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.
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:
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 So the use of lousy, irrelevant, or outdated keywords and other significant data will cost you dearly when it comes to generating leads.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.
Source: filestage.io
Marketing Operations is the system that binds all your marketing strategies together. It helps you in;
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.
Here’s how marketing ops help generate leads.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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!