product or service related)

3 days after the webinar (aiming for the following week), your automated campaign will deploy an email invitation to a live demo of the product/service that is related to your topic theme throughout this campaign. The messaging focuses around relating the live demo to their company by inserting the data you have collected from them so far. The sign-up form for the live demo will work similar to the webinar sign up form and will prompt the contact to fill out additional fields such as their yearly budget, and the timeframe they will be looking to make a decision connected to the topic of interest.

 

Step 5: Set up a call (100% focussed on how your product/service can meet their needs)

1 hour after the live demo takes place, your automated campaign will send the contact an email thanking them for participating, and suggesting that in order to better understand their needs and help them achieve their goal, you would like to set up a sales call with them to discuss how your product/service can meet their unique business needs.

 

By the end of this campaign, you have collected their first name, last name, email, company, size of the company, job title, role in purchasing, yearly budget and the timeframe in which they will be evaluating the product or service that is connected with the topic or theme your campaign has been centered around. You have achieved this through a series of mutually beneficial interactions, that have been building trust, gaining a deeper level of understanding, and nurturing the engagement between your campaign and your contact.

 

Why this works:

• You are creating a series of helpful, beneficial touch points for your prospect, providing them with multiple positive experiences with your business.

 

• The majority of the time, B2B prospects will come across content while researching a problem they need to solve. You are providing much-needed information, perspective, and solutions in a timely fashion.

 

• This campaign is based upon continued engagement, if the contact stops engaging they fall out of this campaign and can be picked up by a re-engagement campaign with the purpose of offering more options based on what they had been interacting with in the beginning.

 

• Timing is everything; in this campaign, we are roughly estimating where the contact will be in the research and decision-making process and are timing our automatic touch points to reach them at the opportune moments without being too aggressive.

 

Marketing automation provides the ability to accommodate your contacts schedule and adapt to each individual’s engagement levels as if they were your only client.  This scalable approach allows you to build and strengthen your relationship with your prospects no matter the quantity, without bogging down your time. The rolling campaign will need to be optimized from time to time but ultimately, if created correctly, running these campaign can work as though you have both a marketing and sales coordinator in one and your contacts feel recognized and catered too. Now if only dating could be this straightforward 😉

 

You can find part four of this series here: How To Convert Lost Leads: Retargeting’s place in the Mix