Audience
What does the business want or need more of? For many it’s clients placing bigger orders rather than candidates or one off buyers. In my experience of working with recruitment agencies, they crave clients who want to pay them to do the recruiting work, but they have plenty of candidates already. The strange thing is though, so often a lot of their content and lead generation campaigns are focused on the candidates, or not on the actual business goals.
Start your lead generation campaign planning with consideration of the key business goals and objectives. Do you want more clients, what is it that you need?
As soon as you have this in mind, work through your buyer personas.
Buyer Persona
Ask yourself, your team and sales reps, who is the perfect client or customer. In relation to the business goals, if you could tailor-make a client what would they want, need, know, like, dislike and gather as much information on them as you can.
Think about:
- Who are they
- What do they do
- Who do they do it for
- What is the benefit of what they do
- What don’t they do
- What are their challenges
- How can you help them
This might be a whiteboard or two’s worth of information but it’s important to sit the team down and drum up this information and ideas.
Content
There are several aspects of content planning for any lead generation campaign. Firstly, consider what the lead magnet will be, the piece of content people will download in exchange for their contact details. Make the topic and content of this as compelling as possible, really focus on solving your buyer persona’s problem and making it important that they download it.
In every lead generation campaign I have ever ran or experienced there has been at least a number of blog posts created to support the campaign.
My work in the week I wrote this post has been planning a minimum of 3 blog posts to support each lead generation campaign I am creating and working on for my clients. This in itself is a low number of blog posts to support a campaign. I’ve boosted the number of posts to support my campaigns for Live And Social so that we now use 7 blog posts to support a landing page that will obtain contact details of those who want to download my piece of content.
Campaign Management
You need a manager to oversee the campaign and make sure all assets to the campaign are being created and on time.
A task management tool like https://asana.com/ has come in handy for me in the past and has been very helpful for me of late, in my own lead generation campaign planning and execution.
Follow Up
I have always tried to include email communication with any leads I have generated before following up with a phone call. I have used 5 part email automation series dripped to leads to nurture them ready for a call.
Consider how ready you feel the lead is for a phone call, and what they have received from you. Do they know enough that means you have earned the right to call them?
Lead Generation Campaign Planning Considerations
Video
If you’re going to include video in your lead generation campaign the likelihood is the costs of producing the whole campaign will rise quite sharply, unless you have in-house capability. Depending on your buyer persona and audience, industry and a number of other factors you may decide against using video in your lead generation campaign planning.
I have used video before and decided to not use it in some campaigns, this is one thing you do need to decide internally. There’s no right or wrong answer about using video, but deeply consider the reach and value you will get for it.
Advertising
Again, you could say advertising is a must for a lead generation campaign, the same as video. It depends on your general reach and site traffic level. If you have a great email list with lots of segments and high website traffic this is less important. If you have less of a contact base already then advertising may be more important.
All Content Produced internally
I have led lead generation campaigns that have been angled towards guest writers contributing to an industry report which was the lead magnet in the campaign before and the appeal of “influencers” speaking is great. You do not need to produce all of the content for the campaign internally, I have used guest contribution before and interviews with team members as well as produced content myself. A good mixture of this will see a nice piece of content with lots of perspective come through.
Roundup
In essence, plan you needs to talk to you and create something that can start the conversation. Follow up with email series and content, and then be ready to pick up the phone and initiate a value-adding call. Value first!
You may want to dive into some video and advertising but I do not think it’s vital. I’d love you to tweet me (@OllieWhitfield_ )or get in touch on linkedin and let me know how you’re getting on, ask question and give feedback. Don’t forget to share this blog post.