Wikipedia’s definition is ‘’ . . . the initiation of consumer interest or enquiry into products or services of a business.’’ Necessarily broad, this definition does capture that the definition of a lead can be very broad, but at its core, it is simply someone who has voluntarily indicated some interest in your product.
Leads are not one class of interested people, but a cover-all term for people as they go through a buying process. For B2B technology companies these buying cycles can be long and complex so it makes sense to break down the definition of lead into several stages:
The raw leads, MQLs and SQLs form your ‘sales funnel’. Sometimes firms make the mistake of only focussing on SQLs and ignoring the previous stages as not worthy of their effort. To be efficient about your selling however you need to be filling the top of this funnel with your lead generation activities so your sales team have plenty of MQLs to work through when SQLs start to dry up.
The other mistake tech firms make is expecting sales to do all of the work to generate raw leads and MQLs. We call it a ‘lone-wolf’ approach, where talented sales people are left to do it all, from finding new prospects right through to signing the deal. Many of them can achieve this, but it’s fundamentally inefficient.
What tech firms need is to focus on repeatable lead-generation programmes that develop raw leads and MQLs and nurture them to SQLs.
A tool that a person can use to design, manage, and publish a website.
Marketing automation refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions. Many marketing departments use this to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions.
The distribution of content through a variety of media channels. Some channels include social media networks, blogs, email, and live events.
Technology to manage and analyse customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention and driving sales.
Once your basic marketing technology systems are in place, you can start to extend your use of them. Marketing automation tools provide features like lead scoring for example, where you can manage a high volume of leads by automatically categorising how valuable they are.
New marketing technology and trends are always emerging, from conversational marketing to the much-hyped concept of artificial intelligence. Many have useful applications but should be considered once you have a strong foundation in place, and are generating a regular volume of leads with a nicely aligned sales and marketing team.
Concentrate is a HubSpot Diamond Partner, so our answer is going to be yes of course, but it’s also the choice of most Kiwi tech firms. According to Market Measures, 53% of Kiwi tech companies are using a marketing automation tool, with HubSpot being the platform of choice by 30% of them.
As we mentioned above, there are thousands of marketing technology tools. At Concentrate we originally used a ‘stack’ of tools, from Wordpress for websites to Mailchimp for email to Buffer for social media to Google Analytics for metrics. Eventually this become a cumbersome way to operate so chose HubSpot, as a platform that could offer all of the component parts.
A platform approach enabled us to become more efficient at managing marketing activity, while getting more visibility to what was happening with our lead generation efforts.
Learn about more marketing technology stacks here.
Buyers need to be able to find your website, and particular your content landing pages, through search engines. Pillar pages like the one you're reading are increasingly key to SEO.
Firms can get over-focussed on social media, but promoting your content through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and other channels can deliver quality leads.
Targeting buyers that have given you opt-in permission to contact them helps generate new leads and nurture existing ones along the buying process.
Buying some traffic to your content landing pages is a legitimate target, if managed and monitored carefully. From simple Google Ads through to remarketing tactics to LinkedIn promoted posts, there's a myriad of options for generating interest for your content.
Using highly trafficked sites in your target market, e.g. an industry association to post links to your website and its content is also a reliable way to direct the right people to your content.
Clean, functional design focussed on user experience: a website must be of good quality, and consistent with your brand, but the most important aspect is how functional it is for the user.
Winning design awards for your website is irrelevant if you are not delivering qualified leads to sales.
User friendly CMS that marketing can drive: too often marketing doesn’t have enough control over their website.
Effective lead generating websites are live, dynamic platforms, constantly being updated with relevant information for buyers. If updating content is slow and difficult your effectiveness is highly restricted.
Regular blogging and content production schedule: according to HubSpot data, B2B companies that blogged 11+ times per month had almost three times more traffic than those blogging 0-1 times per month.
Review your metrics monthly: you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Any marketers must track some base information about your website – volume of traffic where it is coming from and how much is converting are three high level ones to start with. Bounce rates, time on page etc aren’t irrelevant but focus on the most important data points first. Here’s six you can track.
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest and the myriad of smaller niche social media channels are all potentially good channels for your lead generation. Different platforms work differently for different industries and personas. We’ve found Twitter great for communicating with Salesforce developers, LinkedIn brilliant for CXOs in a US-industry, and Pinterest useful for HR software promotion. The key is trying them and measuring the result.
Don’t forget, channels like LinkedIn can also be excellent tools in the sales process, once leads are generated.
Paid social media (e.g. boosting posts on Facebook, sponsored posts on LinkedIn) offers some exciting opportunities for hyper-targeted advertising spend.
Driving lead generation internally can be an effective approach, but sometimes you are limited by size. Typically you will need skills across inbound marketing strategy, SEO and SEM, email marketing, content production, graphic design, social media, conversion rate optimization, event marketing, data and analytics.
You can either hire someone with specific skills, and then complement them with contracted resource, or consider options like a full-service agency that can deliver all the marketing ‘flavours’ you need.
For example, one year you may be refreshing your website design and structure so require SEO and design-savvy marketing roles, whereas the following year you may be looking to ramp up your content strategy with an eBook campaign so need excellent writers, and inbound marketing expertise.
Outsourcing your marketing to an agency is an alternative to hiring an in-house marketing role or roles. For the price of a mid-level employee, you get access to a ‘pick and mix’ of the marketing roles mentioned above, when you need them, as you need them.
