Zina Manda, director of Mardev, shares her advice on making your lead generation strategy a success and impressing the financial director

Credit crunch marketing has seen a considerable move in budget over the last 12 months from traditional advertising to lead generation. There are however a large number of lead generation channels and vast array of possible outcomes. How can you ensure that you are generating genuine value for your company from this type of activity?
 
Defining a lead
A marketing-defined lead may recognise a click through on an email, a download of a white paper or registration for a webinar as a lead. Your sales team are likely to disagree: for them a lead is an identified individual with a budget, a need, defined timescales and the authority to make a purchasing decision.

What can you do to bridge this gap? The good news is that the marketing-defined lead is an important starting point for building engagement with a prospective audience. The bad news is that sales is correct; ultimately the prospect needs to be moved along the funnel and marketing have a role to play in making that happen.
 
Valuing a lead
Right now marketers are buying buckets of unqualified B2B leads very cheaply, from £10-£40 a go regardless of the channel that has generated them and without much regard for the value that is being driven out of those leads. I think that we are looking down the wrong end of the telescope!

You need to start by assessing your product and the profit that you generate from each sale together with your production capacity. This will determine how many sales you need to deliver against your company’s objectives.

You will then need to collaborate with sales to gain a full understanding of a typical customer journey and what type of information they need at each stage in the buying process to help them to advance down the funnel. This will help you to create engaging content that fits your customers’ needs.

This approach once tested will be very empowering for the marketer when soliciting funds from the CFO.

Which media channels are best at generating leads?
To deliver the right messages at the right time, you will need to use multiple channels. Search has become invaluable in delivering customers – who are in research mode – to your website, but you will need to use other traffic drivers like email and online advertising to grab the attention of those who are earlier in the buying cycle.
Telemarketing still delivers the highest conversion rates and the best levels of qualification for identifying leads that are further advanced in the funnel. Telemarketing is however expensive and you will need to prequalify and prioritise the targets that should be called.

Where to begin?
Test! Test! Test! You already have a sense of how your audience responds when you email them or call them. You now need to understand how response builds over time when you combine techniques. The effectiveness of your content and frequency of your communications should also be tested.

Don’t forget to size and scope your market before you start, if you need an audience of 100,000 nuclear physicists converting at 0.5 per cent per annum to deliver 500 sales, you may need to review your business plan. Are there 100,000 nuclear physicists out there? Sadly, this elementary mistake does occur.