Aim Before You Fire

Before you campaign for leads, you need to figure out your target.  Who are your current customers?  Which titles make the purchasing decisions?  Which leads convert best?  Ask your sales team, build some reports, and use your marketing chops to build a buyer persona (or three) to keep the right target in your sights.

Content is King

The first impression of your company comes from your content, so spend the time to make your content shine. Strive to create shareable content for your buyer persona, and test what works.  It’s important to understand what content aligns with your current customers and what works best to generate new prospects. 

Maximize Your Media Real Estate

A paid source of leads is important, but pay-per-lead can get pricy fast if you don’t know what drives conversion.  Test your landing pages and retarget to ensure you’re getting the most out of your content, and track your conversion rates at each stage so you know how much you should pay along the way.  You also probably own some digital real estate such as your home page, blog, etc.  Use it!  A SlideShare presentation, infographic, webinar, or guest blog post can be recycled while staying connected to the original landing page that you own.

Nurture Your Qualified Leads

This step requires definition: What is the difference between a marketing-qualified and a sales-qualified lead?  Keep all of your teams aligned with these important distinctions to build effective nurturing campaigns.  Your marketing-qualified leads will be better educated about your product before you formally hand them over for sales-qualification.  You can even build lead scoring to help sales prioritize outreach to their leads so none of the hot opportunities you worked to hard to create slip through the cracks.

Test, Measure, Optimize… Rinse and Repeat

Understanding what works (and what doesn’t) is the key to effective lead generation.  Take a look at your leads, opportunities, and customers by marketing channel, Salesforce campaign, ad buy, or however you slice your data.  Then measure your results, optimize and adjust based on what you learned, test any new hypotheses, measure your results, and continuously repeat this process to refine your lead generation engine.  Shoot for full return-on-investment reporting, including salary costs, but simply uncovering return-on-ad-spend (just for the media costs) can be a great first step.

Using Apps to Help with Generating Leads

Now that we've got the basics, let's turn to the AppExchange to put some fun in these fundamentals. Beyond using your own core marketing skills to determine the target and message, there are variety of campaign management apps for all the testing, measuring and optimizing of media real estate.  For example, Bizible is a marketing analytics tool that allows you to track the ROI of your marketing activities inside Salesforce.  There are also marketing automation apps to help you build nurturing paths for leads and calculate lead scores for sales, and apps like LeadFormix from CallidusCloud that specialize in lead management.

These brain-over-brawn apps will help you make the most of your lead generation the app savvy way. 

Learn more about building great mobile apps with the free e-book below.