One of the most important things for any lead generation strategy is the ability to stay agile, even as your goals shift and realign. The digital landscape is changing all the time, with new technologies and trends arising every year. With these changes come growth opportunities. When your strategy is set in stone and unable to adapt to changes, it will be all too easy to get left behind. Stagnating can be extremely damaging for your business on many levels, not least because you will lose sales. You could also put your reputation at risk, with your audience seeing your brand as outdated and out of touch. A big part of staying agile and dynamic is knowing how (and when to scale) your strategies. Another part is knowing how to make changes without affecting the customer experience.
How do you ensure that you can thrive in the constantly changing digital space while increasing your results? In this guide, we take a look at some of the ways that you can plan and adapt your lead generations through changes and trends.
Lead Generation Strategies for Agility & Growth
Few things will ruin your chances of conversion more quickly than outdated, set-in-stone lead generation strategies. Digital marketing in itself is something that is fluid. Things that work right now may not work in a year or even a few months from now. When you see your strategies as something that is cemented rather than dynamic, you will struggle to stay ahead of your competition. You will also find it much harder to connect with your audience, putting all of your hard work to waste. To keep your lead generation strategies agile and set for maximum growth, here are a few things to consider.
1. Review your goals
Aside from your broader goal of converting leads, your goals should never be fixed, year on year. You may have been focusing purely on bringing in new leads over the last year or two or you may have been focusing on building awareness. To grow, you need to review your goals regularly, at least twice a year. This is the most effective way to be sure that your strategies are still aligned with your goals, which, in turn, will make it far easier to reach those goals. If you need to recalibrate and change smaller goals, regular reviews will allow you to do so in a way that does not throw your entire campaigns off course.
2. Rethink the customer journey
The customer journey is, without a doubt, one of the fundamental factors in any lead generation strategy. If you are not constantly fine-tuning and improving the customer experience, you will battle to reach leads. Customers today expect a lot more than they did last year, or even earlier this year. Gone are the days of stilted, pushy campaigns riddled with sales-speak. Today’s lead nurturing campaigns are made to reach audiences holistically, in a way that gently takes them through your sales funnel until they are ready to convert. Being able to stay on your feet and adapt your campaigns according to current trends and audience expectations will help you get the most from every campaign, whichever channel you are using.
3. Embrace multichannel
On the topic of channels, a multichannel lead generation approach is essential if you want to see real growth. Multichannel lead nurturing is about creating an experience for leads across every channel. Campaigns can be run in a way that takes leads through the nurturing process without any hiccups. The problem with focusing on one or two channels is that it is easy to see each channel as completely separate from the other. In reality, channels should work cohesively together so that leads have a seamless experience across every channel. Although every channel is unique, each may have a different audience. On the other hand, you may find that may leads are found on more than one channel. This is why a cookie-cutter approach is the worst thing you can do to see results. Using the same messaging across emails, social media, mobile, and SEM, for example, will not have the same results as a multichannel strategy that uses messaging that is suited for each channel in a way that captures interest and drives more engagement.
4. Clean up your lists
Cleaning up your lists is important for a few reasons. Firstly, it is always a good idea to remove any outdated information such as old email addresses no longer in use. Outdated lists will never result in conversion, and unless details are updated, there is no need to keep these leads in your lists. Duplicate data can be extremely problematic for conversion, too. If you sign up leads through email and already have their details through in-person events or any other point of contact, you will be messaging them twice, which is never ideal for the nurturing process. Missing data can be an issue as well, particularly if you are using personalisation such as {name} tags. A regular list clean-up is the best way to avoid dirty data.
5. Re-engage old leads
You may be wondering how old leads can help you keep your strategies from stagnating. The answer to this is simple. If you have leads that showed promise, only to drop out near the end of your funnel, there could be a few different reasons this happened. At the time, your strategy may not have been as effective as it is right now. You may have fine-tuned bottlenecks in your funnel. You may have embraced new trends or strategies. Even if leads do not convert after being taken through your funnel, they don’t have to be lost forever. A re-engagement campaign made exclusively for old leads can be effective at bringing back leads before they’re gone forever. Examples of this type of campaign could include emails that let cold leads know you are there to help, asking leads directly if there is anything you can do for them or changing up channels to reach cold leads a different way. If none of these work, you can let them go.
Creating Dynamic Lead Generation Strategies
If you have been battling to breathe new life into your campaigns, you’re not alone. Keeping campaigns up to date and making sure that they are agile enough to meet the current needs of your audience is not a small feat. Many brands struggle to keep their strategies updated and those who struggle to embrace tools such as automation find it even harder to stay abreast of trends that encourage growth. Once you begin to take a good look at your current approach, you will be able to step back and look at the bigger picture. This, in turn, will make it a lot easier to re-think your strategies so that you can keep up with current shifts and changes in the digital environment, year after year.
It doesn’t have to be an impossible task to grow in a way that is organic and agile. With the help of the tips above, making sure that your lead generation strategies are agile and geared towards growth should be far less of a challenge.