Lead Generation Archives • Lake One ®

Successful Full Funnel Marketing Strategies for Startups

Posted on September 13, 2022September 12, 2022 by Meredith Garner

Successful full-funnel marketing strategies drive awareness, educate your audience and convert them to leads simultaneously using a variety of channels. Mobile devices (yes, your smartphone) make it easier for marketers to connect instantly with their audience.

How you decide to send the message to them that your startup or business solves the need they’re looking for makes the difference.

Read more below to discover top full-funnel marketing strategies.

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5 Ways Manufacturers Can Leverage Short Form Video Content

Posted on August 2, 2022July 28, 2022 by Meredith Garner

A 2022 HubSpot survey found that short form video content has the highest return on investment compared to any other marketing strategy.

That sounds like a good marketing tactic for any industry, especially manufacturers.

And let’s be honest – Many manufacturers haven’t had to market to the public unless you’re talking about specific industries like fashion and lifestyle brands, who, for years, have built corporate marketing strategies that drive sales.

Manufacturers who create goods and services rely heavily on their sales team. Their approach has to be specific with tradeshows, industry advertising, or while cultivating customer relationships. Today’s landscape is competitive, and it’s time for manufacturers to adapt their marketing.

Here are five ways manufacturers can leverage short-form video content.

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The Best Paid Media Dashboards for Measuring Success

Posted on July 15, 2022July 28, 2022 by Meredith Garner

Paid media dashboards are a critical tool to utilize in your marketing efforts if you aren’t already. Dashboards help you make quicker decisions, increase sales, reduce costs per acquisition (CPA), improve conversions, create engagement, and increase brand value. But not all dashboards are created equal. In fact, the wrong visualization or KPIs can do more harm than good when trying to communicate to others or identify trends.

Continue reading below to discover the most effective paid media dashboards for your campaigns.

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How to Create Your Ideal B2B Buyer Personas

Posted on May 26, 2022May 11, 2022 by Amanda York

To execute a successful marketing campaign, you need to understand your target audience. This goes beyond learning the demographics and behaviors of your prospects. Carving out fictional characters that align with your business objectives will guide you in developing a strategic marketing campaign.

Oftentimes, companies invest money into content marketing plans, google ads, or social ads with little knowledge of their B2B buyer personas and realize that the data and ROI aren’t adding up, inevitably blame the channels or product. More likely, you aren’t reaching your target buyer, the person with the purchasing power.

In fact, companies that develop buyer personas see a 55% increase in organic traffic and a 210% increase in website traffic. So if you haven’t created your personas yet, now is the time!

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Lead Generation Guide Part II: Techniques, Tools and Tips

Posted on October 8, 2020March 11, 2021 by Lake One

In part one of our series, we talked about some of the pros and cons associated with lead generation and some tools to help combat the challenges. (Click here if you missed it.) Now we’re going to share with you some techniques to actually generate those elusive leads we all covet so much. Let’s start by thinking of your lead gen strategies and program as a toolbox. These tactics are all just tools in there to use at your disposal. Some you’ll use, some you won’t. You might have a favorite that gets the job done every time and another that you only pull out to tackle special projects. There’s a mix of old school and new school lead gen tactics. Take a look and find the ones that will help you build a successful lead gen strategy.

Turn Your Website Into a Lead Machine with HubSpot Lead Flows

Posted on July 9, 2020July 9, 2020 by Ryan

You did it! Your site traffic is growing. Your blogging, social media, and offline brand development are all working. You kick back, relax, and wait for the leads to flow in. But aside from the robo-SEO service from Kazakhstan, your lead forms aren’t doing much. What’s wrong? It’s possible your offers aren’t aligning with your content or your website visitors aren’t getting pointed to your highest value conversion points. How do you fix it? If you’re a HubSpot user, it’s HubSpot lead flows to the rescue.

What is a Hubspot Lead Flow

A HubSpot lead flow is a special kind of conversion unit that you set up in HubSpot. It is a pop-up form based on parameters you set and can either gather lead information on the spot – or direct a website visitor to a high-value page like a resource center or limited time offer.

Forms vs Lead Flow

So what’s the difference between a HubSpot form and a lead flow? The biggest difference is the way the two are served to a user.

A form is a static destination that you have to create a conversion funnel (call to action, landing page, etc.) to drive a website user to.

A lead flow brings the form and point of conversion to a visitor based on key behaviors and parameters you’ve identified.

For example, the user is reading content related to a new offer you have, or they are on a list of MQLs and you want to serve them a decision stage offer, or they came from a referral URL as part of an account-based marketing program and you want to personalize an offer to them.

How Can a Lead Flow Supplement a Visitors Experience

Not all pop-ups are appreciated by users and a lot of sites go overkill with exit-intent “Are you sure you don’t want to subscribe to our email list before you leave? PLEEEEEEASE!?”. But if used judiciously, lead flows can improve the overall visitor experience on your site. Here are a few best practices to consider.

When choosing where they “pop in” consider other notifications, i.e. chat or cookie notices. Having them all overlap creates chaos.
Use exclusion lists to make sure people aren’t seeing it that shouldn’t
Be as specific as you can in your targeting and matching up the offer to the visitor

HubSpot Lead Flow Example

The obvious use of a lead flow is to offer a piece of content in exchange for lead intel right away. But the creativity comes in targeting and in the application. But there are creative ways to make the most of the feature as well. Here is a lead flow example that goes beyond immediate conversion.

When crisis strikes, lead flows are a great way to get your website visitors to your most critical content right away. This example from Communication Firm and Lake One client, Beehive Strategic Communication is a great example. They also utilized an exit-intent on the page to allow visitors to get an update as new resources become available.

How to Set Up a HubSpot Lead Flow

Lead flows are a snap to set up. Here is a step-by-step outline and video walkthrough to get you going:

Under the “Marketing” navigation, head to Lead Capture > Forms
Select Create Form
Choose Pop up Form > Next
Choose Type and Name your form
Build your call out and define the action you want your CTA to take
If capturing lead info in the Pop-Up, build the form
Optional: send a follow-up email
Define your targeting parameters
Set options for mobile and how long to not show to those who dismiss
Preview
Turn it live

Need help putting your lead flows in motion? Schedule a free consult.

How to Marketing Qualify Your Manufacturing Leads

Posted on April 2, 2020April 2, 2020 by Tiffany Schultz

Whether your manufacturing digital leads are feast or famine, how do you know which leads are a good fit? How is the sales team determining which leads they should talk to and which ones are in need of nurturing by marketing because they are aren’t quite sales-ready? In other terms, how are they being qualified? If you find yourself asking these questions, you might need some help determining a marketing qualified lead.

Often referred to as an MQL, a marketing qualified lead is a lead that is considered more likely to become a customer compared to other leads. These leads have shown an interest in buying. They are open to the idea of a sale and have engaged with you and your business by taking some sort of action. Marketing efforts are typically what bring the leads in, but it’s what the lead does next that prompts them to become an MQL.

Define Your MQL Criteria

Before you can begin to qualify your manufacturing leads, sales and marketing need to come together and not only define what an MQL is but agree on that definition. What are the characteristics and engagements that make up a good lead for you and your sales team? At Lake One, we lovingly refer to this as your lead fit to win criteria. It includes both lead requirements and lead engagements.

But okay, where do you start? Here are the top areas for consideration when it comes to defining your MQL criteria.

Review existing opportunities and customers: Who is your team talking to right now? Which leads have turned into customers and what actions did they take prior to inking a deal? You’ll likely uncover similarities in demographic data, such as industry, geo, company size, or job title, along with similarities in engagement.

Engagement can be the content offers downloaded, the frequency of web visits or maybe even specific page views.

Examples of MQL Actions

Requests a quote
Requests a product catalog
Attends a webinar
Downloads an ebook
Engages with your social
Opens a marketing email (or two)
Subscribes to your newsletter
Visits your website and/or visits key pages
Requests more information or asks to be contacted

Talk to Sales: Find out what a qualified lead means to sales. They are not only key drivers in moving leads from marketing qualified to sales qualified and beyond, they know what they need and are a great resource. For example, is a lead worthless without a phone number? Or does sales need to be connected to a certain role within a company to increase the likelihood of closing a deal? All of these can be factored in as MQL criteria.

Nice to know vs Need to know: Defining MQL criteria is really finding a balance of what is ‘nice to know’ vs what is ‘need to know’. Especially when starting out, we recommend creating opportunities to collect information (like updating form fields and leveraging progressive fields if you have that accessible) while still making the MQL status obtainable by leads. You can always tighten up the fire hose.

Review. Revise. Repeat: Like with most things in sales and marketing, you can’t just set it and forget it. We recommend revisiting your MQL definition at least on a quarterly basis as a team. If you aren’t seeing the number of MQLs that you anticipated, is it because your criteria is too narrow? Or is it a lead quality issue? MQL criteria is a great place to start.

Once you’ve defined your MQL criteria, you need a way to collect it, track it and communicate it with your sales teams.

Cue marketing automation.

Leveraging Marketing Automation Software

Determining marketing qualified leads for your manufacturing company doesn’t have to be a manual process and in fact, we recommend it’s not. Marketing automation helps with:

Data capture at the time of form fill
Contact data storage
Housing the MQL criteria infrastructure
Notifying sales when a lead becomes an MQL
Closing the feedback loop

Here are some of our favorite marketing automation tools to get you started.

Out of all that is listed above, we wouldn’t be doing our due diligence if we didn’t discuss the importance of notifying sales and closing the feedback loop. When a lead is hot, it’s hot and sales needs to be notified in real-time and on the contrary, if a lead isn’t so hot, marketing needs to know that too. Marketing automation software helps facilitate communication through notifications and custom properties.

It’s All About Alignment

Marketing qualified leads are really just a piece of the big picture of sales and marketing alignment. If you know anything about Lake One, you know we’re major proponents of alignment and defining what a marketing qualified lead is for your manufacturing company is a critical step to getting both teams on the same page and funneling quality leads to sales.

Lead Generation for Manufacturers: 9 Strategies to Crush 2021

Posted on March 24, 2020January 12, 2021 by Ryan

Over the last decade, lead generation for manufacturers and industrial organizations has transformed. While the industry is still heavily relationship-driven, like every other vertical it’s been affected by digital disruption. Marketing for manufacturers is changing rapidly. B2B buyers are empowered with more data than ever and shopping experiences in our consumer lives are informing our expectations in our business lives.

As the modern economy evolves – manufacturers and industrial firms may find themselves wondering how to get more sales opportunities in a quickly changing sales and marketing environment.

If you’re ready to move past the basics of lead generation, these are the manufacturing and industrial lead gen trends we’re seeing drive success as we head into a new decade.

Industrial Lead Generation with Account Based Marketing

Account-based marketing can provide manufacturing and industrial firms a strategic way to market only to the prospects your organization’s value most. It flips the thinking of a funnel. Instead of casting a wide net and working to qualify down to the best opportunity, you identify the accounts you want to work with and target outreach and promotion to reach and influence buyers. Generally, it works as an additive strategy to a diverse sales and marketing program and can run parallel to an inbound effort. It’s also a great way to repurpose and leverage your inbound content in a complementary strategy making sure you maximize your content investment.

Centralize Marketing if you Sell Through Distributors

For manufacturers who sell indirectly through distributors, consider centralizing your manufacturing marketing efforts. By creating a coordinated marketing effort, you can provide a digital co-op marketing initiative to your distribution partners. It serves two purposes. First, it provides a central place for potential buyers to go to as they research products. As the manufacturer, you retain brand control. Second, it’s a value add to your distribution channel as you can provide a steady stream of leads. It can also serve as a channel to recruit new distribution partners. Finnleo, a sauna manufacturer with a dealer network distribution channel, is a great example.

manufacturing lead generation with centralized marketing

Leverage Inbound for Manufacturing Lead Generation

Inbound marketing is a great way to drive a steady source of new leads for your manufacturing or industrial firm. Inbound marketing at its core is about creating content that answers your potential buyer’s questions early in their research process. The content is designed to convert prospects along with conversion funnels, maybe you provide a webinar or request a quote. Inbound also serves as a great way to develop your organization’s thought leadership and is extra powerful when combined with industry outreach and PR. Further, inbound aligns well with how engineers want to consume content based on research from Engineering.com When asked about preferred ways to acquire engineering information, a search is the top channel for finding answers to questions. This begs the question: if your engineering buyers have questions, whose content will they find, yours or your competitors?

Leverage marketing automation and CRM

A key part of successful lead generation for manufacturers is implementing the right sales and marketing tools to support digital sales. Essential to that tech stack is a CRM that your sales team will actually use, with data governance that is meaningful to your business and marketing automation that helps nurture and identify opportunities. Marketing automation in manufacturing is also a powerful tool to help drive efficiency into often manual processes from lead routing and quote management to data governance and lead nurturing.

Activate retargeting

Outside of paid media for account-based marketing and promotion around tradeshows, retargeting is an absolute must. If you’re doing any sort of lead generation program – retargeting is a low-cost way to drive additional conversion opportunities off people who respond to your manufacturing lead generation programs but don’t convert on your website. You’ve already invested a ton to get a prospect to your manufacturing website, if they don’t convert, set aside a small add budget to serve ads to them after their visit to try again.

Monitor social conversations

Depending on what your firm makes, monitoring social media for conversations around needs or trends can be a great way to identify opportunities for direct sales, PR opportunities to talk about your offering or identifying new channel partners. You can monitor conversations in several different ways. Join groups on LinkedIn, set up feeds or lists on Twitter or search on Facebook.

Activate paid media around trade shows

Trade shows are still a great gathering place for manufacturing and industrial firms. But following up with people from trade shows can sometimes be a bit – meh. Instead of grabbing everyone’s business cards, leverage your marketing automation tools and let people book real meetings with you. Or set up a nurture sequence for those who stop by the booth.

Activating paid search around the tradeshow name is often a low-cost way to drive traffic to a landing page ahead of the trade show. Here you can promote any giveaways or reasons for people to book time with your team.

Monitor industry news & trends

Similar to monitoring social media, monitoring news alerts can be a great resource on multiple fronts. It can inform you inbound content strategy, support your account-based marketing program or provide opportunistic outreach opportunities for your sales team. The easiest way to do this is to set up Google Alerts or create a Feedly account to monitor terms and topics that matter most to your industry and buyers.

Leverage tools

There is a constant flow of tech tools rolling into the market. Here are a few of our favorite lead generation tools for b2b. Of the tools mentioned in that post, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is probably the most relevant for our friends in manufacturing and industrial organizations. One of the features I find the most useful is the account and lead recommendations. As you interact with and tell Sales Navigator what kind of leads and accounts you’re interested in, it surfaces new contacts and accounts that are similar but might not have been on your account based targeting list. It’s a great way to expand your scope with the accounts you can truly add value to instead of randomly selling to anyone with a pulse.

manufacturing lead generation with LinkedIN

5 Ways Marketing Automation Can Help Boost Lead Volume

Posted on March 12, 2020January 12, 2021 by Tiffany Schultz

The saying goes, “Work smarter, not harder.” But in a lot of cases, you need both. You need someone or something to work smarter and harder. That’s what marketing automation provides. Marketing automation is technology that allows you to automate, streamline, and measure your marketing tasks and workflows. By utilizing it, you’re being smarter about where your time and efforts are spent by allowing automation to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Like we covered in our blog on sales and marketing automation, marketing automation helps to accomplish the following:

Updated tracking
Real-time alerts
Automated lead-hand off
Forms
Landing pages
Social post scheduling
Emails
Lead nurturing
Lead qualification

But did you also know that it can help with lead generation?

1. Leads and Landing Pages

How do you turn a lead into a customer if you’re not first capturing them as a lead, to begin with? Lead generation landing pages are a great way to capture those new leads and gauge if your prospects are interested in your product or service. Marketing automation platforms or “MAPs” will generate specific landing pages that speak to the segment of the audience you’re targeting and display relevant content and resources to them, automatically. Here is where you should be asking them for their contact information, in exchange for that piece of content or resource they’ll find valuable. Once you’ve collected the prospect’s info, the marketing automation software will sync the data directly to the prospect’s profile.

Related Reading: Lake One’s Lead Gen Guide: Basics of Lead Gen

2. Automated Email Campaigns

Once a prospect hits that landing page and provides their information, quick lead follow up is a must. Wouldn’t it be great if you could automate that outreach and subsequent follow-up communications, all while making it custom to the recipient? Spoiler alert, you can.

We’ve all been on the receiving end of an email that was clearly sent to a bunch of people and there’s absolutely no personalization involved. How special did you feel? More importantly, did you even open and read that email? Probably not. With marketing automation software you have the ability to personalize, which is important. In fact, marketers saw an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalized experiences.

Thanks to marketing automation, gone are the days of having to manually enter in prospect or lead information to ensure they’re getting a personalized experience. Using MAPs allows you to send automated and personalized emails at scale and implement email drip campaigns, which is a great way to nurture your leads. Most programs come fully equipped with segmentation capabilities, which allows you to divide your lead database by channel, sales funnel position, what industry they’re in and much more.

3. Custom Website Experience

Offering a custom and personalized website experience to your prospects and leads can provide increased engagement and decreased bounce rate. Are you sensing a theme with all this talk of personalization and customization? Your buyers have come to expect it, and if you want to increase your leads, we recommend following suit.

Imagine your leads hit your website and you have the ability to personalize your blog recommendation to them. Or serve messaging that’s tailored to a specific buyer persona. It’s no wonder why Dynamic Yield saw a 111 percent increase in demo requests after personalizing elements of their site. That’s the beauty of automation. It allows you to move away from the one-size-fits-all experience and give your buyers a truly personalized journey.

4. A/B Testing

So now that you’ve got your landing pages in place, your lead nurturing emails are being sent and your custom website experiences are happening [thanks to your marketing automation], you can set it and forget it, right? Not quite. What works today and for one person, might not work tomorrow and for someone else. When in doubt, test it out. A/B tests on your landing pages, emails, and more can show which content, headlines, or images resonate best with your audiences. Once you have that data, you can use it to customize your appeals. But how? You guessed it, marketing automation. The more you know about what your audience is looking for or what they respond to, the better content you can serve them and the more likely they are to become leads and then hopefully customers. More on A/B testing here.

5. Sales and Marketing Collaboration

Last, but certainly not least, can’t talk about lead generation without mentioning the importance of sales and marketing alignment. Everyone has the same goal: convert leads into customers. The way they go about doing this can look very different. Same goal, different approach. So where does marketing automation fit in? While CRMs centralize all the data that sales needs when it comes to incoming prospects and accounts, marketing automation platforms help marketing centralize the customer behavioral data from website activity, email campaigns, social media engagement and more. (Checkout of favorite lead gen tools here.) Using this behavioral data to help improve lead quality can help eliminate some of the disagreements between sales and marketing. Better lead quality and more aligned smarketing teams? It sounds like a win-win.

These are just a few of the ways that marketing automation can help boost your lead volume. But don’t just take our word for it. According to VB analyst Andrew Jones, 80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase. But remember, the content you’re providing needs to be relevant and of value to these leads. Content for the sake of content isn’t going to move the needle. You have to be intentional about what you’re creating and who you’re creating it for. Let your content be smarter and your automation work harder to achieve your lead gen goals.

Top 6 Benefits of Using a Marketing Firm for Lead Generation

Posted on March 5, 2020March 5, 2020 by Danielle Carson

Lead generation is one of those things that you can do alone, but probably shouldn’t. Like cutting your own hair, it’s not that deciding to do it yourself is inherently bad, but you might end up with a bowl cut straight out of 1995.

Here are the benefits of using a marketing firm for lead generation and why partnering with experts might be the best choice for your organization.

1) Alignment

Perhaps the greatest benefit of using a marketing firm for lead generation is alignment. A great firm will know that while the ultimate goal is getting more leads, you won’t be able to achieve or sustain that without alignment throughout your entire program. So what do I mean when I say ‘alignment?’

Related Read: Lead Generation Guide: Basics of Lead Gen

First, I’m talking about sales and marketing alignment. What a marketing firm does to increase lead gen will support sales initiatives. A firm will be focused on bringing in the high-quality types of leads that sales needs. They’ll also enable sales with tools– such as email templates, ebooks, white sheets, etc.- to help them close deals. Furthermore, a marketing firm will also encourage input from sales to create a symbiosis of feedback and continual improvement.

I’m also talking about alignment with your business objectives and goals. One benefit of working with a marketing firm on lead generation is that they can help you ramp up your current targeting or pivot to a new market segment when necessary. They’ll be able to right-size your existing program with the tools and strategies to take your company where you want to go.

2) Multi-Faceted Strategy

Additionally, a marketing firm will be able to implement multiple strategies and tactics to increase your lead generation. Firms typically have experts in varying areas of specialty- an SEO expert, a social media expert, a content expert, for example- that make up their larger team. They’ll put their heads together to create a lead gen strategy that encompasses all different angles of marketing in a cohesive way to get the best results.

As your program grows, the needs of a lead generation program will change. Sometimes a paid media strategy to bring in leads isn’t always a good fit and maybe you actually need to back off on the social posting a bit. A firm will have the wherewithal and experience to implement these strategies (or not) and make changes as the program develops. Working with a marketing firm for lead generation means they will have the experience to know how – and when – to pull the right strings.

3) Automation Experts

A key element to lead generation is marketing automation. The right partner for your lead generation program will be an expert in this area. You can read more about the basics of marketing automation here, but in short, automation is a way to make your marketing work smarter and harder for you. Working with a marketing firm means you’ll have experts doing the setup and management on your behalf. They’ll work in your CRM to make sure incoming leads are nurtured and addressed appropriately.

A marketing firm will also be able to set up the parameters to sort your leads for you. They’ll be able to set up the automation to make sure the job candidate leads go to HR and any complaints go to Brenda in accounting. (Just kidding. Unless you want them to…). They’ll also be able to qualify leads appropriately, which is essential as higher volumes of leads start coming in. This means that leads can be screened for fit before they ever hit the desk of your salesperson. For instance, let’s say a lead comes in that meets most of your criteria to be a good lead, but isn’t ready to buy yet. They can be automatically enrolled in a drip campaign that nurtures them along to keep you top of mind, but they won’t be handed to sales just yet. A marketing firm will be able to help you identify your criteria and set up the backend work to make it all happen.

4) KPI Reporting

Because a lead generation program has many elements, tactics, and levers, it’s easy to get lost in the reporting weeds. A marketing firm will be able to narrow your scope and focus on the KPIs. Furthermore, they’ll be able to tell you what those KPIs actually mean. So your lead volume is way up but your traffic is down- what does that mean? Is it a problem? Do we like it? There’s always a story behind the numbers. A firm will be able to read it to you.

5) Unbias Insights

Another benefit of using a marketing firm for lead generation is that you’ll have a neutral, third party present to help with decision making. They’ll use those reporting insights we just talked about along with their combined experience to offer unbias solutions on how to move forward. It can be hard to see the forest through the trees and a firm will bring a new perspective.

Partnering with a marketing firm means you’re bringing a team of people whose sole objective is to help achieve your goals. This is important because starting up a lead gen program often means changes for internal sales and marketing team. It might be a new process to handle leads or an ask to do something new. A marketing firm will be able to discuss the big picture objectives and the reasons for change to encourage your team and make them feel comfortable with it.

6) More Leads

This benefit was so obvious I almost forgot it, yet it needs to be said. The biggest benefit of using a marketing firm for lead generation is more leads. Nothing is ever guaranteed, but when you bring on a firm with everything stated above – expertise, alignment, automation skills, etc. – it translates into a stellar lead generation program.

Key Takeaways

Lead generation is important. Actually, it’s critical. Without leads coming in the door, you’ll become stagnant. Working with a marketing firm for lead generation means more leads and company growth. A firm will be able to align your program with your business objectives and get your sales and marketing teams working toward a common goal. They’ll bring the experience and unbias insights needed to take your lead gen to the next level.