How marketing operations ignites lead generation

How Marketing Operations Ignites Lead Generation

Introduction

According to a recent HubSpot survey, 61% of marketers considered lead generation their biggest curveball!

This means, more than half of the global marketing fraternity is still trying to answer the question - how to generate leads? Why is it so hard? Well, lead generation is believed to be the outcome of executing genius marketing strategies. But clearly, there’s more to it than what meets the eye.

For starters, marketers often overlook the pivotal role that marketing operations play in generating leads. As a marketer, if you do not pay heed to implement clever marketing operations strategies and keep a check on where your marketing programs and campaigns are headed, the chances of you garnering fresh leads for your organization are slim. And in this blog, we’ll be discussing just that.

But before that, let’s understand why generating leads is so important. 

What is lead generation and why does it matter for your business?

Inbound marketing methodology

Source: offers.hubspot.com

Lead generation is the process of identifying and capturing the attention of a target audience you reckon to be interested in the product or service your organization offers. So yes, it is vital for any organization’s growth as it directly influences sales and, thus profits.

But that’s not all. Here are some more reasons why as a marketer, keeping the leads pipeline full at all times should be among your primary objectives:

  • Helps in creating your ideal buyer persona
    When you reach out to people for generating leads, you may notice that a specific group of individuals show more inclination towards buying or subscribing to your product or service. With every new lead that comes your way, you gradually start understanding your target audience more precisely.
    And before you know it, you’re able to chalk out the exact demographics and buyer persona of the audience that is relevant to your business.
    In this way, lead generation is a tool that connects the dots to enable marketers to target the correct prospects and deliver to their needs more precisely. And mostly, that turns out to be a game-changer.

  • Aids in driving more sales
    As per Belkins’ latest study, it was found that on average, at least 10% to 15% of leads turn into conversions. This means that if a marketer knows the secret sauce of how to generate leads, they are most likely to turn at least 10% of the prospects into buyers who take meaningful action, thus driving in more sales and profits.

  • Builds strong brand awareness
    Building impactful and distinguishable brand awareness is imperative in today's competitive market. But how exactly does lead generation help this cause? Well, through lead generation and nurturing, you get a chance to build strong awareness for your brand by allowing your leads to interact with relevant content through every stage of their buying journey. Simple but stunning!

Why your business may be struggling with getting new leads?

What are your company's top marketing challenges?

Source: smartinsights.com

Let’s admit this once and for all - lead generation may not be simple despite the marketers’ best efforts. Here are some possibilities for it. 

#1. You are targeting the wrong audience - It may be possible that your target audience isn’t the audience you should be targeting at the outset. Most of the time, marketers only “seem” to figure out their target audience for the product, when in reality, the buyer persona tells a whole different story. 

#2. You may be using obsolete data - Trends are ever-changing. So the use of lousy, irrelevant, or outdated keywords and other significant data will cost you dearly when it comes to generating leads. Remember - data is decisive, so be meticulous with its usage. 

#3. Your teams aren’t well-coordinated - Lead generation starts with marketing and ends with the sales team. So it’s apparent - if both the teams fail to communicate efficaciously and aren’t well-coordinated with each other, a lead may never turn into a conversion. 

#4. Your marketing tactics are comprehensive - Very, very important! Following the same generic marketing pitch for all your leads implies tricking yourself into believing it’ll generate leads the same way as personalized pitching does. Spoiler alert - it never does!

#5. You are trying too hard to sell - Persuasion is a skill that a salesperson is expected to master. But being a marketer, if you try persuading the lead too hard to take actionable steps at the initial stage of lead generation, you are going thoroughly wrong. 

These are some reasons why marketers generally fall short in collecting leads. However, the good news is that you can address these lead generation flaws by putting an efficacious Marketing Operations system in place. 

Don’t know what Marketing Operations is and how exactly it facilitates lead generation? Don’t worry - read ahead to find out.

Simplifying the jargon - what is marketing operations?

Marketing Operations Scope

Source: filestage.io

 Marketing Operations is the system that binds all your marketing strategies together. It helps you in;

  • formulating marketing strategies from scratch, 
  • overseeing your marketing programs and campaigns,
  • analyzing the technological aspect of your marketing processes,
  • measuring the overall performance of your marketing programs.  

Marketing Operations is the yardstick that keeps all your marketing strategies and implementations in check. 

For instance, let’s assume you’ve ideated an amazing marketing campaign for your company. You have it all sorted - the content, the channels - everything. You expect the campaign to disrupt your lead generation pipeline like never before. But after two weeks of running it, you realize that the campaign didn’t yield the result that was expected of it. You find out the campaign couldn’t generate half the amount of leads you expected. 

Sound harrowingly disappointing, right? With customer behavior changing like seasons and more and more players entering the market every day, this is the reality of the marketing team of those organizations that neglect the need to prioritize Marketing Operations. 

Marketing Operations will help you to establish and drive lead generation effectively. 

How to generate leads using marketing operations?

Here’s how marketing ops help generate leads. 

Drives lead by making your marketing strategies more effective

The biggest benefit of Marketing Operations is that it provides valuable customer insight. This enables marketers to understand the overall effectiveness of a marketing strategy.

If the data reveals that a particular marketing tactic or say, program isn’t doing very well in yielding leads, the marketing team can easily switch to doing something new or improving the same thing to make it more effective. That way, lead generation is never a problem but an outcome. 

Helps in aligning all your marketing processes for generating leads

Leads generate only when the marketer can communicate and align their mindset with that of the prospect. For that, you need Marketing Operations. It helps you in checking your overall customer experience at every step, to pluck out those parts which aren’t going down too well with the audience. And just like that, it pushes you one step closer to an enhanced customer experience, generating honest, organic leads.  

Offers scalability and predictability of marketing strategies

Lead generation is something that a business will always need to grow and expand. And with marketing operations in place, the future of lead generation is also secured. Marketing ops provide scalability as well as predictability of the marketing strategies. This implies it can help you create such marketing strategies and tactics that are scalable and could be repeated in the future as well. So, the lead generation process is never hindered.

Provides measurability of lead gen success

Marketing Operations is data-driven. It means that nothing is based on guesswork and every result that you receive is backed by strong data. So, if you have a specific lead generation target to meet for a particular campaign, you can easily measure the marketing KPIs as defined by marketing ops to see if you are on the right track. It will help you to get a clear understanding of how far you are from achieving the goal and what are some of the major consumer pain points that aren’t doing well and need a rework.  

Conclusion

At Fractional CMO, we offer end-to-end Marketing Operations Consulting & Services to help you generate leads. Yes, you heard that right. With a smart and efficient Marketing Operations solution like ours in place, garnering leads that are both organic and profit-yielding is an achievable goal. 

We specialize in:

  • Strategizing - we strategize tailor-made marketing campaigns to help you attain your bigger marketing goals,
  • Execution - we execute your marketing campaigns through our team of in-house marketing operations experts so that you don’t have to,
  • Analysis - we analyze the campaign outcomes to help you take better, data-driven actions for your future campaigns.

We take care of the operations, so you can focus on more critical activities that need your attention. 

So don’t hold yourselves back - reach out to Fractional CMO now!

Start growing with fractional CMO today!