Lead generation marketing, is how you grow your business, but knowing where to invest and what is working can be hard.
Lead generation marketing has two key action areas.
- The first one is what content should you be creating and is that content creating leads for you organisation?
- The second is, knowing where to invest your marketing budget to ensure you are reaching the right audience and doing it in a cost effective way.
Key takeaways- Lead Generation Marketing
Top 3 tips for Lead Generation
See our checklist
1. Get a handle on the overall performance of your lead generation marketing and how many leads you have created, volume of visitors, conversion rate and the cost per lead.
2. Understand which channels and campaigns (how people got to your website) are working and not working. Know the cost per lead for paid channels, to see if there is an issue or opportunity to invest further.
3. Know which content people are engaging with the most. What is driving your lead generation and what content should you be doing more of.
Lead Generation Marketing
The What, Why and How
What Lead Generation Marketing activities can I do?
Lead generation marketing is not a new category in marketing. However with digital marketing it makes the process more interactive for prospective leads and measurable for organisations.
The two activities you need to be focusing on for your lead generation marketing are the following:
1 The content you need to create
2 The channels you need to use to reach your audience
2 The channels you need to use to reach your audience
By deploying the right type of content through the right channels you will be able to to start to generate leads.
Why should I measure my Lead Generation Marketing?
Measuring your lead generation marketing performance is critical.
By measuring where you leads came from (channel) and what they engaged with (content) you will be able to understand what is and is not working.
Once you know what is converting well, you will be able to invest your lead generation marketing budget to work it’s hardest.
The typical measure of success is Cost per lead (CPL) which will allow you to understand which media and content combination is the best.
How to I diagnose my Lead Generation Marketing effectiveness?
To diagnose your lead generation marketing you will need to look at two key areas:
1.Define your trending lead performance
The first task is to understand overall how your organisation performs at generating leads. This needs to be compared either month on month or year on year. Click here to learn how to monitor your overall lead performance.
2. Diagnose your channels and content
The second task is using the changes from your trending lead performance, diagnose which channels, content and campaigns are over and underperforming.
Click here to learn how to diagnose your lead generation marketing.
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See our quick video guide to understand your overall lead generation marketing performance.
Outlining your overall lead generation marketing effectiveness
In this image we have outlined the key metrics you need to have a handle on to ensure you can accurately monitor the effectiveness of your lead generation marketing. This example is based on monthly data, but could also be quarterly.
1
Capture the number leads did you delivered this month overall. Compared how this has changed month on month or year on year. This will help you know how far behind or ahead you are from your monthly target?
2
Define your overall monthly paid media spend. Look at this monthly and also average you cost per lead to see if your costs to acquire new leads are going up or down, as you switch the type of campaigns you run. (brand awareness vs demand generation).
3
Capture your conversion rate (the number of leads captured divided by the number of visitors). Look at this rate month on month to understand if this is improving or declining. As you increase your traffic, this rate often decreases.
4
The amount of visitors you came to your website this month. Compare this month on month to understand if you are attracting more people to your website.
Profiling your overall campaign performance
Here are a number of example lead generation marketing campaigns which have been run over a month. The overall awareness vs effectiveness has been mapped out so you can understand the contribution of each campaign.
1
Campign 1 was the least effective at delivering visitors to the website for the brand campaigns. It was also the most expensive at a cost per lead of £500. However it’s main objective was brand awareness, but it still under delivered compared to Campaign 2.
2
Campaign 2 had the most engaged audience with a clickthrough rate of 3.8%. Although it didn’t deliver many lead, it;’s main objective was to engage users to get them to visit, which had been effective.
3
Campaign 3 was the best at generating leads. It had a high conversion rate at 3%+ and a cost per lead of £100, half of campaign 1. It also delivered the most visitors, which could be due to the investment, but given the audience converted too, it showed the campaign had a combination of the right tatgeting and engaging creative.
4
Campaign 4 was the most cost efficient. Each lead only cost £75 and there could be potential to further invest in this campaign given the small amount of investment, compared to the other campaigns.
On the go?
Listen to our audio guide on how to monitor your overall lead generation marketing performance.
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Discover 5 easy steps to diagnosing your lead generation marketing
See our quick how-to guide on diagnosing your lead generation marketing activities.
STEP 1: Discover where your leads are coming from
In this image we have outlined the number of leads generated by each marketing channel. Make sure you can capture each lead and identify where they original came from to know how effective that channel is.
TOP TIP: Make sure the website traffic is correctly classified so the leads are put into the right buckets. For example if the email traffic is not correctly tracked it will come in as direct traffic.
1
Looking at lead conversions on our website, we can see here display advertising is generating a majority of the leads.
2
In this example we can see the email channel (which has a much low communication cost) is performing very well, as the number of people who received the email was a lot less than those who saw the display campaign.
STEP 2: Know what your leads engaged with
This image shows what the visitors did on the website. Ensure you tag each of your forms on your website so you know what people did to become leads so you can then understand what content is currently engaging your audience, which makes your marketing spend work harder.
TOP TIP: Be sure to validate the quality of the leads. Ensure the leads generated by each form, are not inflated with irrelevant leads. Use your lead goal targets for both leads and qualified leads to know if your lead forms are over or under performing.
1
Looking at where the leads came from (based on form completions) we can see what content our audience engaged with most. Here we can see the maturity assessment tool on the website delivered the most number of leads.
2
The industry report contributed a good number of leads. It is important to understand if these items were also promoted as this could be a reason for the high numbers.
STEP 3: Diagnose which channels are working effectively
This illustration highlights the lead generation marketing effectiveness of each of the major channels. Profile the share of your channels to understand where the majority of your leads are coming from vs where the traffic is coming from.
TOP TIP: Aim to profile share of traffic against share of leads. Be aware the more traffic you generate the less effective that channel will become. This doesn’t mean that channel is underperforming. This is certainly the case if you are prospecting or targeting visitors who have never visited your website before. As long as the cost per lead is not very high for media campaigns continue with this effort.
1
Display is generating the majority of traffic and leads. There is some room for improvement in the conversion of leads that visit the website.
2
Email is a hugely effective channel. It only generated 14% of visitors but 22% of leads indicating the audience converts very well.
3
Referral and social traffic are also effective channels, given the small amount of traffic each of these channels generated.
STEP 4: Understand which paid campaigns are generating your leads
Here is an outline of lead generation marketing paid campaigns. Look specifically at the performance of each of your paid for campaigns. See which campaigns have generated the majority of your leads and see if there is more headroom for those which are performing well.
TOP TIP: Ensure you have a clear naming structure for your campaigns, so you can quickly identify what campaign they are and what type of advert it is. Also ensure the cost per lead is not too high on the large volume campaigns, as they might be generating a good volume of leads but at a very high cost. Ensure the cost per lead is aligned with your target cost per lead.
1
Overall the display maturity campaign is performing the best overall generating the majority of the leads.
2
The display industry reports campaign is also performing well generating a lot of leads.
3
See if your text ads, or webinar and demo campaign could have more budget as these campaigns are all showing promise of generating leads.
STEP 5: Calculate the cost per lead for your campaigns
This is an overview of the cost per lead for your paid lead generation marketing campaigns. This one of your magic 3 B2B KPIs. Make sure you know your cost per lead targets and what leads are currently costing you.
TOP TIP: Look at your cost per lead closely to understand the performance of your campaigns. If you closely monitor you cost per lead over time you might need to stop a campaign if it starts to become tired (increasing cost per lead) when users have seen the content or already engaged with the content. This could require the creation of new a campaign and content.
1
The display brand awareness campaign has the highest overall cost per lead at £150.
2
Both of the text ad campaigns are highly cost effective with a low Cost per lead of between £25 and £30.
3
The paid social maturity campaign is more effective than the display maturity campaign at £75 vs £90.
On the go?
Listen to our 5 step how-to guide on diagnosing your lead generation marketing activities.
People also ask . . .
Where should I focus my lead generation marketing effort?
This is a fine balancing act. You will need to balance marketing brand awareness with demand generation (here is a great list of demand generation tactics) and conversion activities.
Once you have set out your targets for the year and built your lead generation performance funnel, you will have idea on the numbers you need to generate.
Depending on if you are hitting or missing these targets will indicate where you need to focus. For example:
- Too many visitors and not enough leads? Then there is a lead conversion problem.
- A lot of leads but not enough sales opportunities, more work is needed to qualify the leads.
So knowing your lead performance funnel and monitoring it will enable you to know where to focus your effort.
How can I measure my lead marketing effectiveness?
Your lead marketing effectiveness will all depend on what you are trying to measure.
In the first instance you will need to ensure you cost per lead amount does not exceed the amount of potential revenue you could get from a sale.
To truly start to measure your lead generation effectiveness, you will need to start to measure the number of qualified leads. These are leads which are deemed as being ready or relevant to have a further conversion.
Understanding your marketing qualified lead cost is very important and is a good measure to knowing if you are likely to generate profitable leads.
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Recommended Reading
Below is some recommended lead generation content, we have picked out. This content is mixture of tools to help and articles which help understand more about lead generation in digital.
Define: B2B Marketing KPIs – Find out about the marketing metrics which are key to running a B2B organisation. Learn about the lead generation marketing KPIs you should be keeping an eye and why they are important. See these metrics used in scenarios to help you diagnose your lead generation marketing performance.
Define: Lead Generation – Find out about lead generation and what it can do for your business. Learn how to create your lead generation performance and budgeting funnels. These will enable you to understand the effectiveness of your lead generation through to sales, and to set the right budget to make this achievable.
Discover: Experience our lead generation assessment tool – See our lead generation tool in action. We have built an example for the topic “Marketing budgeting”. The demo will allow you to see your maturity level, compare yourself and get personalised plan to improve. This tool can be deployed for any topic.
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