What’s the first thing most people do when seeking out a product or service? They open their laptop or mobile device and search for what they need, usually through a search engine or social media platform.

As a marketer, salesperson, and brand overall, it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of your ideal potential customers. Can your target audience find your brand and specific services or products through a quick Google search? Are you reaching the right prospects through your social media channels and campaigns?

After all, if your digital marketing efforts aren’t focused on strategies that will generate quality leads, you may as well be casting a line in a pond with no fish.

The digital shift in B2B and B2C lead generation

In an increasingly digital world, consumers flock to search engines and digital channels to find solutions to their challenges and problems. Traditional sales and marketing tactics have shifted to accommodate these behaviors. In pre-COVID-19 times, many B2B and B2C companies reported in-person events, conferences, and tradeshows as their most effective form of lead generation.

As companies adapt to a digital sales environment, many are experimenting with online lead generation campaigns, which have the simple goal of bringing in potential customers to turn into actual customers.

Lead generation campaigns are some of the best tactics in digital marketing for attracting ideal prospects and bringing them into your nurture funnel until they become a loyal customer.

In this post, you’ll uncover the five basic steps of launching a successful lead generation campaign through social media, and how to incorporate all areas of digital marketing into your campaign. You and your team will need skills in the following areas to successfully launch a high-quality lead generation campaign:

• Content marketing
• Digital marketing
• Paid advertising
• Social media management
• Copywriting
• Expert knowledge in your field and industry
• Graphic design
• Web development

What is online lead generation?

According to HubSpot, lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated an interest in your company’s product or service. In order to attract and convert your ideal audience, you can set up an online campaign on your website and amplify it through a range of marketing channels like social media, Google Ads, and email marketing.

How to set up a lead generation campaign

A successful lead generation campaign starts with quality content marketing. After all, the best way to get someone to complete a form and give you their information is by offering something they find inspiring, informative, or entertaining. Generally, this comes in the form of offering more information on a topic that isn’t widely available.

Whether you choose to create a guide, eBook, white paper, checklist, video, or another form of downloadable content, you need to make sure it’s valuable to the person downloading it. Select your topic, do the necessary research, and have an expert copywriter put together the content and optimize it for the format you’ve chosen. Once that is finalized, pass it to your design team to make it branded and beautiful.

Promote your content

In a perfectly SEO-optimized world, the perfect potential customer would stumble upon your landing page through an organic search, enter their information into the form to access the content you’ve just created, and become a customer. The chances of that happening? Pretty slim. This is why the next step in the lead generation process—after you’ve created your downloadable content—is to have a strategy for sharing it with the world.

Have your copywriters, design team, and marketing strategists work collaboratively to create multi-channel content with compelling CTAs (call-to-action). This refers to Instagram or LinkedIn posts, blog posts, webinars, email marketing content, and digital advertising assets such as Google Ads to promote the information within your content and encourage downloads. Your promotional content should link directly to your landing page, or wherever the downloadable content and form is located.

Set up landing page and tracking

Once your content and promotional plans are ready, you’ll need to create a place for the downloadable content to live—aka the landing page mentioned earlier. This system may vary by whether you host your website through a site like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or utilize landing pages through a platform like HubSpot.

Create your initial landing page with a form, then create a confirmation page (not applicable for HubSpot sites) that potential customers are led to after completing the form. After creating and publishing these pages, you’ll want to generate UTM links to the main landing page for each channel you plan on sharing the link to. This will help you get more accurate results and separate organic versus paid traffic to the page.

If you are launching social media and/or digital ads, you will need to install channel-specific pixel and conversion codes onto the two website pages in order to track the exact number of conversions. Each social media channel has documentation of how to generate and install their codes on your sites.

Launch, monitor, and adjust your campaign

Our golden rule after launching a campaign: never set it and forget it! Be sure to check in on your organic and paid promotions to see how they are performing, evaluate what could potentially help them perform better, and make any necessary adjustments.

Example: You promote your content on Twitter, and even back it with a paid ad budget of $500. If a week goes by and your tweets are getting low impressions and clicks to the landing page, it may be time to pause the paid ads and evaluate your targeting, or shift your efforts to a different channel that may be performing better.

Report and evaluate the effectiveness of your lead gen campaign

The final step in a lead generation campaign is reporting and reflecting on the campaign. There are three key questions you and your team should consider when evaluating your campaigns’ performance:

• Do you understand the results and numbers you are looking at?
• How many leads did you generate?
• Are those leads actually qualified and/or valuable to you?
  

Simply reading the metrics may not be enough for you to determine success. Many marketers find far more value in who the leads are than the total number of leads generated. Although a high number of downloads may seem exciting at first, if none find your services valuable, you may as well have had zero downloads in the first place.

Launch your lead generation campaign and watch sales soar

While it may seem simple at first, there are quite a few imperative steps to take for a high-converting lead generation campaign. Digital lead generation is the way of the future, so now is the time to take advantage of these tactics to drive new business and connect with your ideal customers right at your fingertips!

Social media advertising is one of the most effective ways to generate qualified new leads online. But are you setting your campaign up properly? Download our free guide to learn the 10 Mistakes To Avoid When Launching Your Own Social Media Advertising Campaigns.

Aimtal is a full-service marketing agency that builds marketing that engages and converts your audience. Our empathetic approach to content development means we create marketing that your audience cares about, leading to a higher conversion rate. Click here to schedule a discovery call and learn how we can help your brand thrive.

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