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Get the Most Out of Your Online Lead Generation Campaigns

Now more than ever, marketers are hyper-focused on getting the most out of their lead generation investments.  Here are nine quick tips to give your current online campaigns a boost and get the highest quality leads coming to your website.  For the most part, these techniques can be implemented fairly easily, and are highly effective at maximizing your campaign ROI.  

1. Reevaluate, reexamine, and reconfirm your objectives. Different economic times often drive different campaign objectives. Campaign success or failure is driven by getting the objectives right on the front end. Now is the time to ensure your objectives are in line with your needs.

2. Look at your traditional marketing assets and see what you can repurpose, reallocate, and reuse online. There’s gold buried out there in your traditional marketing spend. What events do you attend? What video assets do you already have? What great PowerPoint presentations do you have that can be turned into webinars, articles, etc? Recycling and reusing isn’t only good for the environment, it’s great on the pocketbook too.

3. This is the year to finally get end-to-end tracking and analytics. Reconfigure your web analytics, tie your web analytics into your CRM system, and get a marketing automation tool. Have all of these communicate with each other and with your vendors from beginning to end.

4. Retool your paid search campaigns. Run Google search query reports for your AdWords campaigns. Cut out irrelevant impressions, increase your click through rate and quality score, and add negative keywords. Paid search ads need to be targeted to attract relevant traffic, so make your ads specific. Sometimes it makes sense to use ads to qualify prospects too. One good strategy to reduce spend without reducing performance is to daypart—turn off ads at times of the day that do not deliver quality leads traffic.

5. Add compelling lead bait. Webinars, whitepapers, and case studies, oh my! The quantity increase in quality content can be well worth the investment, and good content will warm up the prospect too.

6. Implement nurturing campaigns and lead lifecycle management. Nurturing campaigns involve things like newsletters, seminar and webinar invites, special tips and tricks in email blasts, physical direct mailers, etc. Basically, continuing to communicate with folks who aren’t ready to speak to a sales rep or who do not yet have a budget. Best communications are always things that have value in them. For example, “Here’s something you might be able to use,” rather than, “Listen to what we have to say.”

7. Use a multivariate landing page testing tool and test all major changes to your website. Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is a free tool that enables you to conduct multivariate and A/B tests on your landing pages. Be sure to limit your variants to a level your traffic can support. Worst case scenario, you discover that some of your brilliant ideas are not so brilliant, and quickly fix them. Best case, you’ll see a triple digit improvement in your landing pages and website conversions. Apogee Results has recently been named one of a select few GWO Authorized Consultants by Google. Working with an authorized consultant can get you the answers you’re looking for to drastically improve your conversion rates.

8. Optimize past online conversions. Your problem may not be that you need more leads, but that you need better quality leads. Integrate your PPC and SEO data into your CRM system so you can have solid ROI numbers for each of your online campaigns before you need them. Once you get enough data, you can start optimizing your campaign towards activities that are generating revenue rather than leads that go nowhere.

9. Start / continue / increase your SEO efforts. SEO success builds over time and can have one of the highest ROIs. If you haven’t started a SEO campaign or you’re not seeing results from your campaign yet, keep up your efforts. While your competitors are pulling back and retrenching, or maybe just utilizing paid search campaigns because of its immediate impact, you can get a long-term lead on them by accelerating and improving your natural search impact.

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