Let's start by painting a picture here. Your marketing campaigns are working fine, but you do not see improvements. The quality of your incoming leads is deteriorating. Your lead generation efforts are not bringing in enough leads. Your sales pipeline has started to dry up.
You are concerned about hitting your revenue goals for 2023.
If these challenges sound familiar, this article is exactly what you need. Lead generation is one of the primary goals of marketing operations. It is also one of the biggest challenges faced by growing businesses.
And you are not alone. A report from Hubspot says that 61% of marketers rank lead generation as their number one challenge.
In this article, we list down five lead generation strategies you must try in 2023. But before we do that, let's explore the definition and fundamental process of lead generation.
What is Lead Generation?
Hubspot defines lead generation as 'the process of attracting prospects to your business and increasing their interest through nurturing, all with the end goal of converting them into a customer.'
Let us break this down. A lead is a person who showcases an interest in your product, service, or business. It is marketing's job to generate this interest within your target audience through various channels. This journey of developing an interest through various outreach and branding exercises and capturing interests as specific leads are called lead generation.
By generating interest and identifying leads through campaigns, marketing supports sales, whose job is to take leads further down the buyer's journey and convert them into customers.
Most companies that think they are not using lead generation as a mechanism to generate leads are still using it. They just don't know that they are. For example, a small cafe business owner gives his friend a few flyers to distribute at his event.
Although this is not a direct lead generation strategy, more prospects will become aware of the cafe and take an interest in coming in for a coffee someday.
Lead Generation Process
Now we know what lead generation is. And although every company uses different variations of the lead generation process, let's outline one that is generic enough and applies to every business.
- You use marketing channels to reach out to your prospects and make them aware of your product, service, or business.
- The prospect is interested in your message and lands on your website to explore more about your business.
- The content on the website helps the prospect understand your product, service, or business better.
- The prospect is interested in one of your offers on the website (eBook, webinar, event, resource guide) that needs them to fill in a form.
- This form captures the prospect's information and identifies it as an interest in your product or service.
- This prospect is now the lead that your marketing team uses for further nurturing, and once the lead is ready to make a purchase, marketing hands it to sales for conversion.
This process varies based on business, lead generation strategies, and marketing teams.
Top 5 Lead Generation Strategies to Try in 2023
Like most marketers, your team probably explored the traditional lead generation strategies such as email marketing, social media marketing, PPC advertising, and search engine optimization.
Prospects have become more thoughtful and choose to be more selective towards marketing messages. So, we as marketers should also find ways to generate interest by educating, entertaining, and informing the prospects through creative channels and content.
These five creative strategies will refresh your outlook on lead generation and help you get more leads in 2023.
Leverage the Influencer network in your industry
If you have not explored influencer marketing yet, you are way behind in following marketing trends! There has been a 17% growth in the usage of influencer marketing in marketing strategies between 2019 to 2022. In fact, a study on influencer marketing reveals that 90% of marketers believe Influencer Marketing is an effective strategy.
Influencer marketing combines the concepts of word-of-mouth marketing with social proof coming from an established and reliable voice in that particular space. This increases the credibility of a product or service in the eyes of a buyer. It also introduces your business to an untapped pool of prospects - which means more leads!
For example, you are not completely sure about purchasing a peloton. But if your favorite fitness influencer on Instagram recommends the use of the peloton, you will definitely consider buying it.
Here are a few ideas to brainstorm with your team on how to leverage influencer marketing for lead generation:
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Identify influencers in your industry on social media (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter) and understand their key metrics such as followers and engagement rate. Connect with them and strike a mutual deal to recommend your product or service to their community on social media. Track the leads coming from the channel and analyze the lead quality.
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Identify an author or speaker in your industry with enough credibility. Invite them to become a panelist on your webinar, and ask them to promote the webinar in their own network. The credibility of the influencer brings more sign-ups to your webinar - more sign-ups, more leads.
Introduce Referral Programs
You'd be lying if you said you have never bought a product or a service based on a recommendation from a friend or an acquaintance. Referrals help us make decisions faster because they come from people we trust.
Referral marketing is one of the most ancient marketing strategies used to generate leads. In fact, customer referrals account for 65% of most companies' new deals.
In referral marketing, you incentivize existing customers to recommend your business, product, or service to their own community and network. This helps your business reach out to new prospect markets and generate new leads.
You have obviously, at some point in time, acquired a new customer or generated leads from a customer referral. So why not build a systematic campaign around it to achieve a lead generation goal?
Here's another motivating fact for you to explore referral marketing - Referral leads have a 30% higher conversion rate than leads from any other channel.
There are many ways in which you can incentivize your customers for referrals:
- Free product/service coupons
- Discounts on subscriptions per referral
- Free usage credits per referral
Use referral marketing tools to simplify your process—the possibilities are endless.
Referral marketing can be one of the best lead generation strategies you have ever used - you just have to go for it!
Launch a Podcast
Did you know that in 2022, more than 125 million people will listen to podcasts in the U.S. alone? We are not even talking about the world.
This fact should be enough to convince you to start a podcast for your business. Your target audience is tuning in every day to listen to podcasts while doing chores, working out, or driving.
Podcasts act as a great channel to indirectly reach out to your target audience and generate awareness of your product or service within your target audience.
Here's another fact to help you consider podcast as a channel for your lead generation strategy - 38% of podcast listeners purchase products mentioned in podcasts.
You must be thinking, what should I talk about in my podcast? Here's a simple solution -
Use the problems and challenges faced by your prospects as content for your podcasts, and address these challenges in your episodes to offer solutions to them.
This also helps you segway into how your product or service can also resolve these challenges for your prospects. Once the awareness is generated, the leads will flow in automatically.
So to conclude, you must launch a podcast in 2023 - and don't forget to add a CTA at the end of every episode!
And speaking of podcasts, have you checked our podcast yet? You can subscribe to it right here - Process Madness.
Optimize your existing Lead Generation Process
Now, this may sound non-creative, but it is the most important lead generation strategy to put in place in 2023.
If you are facing the challenges we mentioned at the beginning of the article, there are a lot of opportunities to improve your existing lead generation campaigns.
For example, your email marketing campaigns are running but not bringing in any leads. This means you need to refresh your email design and copy to make it more relevant to your target audience. To refine your lead generation process, you need to include a task where your team brainstorms on creative ideas to build your email copy and design,
Here is a method you can use to improve your lead generation process:
1. Discover your end-to-end 'as-is' lead generation process
If you have been doing lead generation campaigns for a long time, the chances are that there are a lot of moving parts you need to fix.
So first things first, sit down with your team and go through every detail of your current lead generation process. Identify every nook and corner of the journey your prospects go through before they become a lead.
This helps you discover your current process clearly, so you can work on improving it.
2. Design an improved lead generation process that can yield optimized resultsNow that you have discovered the current process you follow, you can clearly identify the gaps that are causing inefficiencies in your process.
It can be ineffective copywriting, incorrect tracking, using the wrong database, or lack of accountability in your team.
Fix these inefficiencies by designing a better process that intentionally focuses on the end results - generating leads.
3. Develop your tools and systems to align with your newly designed lead generation process
The next step is to align your existing or new tools to support the improved lead generation process. Redefine your marketing automation tool, change your database audience, or build a new schedule for your social media posts. This should be easy, considering you know what you want from the tool!
4. Document the changes you made in the lead generation process
After fixing your process gaps and systems, build detailed documentation of the improved and enhanced processes. This acts as your go-to guide for future process references in case of training, re-assessments, and changes in the team. We know it is boring, but it is necessary!
Does this entire exercise sound overwhelming to you? If you do not have time to optimize your lead generation process, you can always turn to experts to do it for you.
We at Processology work with teams like you to give your processes intentional direction to accomplish intentional results. Talk to our expert Processologists for more details.
Concluding Thoughts
Lead generation is a constantly evolving function for marketers. You need to keep trying different ways to generate leads and increase product/service awareness of your business. Why not try these exciting lead generation strategies in 2023 and let us know how well they worked for you?