How to: Lead generation optimisation within a limited budget
It may be stating the obvious, but efficient lead generation is critical for all successful businesses: as the number of leads increases, so do your potential customers and - all being well - so, in turn will your revenue. But of course, if it was that easy everyone would be doing it. Prospective customers often consider cold calling to be invasive and, believe it or not, all those precious visitors to your website are not necessarily ready to start buying from you. To top it all off, the challenge of lead generation is multiplied when word comes from above that you're now working with a limited budget. Good luck with that.
But we're marketers. We love a challenge, right? Having less to spend is no reason to give up, and can even get the creative juices flowing. Finding qualified leads while getting maximum value for your money is always achievable if you can follow the right strategies. Being more creative is a great start for optimising your lead generation efforts, all on a budget.
In this post, we're going to look at some tried and tested ideas to generate leads without spending a fortune... and hopefully spark that big old brain of yours into coming up with a few more in the process.
Targeting the right audience
Casting a wide net may give you a lot of leads, but the resulting conversion rate may best be described as 'sub-optimal'. Narrowing your focus when under a budget is often the best place to start. For example, targeting decision makers only can greatly increase your chances of success by only reaching those with purchasing authority. Of course, smart marketers (like you and me of course) will know that this may effect long-term performance. To deliver an effective sales funnel, marketing campaigns should connect with other people in the decision making chain to deliver more impact in the long term. But within immediate budget constraints, focusing probably makes more sense.
Reaching out to a narrower target audience makes sure your message reaches those most likely to be interested in your product or service. This simple change will increase the chances of making a sale within the limit of your available resources. ROI should increase because all wasteful expenses are cut.
Target buyer personas
An easy way to segment your target audience is by re-evaluating your ideal customer profile (ICP). You can then compare incoming new leads against your existing and a revised ICP to assess whether you've improved the likelihood of bringing in new business.
You should always begin this process by gaining a better understanding of who you need to target. If this is something you've not previously worked on in great detail, then let us break it down for you. The demographic dimensions below are some of the most common, which let you better define targeting based on the particulars of your business. This doesn't just help further define the target audience, but by augmenting this with the right data sources and maybe even some dedicated research, you'll add invaluable insights on where to reach them and how to catch their attention.
B2C Demographics
Age
Gender
Location
Income
Language
B2B Demographics
Industry
Company size
Location
Position title
Language
Target with intent data
Intent data refers to the digital footprint of a person browsing, not only on your website, but across their entire internet activity. This data follows the interests and online behavioural patterns of these potential customers. Accessing intent data helps you identify an audience that is already interested in the type of products and services that you offer. In one survey, an unbelievable 99% of respondents agreed that intent data helped boost their ROI and sales growth.
Consider someone searching for a new Wi-Fi provider. They may have only browsed through a couple of comparison websites, but there's a good chance they've been identified as a lead by internet service providers (ISPs). If you're an ISP, these people who are in-market and ready to buy may have never heard of your business or not considered it before their search. But because of their search and the data you can gather from it, you're now able to target them.
Improve content marketing
The production, management and optimisation of content has become a cornerstone of successful marketing teams. The content you create and share on your site, via email newsletters and social media marketing channels tells those that read it what to expect from your products and services. Having said that, we all know that successful content should not be limited to product descriptions and a long list of features and benefits followed a call to action: "click here to buy now". Those days have long gone.
You should start by publishing content that adds value for website visitors and your followers. Making use of the expertise within your team, gathering the best experts and knowledge and leveraging that with information-packed blog posts with relevant keywords, infographics and videos are a great place to start. For example, a SaaS business specialised in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), could publish articles with advice on sales automation, sales analytics, and customer data management, etc. This will help drive traffic to your website from search engines, by those looking for answers on these topics, thereby positioning your team as thought leaders.
To maximise the impact of your content marketing efforts, you should always look to repurpose content. Take your blogs and create a compilation of e-books, share practical templates and take information from across your content to share as tip lists. Creating a lead magnet by offering access to chunkier content in exchange for an email address can also help build new leads without using any additional resources. According to a recent report, 17% of business owners and marketers list gated content as their top-performing content.
Quality content
For content marketing to be an effective lead generation tool, let us not forget that it must not only be based on relevant topics, but also be well-written. It must have the right keywords, be credible, grammatically correct, easy to read and formatted correctly. Content should also be published regularly for it to be impactful. This can take time and content creation may not be at the top of your team’s skill set.
Of course, you can always outsource the task. You can work with freelancers and content creation agencies, and depending on your needs (and budget, the real reason we're here) there is a solution for every budget.
Strategic content syndication
Your website is not the only platform to publish content. By making use of content syndication, you can publish on third-party platforms and industry publications too. The publishing platform gets fresh content for their audience and you get more visibility for your products and services. Additionally, content syndication can also help with SEO (search engine optimisation). It really is a win-win situation.
With content syndication you can usually choose to republish an entire piece, publish a short, edited section or a summary of the original content. The key is to select the right syndication channels. Of course, if you're unsure of the market and in this scenario we're breaking down here, working with a budget, it makes sense to work with a sales and marketing agency specialising in content syndication. Otherwise you risk burning through cash (that you don't have) on the wrong channels
Finding the right syndication platform begins with finding with the audiences that match the aforementioned ICP. For example, if you're a cybersecurity software, it makes sense to be syndicated on a tech news website than a leisure news website. Right? Ok, so beyond that if you're in the identity protection sub-set of cybersecurity, then you've a better chance of finding potential customers here than here. Beyond that, the right audience needs to be matched with audience engagement, proven success rates and the quality of data available from the different content syndication platforms. So choose wisely.
Score the leads
How long is a piece of string. It's a question without a definitive answer. Likewise, if you begin with 1000 new leads you've no way of knowing how many of those will become qualified leads and eventually, new customers. Some leads may not fit your ICP. Others may be unresponsive to your communication efforts. Nurturing either of these groups will cost time and money, and probably never convert. On top of that, good leads may get lost in the clutter. To avoid this, leads worth pursuing should be set apart from those which aren’t likely to yield results. This is where lead scoring comes in.
Whether you have a lead scoring system in place or not, it always makes sense to check and refine it. To deliver value, efficiently and under budget, it should objectively assess your leads across multiple attributes. This includes the information known about the lead, their engagement with your online and offline as well as historical data. This helps prioritise leads and focus on those that will convert.
Automated lead scoring
Setting up an automated lead scoring system goes a step further for optimising your lead generation efforts. You can even leverage AI to score and prioritise your leads according to demographic attributes and real-time engagement. For example, points would be allocated to potential customers for submitting lead generation forms with their details, opening emails, clicking on links in your email marketing campaigns, downloading e-books, and so on. This data is analysed in real-time and augments existing information to provide valuable insights on how to deliver a higher conversion rate in the future.
The benefits of lead scoring for making efficient use of your budget become evident very quickly. BlueVoyant’s experience with Accelera’s automated lead map journey is one such success story. The solution automatically qualified leads based on completed task actions and clarifying questions. This process helped BlueVoyant increase weekly touch points by over 1800 for each member of the sales team and achieved a 60% conversion rate.
Continuous Testing and Analysis
Believe it or not, switching the subject line for your email from “How to travel light” to “10 tips to travel light” can have a marked difference in results. Sometimes, that’s all that’s needed to improve lead generation. But if you're not testing, measuring the right data points and analysing... will you even know?
Continuous optimisation and strategic testing are critical parts of any marketing strategy when under budget constraints. This will help eliminate guesswork and replace it with data-driven decision making. Testing, measuring and monitoring all lead activities helps streamline operations and make adjustments along the way to optimise their efficacy in an on-going process that can be easy to neglect over time. However when the $ are limited, circling back to this tactic becomes a necessity.
There are many ways to go about it. To refresh your memory, here are some of the most common:
A/B testing
The email marketing subject line example above is a good example of A/B testing. 2 versions of an identical campaign are sent out to compare how well they perform against each other. This tactic works for ads, emailing, and website pages. The analysis of the testing results can give the marketing team insights into adjustments that can improve the overall performance and increase conversion. But don't forget: one metric higher than the other isn't enough, you need to factor in the size of the difference and the size of the audience. Statistical significance is the difference between your "10 tips" being a genius idea... and something that improved merely because of chance.
Multi-variant testing
Going a step beyond A/B testing, multi-variant testing involves testing a combination of multiple alternative elements on a single campaign. Essentially, this means more than just the two in our A/B example. You could vary the colours, images, headlines and call to action on the same message to see which combination generates the maximum number of qualified leads. But be careful to keep track of these variables. Too many combinations will effect your statistical significance and lead to confusion. Test carefully and methodically out there friends.
Heatmap analysis
This focuses on analysing how visitors interact with online campaigns and web pages. It maps the areas that see the most clicks and visitor engagement. Taking note of this activity can better guide you on where to place critical links and Call-To-Action buttons. A small increase in performance, coupled with everything else we've talked about here can lead to enormous improvements as each compounds upon the other.
Boosting revenue with optimised lead generation strategies
Lead generation strategies vary from one company to another based business model and size. That said, regardless of budget, these campaigns must always maximise the return on every dollar spent. This is where working with a sales and marketing agency becomes important. Look for a partner who can think outside of the box... all while staying within your budget.
Budgets shouldn't limit your aspirations. As we've demonstrated here, there are many strategies which can generate high-quality, leads to drive your success. Leverage intent data to identify leads worth pursuing; then, get creative with your content and syndicate it to the right platforms.
Always remember, it’s more important to target those that are most likely to convert rather than focusing on simply adding more emails to your lead list and pointing at the numbers.
If you want to work with a results-driven team, discover how a partnership with Accelera can help bring you opportunities to scale your business.