How to Get More Leads

In the last seven days alone, I've heard from three different business leaders some form of the statement, "I can't get enough leads from my marketing."

It's a common problem, and I found that it usually comes down to one of two things:

• Either they're "black boxing" it, doing some marketing campaigns with the hope that leads will come out the other end - but they're not really sure how.

• They're trying to do too many marketing tactics because they're they were told to, or they see them as important tactics, but most of those moving parts just aren't working very well.

I've found that you can get leads from a marketing campaign no matter how big you are, if you focus first on strategy, come up with a concrete plan for how you're going to do it and then choose the right tactics to make that happen.

I want to talk about three phases of that and give you some tips on how to get it done.

Target

In targeting, there are two TAMs that you need to think about.

First, there's your Total Available Market, which is how you pick the kind of people or companies that need the product that you provide. Industry, company size, region and other things can be included in how you filter your target. But you can't stop there.

You need to go to the second TAM, which is your Total Addressable Market.

Those are the people within your available market that you actually have the ability to reach. That's important because now, if you build a campaign targeting those you can reach, it can be much more real-world and effective.

You figure out your Total Addressable Market by discounting your Total Available Market based on things like your presence in the market (your market share), the competitive landscape and the strength (growth rate) of your market.

Create Awareness

The second thing to think about is how to create awareness.

I separate creating awareness from generating interest. It makes your campaigns much more accountable, because in reality awareness and interest are two separate things you need to accomplish.

Awareness is about just that: creating awareness in the mind of your target of your business and what you do. You're not trying to get an order, and you're not even trying to get a lead out of this.

You want them to have you in their brain.

I found that to do that, you need a very straightforward metric. I use number of impressions as my go-to awareness metric, and typically try to get seven impressions, but it could be a different number.

Seven impressions for each of your prospects targeted prospects within a set period of time. The time period depends on how long their decision process is.

Since, with your addressable market information, you know exactly who you're targeting, you can come up with a very specific numerical goal for impressions on what share of those people you're able to reach (you're going to invest to reach in a specific period of time.

Now that you know that, it will be much easier to choose the right tactics. Is it LinkedIn Ads? Google Ads? Retargeting?

Whatever type of awareness campaign you're going to do, now you can measure results. Did I create the impressions for the number of people I intended to in the time frame I intended?

Generate Interest

This is now what you're going do to get them to raise their hand and say, "I'd like to..." Learn more? Talk to a sales person? Get a demo? Whatever it may be.

These are what your leads are going to be.

So the first step is to decide what is a lead. Is it a referral, a content download, a request for proposal? What is it that you need to move the sale forward? Once you know that, then you can figure out again the tactics you need to deliver on that.

An important thing to think about with interest campaigns is the difference between passive interest and active interest.

Passive interest could be something like a click on a website or a view. They are interesting, but not the end goal. Still, passive interest gives you the opportunity to respond in a way that moves them farther down the path.

So you need a response plan both for passive interest as well as active interest (leads). What's the next step?

One More Thing

I hope these lead generation tips are helpful. It's certainly not the whole story, though. I'll create videos in the future that will dive deeper these three components of effective lead generation.

The important thing I want to leave you with is that you don't have to have an incredibly complex lead generation process to be effective.

If you have a dozen marketers on your team, you can probably build a process that is a lot more sophisticated - and there could be value in that.

But there is a law of diminishing returns. I encourage you to start simple. You can always add additional tactics and additional steps in your process, once those first core steps are working to your satisfaction.