When you’re a new company that’s a newcomer at the market, you need leads, lots of leads, and fast. You hardly bother with “inbound or outbound” lead generation dilemmas, you need something that works, and it’s definitely not just one or two practices.

LeadWave is a startup as well, and we’re interested in generating new leads no less than you are. We’ve done our research and are happy to share the findings that relate primarily to B2B lead gen.

1)  Do create an ideal customer profile

This might sound pretty trite, but without knowing exactly who you’re after, you might be spending huge budget and lots of time on the leads that will never become customers  – simply because they aren’t a good fit for your business.

Therefore, a detailed “portrait” of your target audience will let your sales reps check a lead’s viability and avoid spending their time nurturing the ones who don’t meet the criteria.

Depending on your product or service, you might have a few categories of customers – the more precisely you segment them, the better. Be ready to have a distinct set of techniques, landing pages, content and activities to resonate best with the specific audience segment.

2) Create high quality content – and repurpose

Yes, everyone’s into content marketing now. Yes, it won’t bring you 100 perfect leads the morning after you published your first blog post. Not even in 100 days (well, it depends). Nevertheless, you cannot afford to neglect the practice that can continuously supply you with good leads and scale – for free.

However, if you want your content marketing efforts to be successful – don’t go for quantity. It’s high quality content that can really make you stand out and gain trust. So, take your time to create highly relevant, well-researched and unique pieces of content that provide true value to your audience. Then, choose the best performing ones – and repurpose. A blog post can be turned into a slide deck, an infographic, an e-book (you can combine a few posts), a downloadable guide etc. You can also make it a gated offer which will bring you new leads who are willing to provide their contact details in exchange.

3) Optimize your landing pages and lead gen forms

Before you set off on a “hunt” for fresh leads, make sure you’ve got everything ready to “catch” them – starting with thoroughly created, tested and optimised landing pages. Ideally, one page should contain only one CTA and be gently driving visitors towards the necessary action.

When talking about lead generation forms – they should be short. The shorter – the better, or you risk losing a lead at the very final step of their becoming one.

Include only the absolutely necessary fields in the form. Everything else, like industry, company, number of employees etc can be found via a quick Google search. If the number of leads is too big to do this manually or you need time for other tasks that cannot be outsourced, there are specialized data enrichment services like LeadWave for the purpose – you provide a list of emails, and indicate what extra data fields you need to complete.

This way, you’re getting a chance to increase your conversion rate by simply reducing the length of your lead generation form.

4) Use targeted advertising

Although ads are generally hated by everyone, they are still alive and kicking – and can be precisely targeted using Facebook or LinkedIn. If you want to get in front of the eyes of your target audience who don’t know you even exist, or stay top of mind of your existing customers, there’s hardly a faster way.

There’s even an option of using contact targeting in Facebook or LinkedIn – which means, you can advertise to specific email contacts only. If there are not enough emails on your contact list – you can have a custom email list built based on your criteria and then use it to make your business more prominent for the contacts.

Google Adwords is another viable means of relevant advertising, although it tends to get really pricey in some industries. Anyway, it is up to you to decide how much you’re ready to spend for advertising.

5) Track KPIs and analyze your progress

Engaging into a lead generation race, you risk forgetting what’s the final goal – it’s receiving revenue.

If your website receives numerous visitors but lacks leads – something’s wrong. If you’ve got hundreds of leads, of which only a few convert into customers, then something’s wrong. Finally, you need to know exactly how much money getting one lead/customer costs you.

To be able to evaluate your lead generation strategy effectiveness and quickly spot any negative tendencies, here are the essential metrics to track:

1) Organic website traffic

2) Traffic-to-lead ratio

3) Landing page conversion rate

4) Bounce rate

5) Cost per lead

Wrapping up

Hopefully, these tips will help you refine your lead gen strategy which will result in lots of lifetime customers.

P.S. Just a quick reminder – if you’re looking for help with targeted lead lists – LeadWave.io is here for you. We create custom email databases and provide data enrichment services for a very competitive price. Tell us your requirements and get a free sample of a custom email list for free right now!