Exclusively delivered for the much talked about Growth Festival on Thursday, which was run by Digital Ethos, a marketing specialist treated attendees to a talk on some of the secrets around lead generation through marketing.
CEO of Leicester's Cross Productions Jenny Cross was one of more than 30 speakers with an audience of almost 7,000 guests wanting to boost their knowledge in specific areas of interest in business.
We broke down Jenny's talk on how to generate leads through the use of marketing campaigns. Here's what she had to say:
1. To generate leads with your content marketing, you'll first need to understand the basics. You should research your customer or 'client avatar'. Investigate their demographic, psychographic, and geographic traits.
Demographic traits: List out your avatar's demographic traits such as their age, sex, education level, income level, marital status, occupation, religion, and average family size.
Psychographic traits: These are a little more complicated and require a deeper understanding of your client's avatar. They're based on values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle. Examples include wanting a healthy lifestyle, valuing time with family, or using Pinterest to do home DIY projects.
Geographic traits: Quite literally, where are they? Are they local to you or live within 10 miles? Are your customers all over the UK, or will they be across the globe?
2. Understand the pain point of your potential customer or client. What issues are they facing? How can you help? Can you take away that pain? If you can talk and write content about that pain in a relatable way, that's what makes their ears prick up and listen. This goes hand in hand with identifying their goals. For example, the Cross Productions website states that they "help busy business owners generate more opportunities to do business by raising personal brand awareness, gaining trust, building long term successful relationships and generating word of mouth so you can get back to running your business. Taking away the headache around marketing - we came up with this so that people can relate to being a busy business owner who doesn't want to know the ins and outs of marketing they can relate." Cross Productions is instantly making itself relatable here to 'busy business owners'. A business owner who feels too busy to even think about their marketing strategy (and carrying out all the above points so far) already knows that the company understands their pain.
3. Choose your content distribution channels. Where does your audience frequent? Are they avid users of Facebook? Or are they more likely to scour search platforms? Or is the best place to find your ideal customer on LinkedIn? You need to understand where you can find them. Marketing is quite like fishing. If you went fishing in a huge lake with a massive net, you'd catch all sorts! But, if you were to carefully select the right lake for you, use the correct rod and the bait you know your fish might like best, you're far more likely to catch the fish you set out to.
4. Write content that talks directly about what your audience wants to see or hear. Think back to your fishing bait. What would your ideal customer respond to? What pain point are you referring to that they can relate to? Make sure that the message you're delivering is valuable to them. But at the same time, don't agonise over it. Many marketers aim for perfection when really, it is a trial and error process. The digital world is constantly evolving so by the time you release your press release, tweet, or whatever it may be, your message may be too late. The world moves on quickly so get something out there now and watch how it's engaged with, track it, and learn from it.
5. Map out your content plan. Once you've decided on what messaging your customers can relate to, start planning how and where to send them out. Jenny recommended Lucid Chart for planning and executing those plans.
6. The next layer to your marketing plan should be to build trust. How will you do this? Through word of mouth or testimonials? Or, will you build a rapport with your audience by engaging with them online? One trust-building technique many companies use that Jenny advises against though is giving away discounts – these should be given to loyal customers. Discounts can take away from the value of your business, product, or service. Instead, give away free advice, hints, or tips that add value, presenting you as the relatable solution to your customers problem.
7. Time to follow up. Now that you've created content that resonates with your audience, they're engaging with it, and you're tracking their behaviour and the success of your campaign or individual actions, it's now time to follow up. Have a follow-up process that catches all those leads. You may be allowing your leads to slip through the net by not taking active measures to engage with them within sensible timeframes. This includes sending out newsletters, replying to comments on Facebook posts, booking a meeting, or making a courtesy call.
Here's Jenny's talk to watch in full.
