Month: April 2019

The core principle of design is to simplify and tell a brand’s story in a way that connects emotionally with the customer. To understand this better –

Guess the name of the brand by looking (carefully) at the below image

(Src:imgur official site)

Yes, it’s Coca Cola!

And if you guessed it right then their marketing department surely deserves a pat on the back, as they have created a strong brand identity.

Ultimately, if your brand has a strong & concise brand identity, you are better able to:

• Communicate with the world and differentiate yourselves from your competitors
• Build loyalty amongst existing customers
• Influence the buying decisions of your customers
• Create a brand experience that encourages people to engage with you
• Concisely convey your brand’s message & philosophy

 

Brand identity when individually looked at acts as marketing activities/tactics, but together they produce a recognisable strategic toolkit that defines your brand to not just yourself or your employees but to the customer and other external parties alike.

Having a customer-centric approach is important and a major priority. This will, in turn, help you shape your brand with a clear and concise brand identity that is easily recognisable, just like as that of Coca-Cola.

What are the steps to create a recognisable brand identity?

Now, if your brand is in its early stages or preparing to rebrand and not sure where to start, follow these steps – to create a recognisable brand identity with an objective to be seamless and build a stronger brand identity that sets you up for success!

 

1. Create and understand your brand strategy

2. Understand the key emotional drivers

3. Figuring out your “Brand Persona”

4. The “Branding idea”

5. Importance of Brand Architecture

6. Design your Brand

 

1. Create and understand your brand strategy

To set yourself up for success, and before you dive into your brand identity, it’s pivotal to complete your research and strategy as you need to understand your brand’s core values, it’s brand messaging architecture, brand voice, i.e your positioning, tagline, brand stories, etc. as your visual design will work simultaneously with those elements.

 

2. Understand the key emotional drivers

For Coca Cola, their emotional factor revolves around “Open Happiness” the tagline they used for the longest time until 2009, and their brand to this day stays true to it.

 

The most important thing that your consumer should believe or feel when they see the design is defined as your brand’s promise. Your brand promise is your business’ commitment to delivering quality rich services and products to your customer – every time they make a purchase from you or use your services. To understand better about your brand promise, it is very important to consider every person that comes into contact with your business, as well as their expectations of your business.

 

3. Figuring out your “Brand Persona”

Your brand personality always relates to the traits that you want your business to be known for. Examples of brands with strong personalities include; Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Tesla, etc.

Your brand identity is basically acting as the “face”  of the brand, that interacts with the entire world. Whatever you create should accurately communicate who you are.

 

However, one common assumption about brand identity is that if your identity doesn’t resonate with your consumer, it won’t be effective. This doesn’t necessarily mean your brand’s customers will choose your logo colour; it means that you will make more effective design choices once you understand their needs, wants, and values.

 

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Related Read – Why is it Important to Have a Memorable Brand Identity?

 

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4. The “Branding Idea”

A “Brand Idea” is a thought that is captured in a simple but effective phrase that expresses the essence of your brand. It is what defines the brand and in return acts as the central driving concept that the brand architecture is constructed from. Your brand story needs to build relatability, trustworthiness and credibility as it shares the journey of your brand. Brand stories is what creates a human connection between the business and the consumer, allowing the consumer to relate to the values of the brand

 

5. Importance of Brand Architecture

To help the audience relate to a brand, brand architecture is extremely important. It organises brands, products and services to help audience access and relate to a brand.

 

Brand architecture that’s thoroughly established acts as an important guide for brand extensions, sub-brands and development of new products. It will help the audience with a road map for Brand Identity development and design and remind consumers of the value proposition for the entire brand family providing the maximum amount of brand value, by fully leveraging both corporate and sub-brands.

(Src: Medium)

 

6. Design Your Brand!

The best stories are the ones you can visualise when someone even speaks about it. As it makes you feel if you’re there, experiencing the events firsthand. Storytellers can always create worlds and characters that draw us in and make us live it. We immerse, we get involved, and we develop a relationship with the characters and story as it unfolds.

Brands are no different in the power they have to create a flow with regards to their voice, tone, and temperament. The end goal is to create a completely distinctive and consistent verbal and visual guideline that will guide all aspects of your brand’s communication and make the audience relate to it.

– Beginning with the logo, that will connect with your consumers

– To the colour palette you choose

– To the typography used

All these depict the tone and voice you’re trying to portray to your audience.

Once all this is taken care of, the visual language should be implemented to everything to create a standardised branding, be it in your brand stationery to your marketing collaterals, the language uniformity should be visible through it all.

For eg: Coca Cola’s brand message has always been about happiness, joy, experiences, etc. and is addressed through a uniform tone of voice – Friendliness.

The Coca-Cola branding celebrates the simplicity of its product range as well as reinforcing its overall ‘functional’ image. Coca-Cola, therefore, is a perfect example of brand identity done right.

Once all the above points have been infused and the brand fundamentals are set in place, you need to put everything together to better convey those identified qualities in your marketing.

A brand is remembered for a high-quality product, excellent service, fine care and most importantly a strong brand identity.

Brand identity is how the brand wants to present itself in the marketplace and the way it wants to be perceived by the existing and prospective customers. Brand identity is how the business feels that it should be perceived by the customers. In other words, brand identity is applying business values to visual and verbal communication.

For example, Airbnb’s brand identity is all about active living. Through their lively imagery and bold pink logo, Airbnb encourages people to make the most of life and use Airbnb to do it.

Image source: Airbnb official site

Why is brand identity important?

Because brands want repeat customers. And it is only possible if the brand has a good impression on customers and it triggers positive experiences from the past. Let’s see some more benefits:

• Brand Identity sets the tone of your brand. It can be used to evoke specific feelings in your audience. An easy to communicate brand can smoothly deliver overall company message and promote business goals.
• Consistent business material designs build customer trust in the brand. It means that consistent brand design showcases honesty and positive brand value.
• A brand identity helps you to differentiate your business from the competition and appropriately position your brand.
• An effective brand identity can help to build customer loyalty and trust in a brand since it allows customers to make a connection between a product and the company.
• Strong identities make employees proud and it also gives customers a sense of ownership.

 

Being a part of brand strategy, identity plays a vital role in defining what a brand stands for.

 

A great first impression is a lasting impression

First impressions are an absolute necessity for any brand. According to a study conducted by the Missouri University of Science and Technology, it takes less than 0.2 seconds for a visitor to make an opinion about a brand. Hence, a lasting first impression becomes essential. Because you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Let’s look at 2 such examples of Indian brands to understand it better.

 

1. Frooti, an Indian mango drink, has always used a mango-yellow branding for its packaging. So, when the brand made its debut on social media, it carried the same color and appearance to create visual content.

Image source: Frooti Official site

 

2. Shoppers Stop, an Indian retail company, positioned itself as a premium, accessible luxury brand. They came up with a tagline, “Start something new”. This position of bridge-to-luxury appealed young, middle-class consumers in India, who had their own money to spend at a young age.

Image source: Shoppers Stop

 

Strongest brands are those that have a recognizable identity and share-ability

While many consumers take the time to research and compare options, others choose whatever they happen to recognize. It is for this reason; established companies like Apple, Pepsi, and Domino’s Pizza spend billions a year on advertising.

You might not have billions to spend but you can still employ some tactics in order to build a robust brand recognition.

Brand recognition is created by the accumulation of experiences with the specific product or service, both directly relating to its use, and through the influence of advertising, design, and media commentary.

For example, Dropbox features a vibrant, colorful identity. It conveys a sense of endless creativity to match the brand’s ever-evolving toolkit. The same identity is followed in their communication, services, and products on all platforms and in internal & external communication.

 

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Related Read – Can Complicated “Designs” be simplified?

 

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Identities that create a fan following

 

In order to create a strong brand identity, keen research and attention to detail are required. A brand image has to be created in such a way that it successfully meets the goals of a business and emotionally connects with the customers. Strong brand identities play a significant role in creating a memorable brand experience and only a memorable brand experience can create fans. Here are the top 5 global examples of brand identity creation:

Coca Cola

Image source: Coca Cola Official Site

LG

Image source: LG Official Site

 

Hyundai

Image source: Hyundai Official Site

Apple

Image source: Apple Official Site

 

Raymond

Image source: Raymond Official Site

The motive here is to show that these brands have such a valuable brand identity that anyone in the world who looks at the associated brand elements is immediately able to recognize the company. That’s the real power of brand identity!

 

No one can deny the rise of inbound marketing and the decline of outbound marketing. Here is how the marketing budget looks like, as per company size –

Image Source: Iron Paper

The marketing budget for inbound marketing methods is increasing at a steady rate. The companies are getting a tremendous rate of return on their inbound marketing budget. The inbound marketers and agencies are aware of HubSpot. If you are reading this article, you must have at least heard of this company.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a company that offers various applications for developers and marketers to help them with inbound marketing. It has a strong position in the inbound marketing industry. HubSpot has helped a lot of marketers and agencies to grow their businesses. In return, it has also achieved tremendous growth in its revenue.

How popular is it?

HubSpot is a well-known name in the digital marketing space. Due to its exceptional service, it has managed to position itself as a premium brand among digital marketers and agencies.

As per the report, HubSpot revenue grew by a whopping 35% last quarter. You can expect it to keep on growing. HubSpot offers agencies to become their partners. You can check out HubSpot reviews to find out more about what people are getting from HubSpot packages.

How HubSpot is different from traditional marketing tools?

The traditional marketing tools consist of print, tv, direct mail, telephone marketing, and so on.

Here is the image of the first-ever advertisement that was printed!

Source: Podcastplanet

After the maturity of outbound marketing methods, we had inbound marketing methods.

The somewhat traditional inbound marketing tools that we usually use are separate third-party platforms:

• WordPress: A famous content management system that allows us to create, format, and manage our blog posts.
• Email Responders like MailChimp, AWeber, and so on.
• Using social media platforms separately to publish posts and advertisements and use their analytics tools.
• Make use of spreadsheets and excel to manage clients and check out their progress via emails or Skype or other communication platforms.

With HubSpot, we have all the tools that we need in one place. There is no need to use separate third-party tools to get leads, convert, and retain our clients. You have your own:

• HubSpot CRM allows you to create blog posts, manage them, and the SEO tool will take care of SEO and internal optimisation like page speed, meta tags, and so on.
• HubSpot allows you to create a beautiful email and segment your audience that will let you send customised emails for more personalisation.
• You can use social media monitoring tools powered by HubSpot to check out your followers’ buying stage, engagement, and analytics that go much deeper than other social media analytics.
• All your contacts are in a single place where you can check out the progress of your prospects and communicate without any difficulty.

What are some of the amazing HubSpot tools that you can access?

The following study predicts digital advertising spend to soar over $375 billion by 2021.

Source: SlideShare

It is crucial to get access to premium marketing tools to get your piece of the pie in this competitive market. HubSpot is the complete solution for your agency.

You get access to tools that allow you not only to market but also manage your agency in one HubSpot marketing platform. Unlike traditional tools where you have to use various third-party tools like emails, separate social media accounts, landing page builders, and so on, you get to manage all advanced tools under one umbrella. It will save you a lot of time.

Here are some of the essential tools that you will get under one place to manage your business:

• Partner Directory: Allows you to create and optimise your profile. Prove your specialisation to attract more clients.
• Client Management Tool: Gives you an eagle eye view of your clients to help you monitor their information, progress, and more to give better service and support for a long lasting relationship.
• Team Management Tool: You get to assign a position to your team members and give them role-based training and monitor their progress. Get access to all the resources inside a single dashboard.

Here are some of the advanced marketing tools to help you grow your agency:

• HubSpot Content Management System: It enables you to create, optimise, and manage your content from a single dashboard without you having to worry about formatting, templates, and so on.
• SEO Tool: The HubSpot SEO tool will take care of your page speed, optimisation, tags, keywords, and so on to help you rank better.
• Social Media tool: Connect, engage, automate, and track your social media accounts and performance via HubSpot social tool.
• Landing Page Creator: Use the easy drag-and-drop landing page creator and customise it by your visitors’ buying stage and other data for getting the best results.
• Email Marketing: Create responsive emails by your customers’ buying stage, preference, and so on for getting more clicks and traffic to your site.
• Marketing Automation: Create advanced workflow and segmentation to automate your repetitive tasks and have an automated email sequence by segmentation that will help you get regular traffic and sales.
• HubSpot CRM: It allows you to monitor your prospects in each stage of a sales funnel, view their activities, and respond to their queries to create a long lasting relationship.

What are the advantages of working with a HubSpot Certified Partner Marketing Agency?

Here are some of the benefits of working with a HubSpot Certified Partner Marketing Agency:

 

1. You have your personal on-boarding specialist and a sales coach

 

Many marketing agencies rely on their knowledge and take a few courses to get started. However, a partner agency’s way of doing business will be different. When working with a HubSpot agency partner, you will get your channel consultant and channel account manager.

Your channel consultant will help you identify and register leads via HubSpot CRM. You will learn how to monitor opportunities around you for getting the maximum results.

After that, your channel consultant will study your agency and define proper three-tiered service model. You will be gaining expertise on finding the most appropriate inbound marketing services for your agency, creating the landing page, and exporting the contacts in HubSpot database.

Now that you have a strong foundation, you and your channel account manager will review the opportunities and create an effective action plan for your agency. Your account manager will assist you to get your first client, and you will learn:

• Explanatory call
• Planning call
• HubSpot Demo
• Packaging and Pricing
• Closing

Finally, your channel consultant will walk you through delivering your services and retaining them.

2. Be a part of exclusive training

The traditional marketing agencies rely on their knowledge, which most likely is outdated. With a HubSpot partner agency, you have the edge over many other marketing agencies since HubSpot’s learning academy offers all the useful insights to get familiar with the advancement of the digital world.

Your agency can also get a chance to join exclusive training either online or in-person with top HubSpot’s sales trainers. Here are some of the training lessons:

• Agency Sales Bootcamp: Learn how to identify your clients’ pain, handling an objection, and offer them alluring solutions that they cannot deny. David Weinhau (an expert HubSpot trainer) will educate you on how to get more sales.
• Agency Pipeline Generation: Dan Tyre will help you gain new skills that enable you to find more prospects and generate more opportunities with Agency Pipeline Bootcamp.
• Agency Account Management Training: Right after learning how to get more opportunities and sales, you need to maintain your client base. The agency account manager training educates you about ways to retain your client base and provide the best experience to them.

3. Tiers and Benefits of becoming a HubSpot partner agency

Some of the famous agencies which have HubSpot partner certifications are Bluleadz, Thomas Net RPM, Kuno Creative, Salted Stone, and many more.

If you become a HubSpot agency partner, you will get a chance to meet with top Hubspotters at the various global events that keep happening. Be prepared to meet some exceptional talents and share each other’s expertise to grow together as an agency.

Once you are a HubSpot partner, they will categorise your agency by monthly recurring income and provide benefits, according to your tier. You can grow together with HubSpot. The four HubSpot tiers are:

• Silver
• Gold
• Platinum
• Diamond

Here is a link to their agency partner program that reveals detailed information about the benefits at each level.

Seagull Advertising – Your HubSpot Partner Agency in Pune, India

Founded in 1996, Seagull started its operations from a garage and has grown successfully over the last 23 years. A team of creative and free “Seagullites”, who are not only skilled but also masters of their respective art.

Seagull helps businesses ‘Grow Better’ by expanding their customer base through winning edge technologies & processes.

 

Being the only creative marketing & advertising agency in Pune, India and a Gold HubSpot partner agency, we work towards nurturing and enabling organisations to achieve strategic advantages and growth for their brand. (Check out our HubSpot Profile Page)

 

At Seagull – reaching goals excite us, exceeding them inspires us!

Over to You

There are a lot of digital marketing agencies today. We have experienced significant growth in the number of digital marketing agencies that are promoting their services to businesses. However, only a few manage to grow and sustain for a long time.

If you want to grow you need a growth partner agency that channelises their energy and resources towards your business goals. That’s what we call a win-win scenario.

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In many ways, leads have become the bread and butter for any business and there are various ways to convert a customer into a potential lead. Whether it is through word-of-mouth, social media, referral etc. Whatever may be the reason it is important that lead generation is introduced and imbibed in your Inbound Marketing efforts.

 

Before we begin, here are some interesting stats related to lead generation: (source – HubSpot Marketing Statistics)

• Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or more bump in revenue in 6-9 months time. (Strategic IC, 2017)
• Businesses who nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost 33% less than non-nurtured prospects. (Strategic IC, 2017)
• 69% of marketers say converting leads is their top priority. (HubSpot, 2017)

When we use the word “lead,” it means an individual or organization with an interest in your company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. This interest is shown by downloading an offer, filling out a form, or requesting more information about your product or service. The whole goal of Inbound Marketing is to attract visitors to your website and turn them into leads. HubSpot defines the process of Inbound Marketing in this way: Attract, Convert, Close, Delight.

Source: HubSpot

In today’s age and the world, the most important thing is “timing” to generate and manage leads. That’s where Seagull can help you with as it is important to understand that some leads will require significant time to nurture, and this also depends on the industry and the niche you’re serving based on the persona, the engagement, and their velocity i.e recency of engagement, volume and timing of events indicating an imminent intent to buy.

To truly realize the potential of lead segmentation, Seagull can help you understand what it is and how it functions. We segment your leads i.e, divide and subdivide your contacts into smaller groups with similar characteristics based on the criteria of where they belong in the flywheel i.e attract stage, engage stage and delight stage. To provide the target audience with their relevant content, lead segmentation is crucial for three major reasons:

• It improves Your Ability to Channelize your Efforts
• It improves your Ability to Deliver Better Value
• Lets You Target the Right Audience

To learn more about the lead segregation process you can read more here:

Inbound Marketing Process for Lead Generation

 

Once this is taken care of, leads have to be transferred and assigned to the sales team which help them reach segmented thresholds and/or trigger specific behaviours, such as requesting a free trial or demonstration.

Finally, our team at Seagull will evaluate the lead generation process for you, as that has to be a constant analysis procedure. Because we need to understand that none of this works, let alone improves, without closely monitoring the performance of every aspect of your lead generation and lead management process.

We understand you might feel that everything can be worked on internally but sometimes consulting with an agency that specializes in such scenarios helps the business achieve its full potential. And asking for help/guidance is the first step to achieve that goal.

At Seagull Advertising, being the only HubSpot certified Gold partnered creative agency in Pune we create a helpful offer to walk you through the different components of generating leads as we know how important it is for companies to pay attention to each of these steps, especially in the early planning stages, and devote the right resources and budget, tend to perform better than the competition.

To have a better picture of how Seagull can help you achieve your goals through inbound marketing we have designed an eBook “Surviving the Future with Inbound Marketing” to answer all your queries. To download it, click the image below!

 

Let us help you take your company to the next level using creative marketing technology!

I have a habit of reading the late-night news on my cell phone just before hitting the bed. While social scientists may opine that using a mobile phone late at night causes sleep disorders, I’ve come to believe that it’s just the opposite in my case.

For starters, it assures me that I’m mostly updated about large global events until the moment I sleep; and secondly, it enforces a good habit of reading useful stuff – something that any leader worth their salt will tell you.

But last Wednesday night was different.

I recall checking Campaign India on my phone, and the first news I saw was ‘Accenture to buy Droga5’. The rush of questions and emotions ensured I was wide awake upon reading that!

 

After all, David Droga and his iconic advertising company, Droga5, was the poster child of creative, purpose-driven and result-oriented communication agencies. If advertising were a religion, Droga would be a modern-day demi-god.

(left: Brian Whipple, right: David Droga)

So, what does the Droga5 takeover by Accenture exactly mean for the advertising world?

The Data and Analytics Juggernaut

 

At the outset, it is important to understand why Accenture – a global consultancy giant, would acquire one of the world’s most awarded advertising agencies – Droga5.

As it goes, this is hardly a surprise – almost every large tech and consulting company has bitten the creative marketing technology bullet – think Accenture Interactive, PwC Digital Services, IBM iX, Deloitte Digital and Cognizant Digital Advertising.

 

As data and analytics becomes increasingly crucial, clients demand for measurability of every dollar they spend. And we at Seagull always say, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

With programmatic advertising, real-time analytics-based AB testing, and an increasingly aware consumer base it’s little wonder that tech companies and creative ideation hot-shops are joining forces to steer clear of choppy waters.

 

How will the tech guys and the creative guys work together?

 

As Droga5 becomes part of Accenture Interactive, the first question that pops up is ‘How will creative and tech people work together?’

The answer, it turns out, is brutal but true – traditional advertising is dead

The future is Creative Marketing Technology.

 

Brian Whipple, Global CEO of Accenture Interactive says, “The future of brand building is not just about creating great ideas; it’s about creating great experiences.”

We at Seagull feel Brian couldn’t have said it any better.

 

As modern day brand custodians, the thin line between the creative guys and the tech guys has been dissolved – we all have to be jack of all and master of all. The need of the hour is to create disruptive ideas and tell compelling stories across multiple touch-points in a consumer’s journey – in the ‘phygital’ (physical+digital) world.

 

What is the impact in a developing country like India?

 

For many traditional advertising gurus, the unprecedented infusion of technology in creative ideation is a hard pill to swallow. The ones who saw the tide changing adapted quickly by acquiring new-age skills in an increasing landscape of digitally-empowered consumers.

 

From OgilvyRED being launched in India to Dentsu Aegis Networking buying digital agencies like Namics, Sokrati and Happy Marketer, the entire ecosystem of ‘digitech collaborations’ is seeing a huge paradigm shift.

The writing is on the wall, and the future that India thought would come to its shores has already arrived.

 

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Creative Marketing Technology is here to stay, and as India continues making giant strides globally as the next big superpower, only a tightly-knit, cohesive solutions-driven approach is the way forward.

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At Seagull Advertising, we saw the changing tide well ahead of time.

Our strategic partnership with the US-based HubSpot, Inc., the world’s foremost player in Inbound Marketing, empowers us to bring the best of creative ideas and data-driven marketing automation to the table.

After all, the only way to succeed in today’s times is to share, collaborate and grow together.

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So, while I may have stayed awake for a part of Wednesday night, the next morning was brilliant. While some parts of the world and many companies in India are still wondering what to expect from the future of advertising, Seagull has already raced ahead of that curve.

 

We are already on the right track of creative marketing technology and are now poised to take on the arduous terrain of an ever-changing customer landscape, with ease, and help our clients grow better.

Written By – A Copywriter at Seagull Advertising

 

For more news on this topic check out the following links –

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/business/media/accenture-droga5-advertising.html

https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/accenture-interactive-accelerates-its-mission-to-reinvent-agency-model-by-agreeing-to-acquire-creative-agency-droga5.htm

 

In the old world of information scarcity, “lead generation” had a definite answer which described it as a process where marketing found the names of potential buyers and passed them to sales. It’s commonly a mix of manual sorting and inefficient communications that risked losing leads and the all-important timing between a request and a sales response.

In today’s age and world, lead generation has become the initiation of consumer interest or enquiry into products or services of a business. Here are 6 important steps you should take to improve your lead generation with the use of inbound marketing process.

 

But before we go ahead with the highlight points, how about an awesome infographic that depicts the journey of an inbound marketing lead

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1. Acquire Leads

The lead generation process starts by finding out where your target audience ‘lives’ on the web. To start attracting leads to your website, generate engaging content that can be shared throughout your various marketing channels. Create content about your business in the form of eBooks, infographics, videos, white papers that would fit your business and your audience. Distribute this content across your blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, other social channels, email, etc. where ever your potential customers are active.

 

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Related Read – How to Generate Leads for Your Business via Inbound Marketing?

 

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2. Lead Segmentation

To truly realize the potential of lead segmentation, you have to understand what it is and how it functions. When you segment your leads, you basically create divisions and subdivisions of your contacts into smaller groups with similar characteristics based on the criteria of where they belong in the flywheel i.e attract stage, engage stage and delight stage. To provide the target audience with their relevant content lead segmentation is crucial for three major reasons:

• It improves Your Ability to Channelize your Efforts
• It improves your Ability to Deliver Better Value
• Lets You Target the Right Audience

 

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3. Lead Nurturing

Monitor and influence the progress of leads through the segmentation stage by presenting them with relevant content based on buyer persona and content mapping. Focus your team’s efforts on nurturing better quality leads that will have a greater impact on your sales since these leads are already interested in your content and services and are closer to converting to a customer than other leads with a lower score.

 

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4. Lead Scoring

According to HubSpot, 79 percent of B2B marketers have not established lead scoring.

When you have a properly developed lead scoring system, it makes it easier to prioritize prospects. A customer relationship management (CRM) system makes it easier for your organization to not only track, organize and maintain relationships with prospects and customer but also allows your business to understand which leads in your system are more valuable than others.

If you know who your ideal customer is, it makes it much easier to formulate your lead scoring model. But it is also important to understand that some leads will require significant time to nurture, and this also depends on your industry and the niche you’re serving based on the persona, the engagement, and their velocity i.e recency of engagement, volume and timing of events indicating an imminent intent to buy.

 

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5. Transfer and Assign Leads to the Sales Team

When your lead scoring system has been set up correctly using marketing automation workflows and you have assigned them to appropriate sales reps, they reach lead scoring thresholds and/or trigger specific behaviors, such as requesting a free trial or demonstration. Use segmentation rules to assign leads.

 

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6. Evaluate Lead Generation Process

A constant analysis is key in successful selling as none of this works, let alone improves, without closely monitoring the performance of every aspect of your lead generation and lead management process. Companies that pay attention to each of these steps, especially in the early planning stages, and devote the right resources and budget, tend to perform better than the competition

 

It will take some time for your business to work out the kinks, but ultimately, you’ll end up with a seamless inbound marketing process that generates better business results.

 

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Did you know: 61% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their top challenge. (Source: HubSpot, 2018)

 

According to the 2018 State of Inbound report, a marketer’s number one priority is converting leads to customers. Both marketing practitioners and their leaders seem to agree that the collation and nurturing of customer data is essential for the success of inbound marketing.

Yet, lead generation remains the real challenge for most and we’ve all been through it.

Let’s start with defining a lead.
In simple terms, a lead is an individual or organization with an interest in your company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. The interest is expressed by sharing contact information, like an email ID, phone number, or even a social media handle.

Now, that your idea of “lead” is clear. Let’s cover what online lead generation is, why you need lead generation?

Lead generation is often described as the marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest, and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service.

The first step to generate leads for any successful inbound marketing campaign is understanding your primary personas. These are the type of people who already buy or use your service or product – exactly who you should be aiming to sell to and the type of leads you want to acquire.
Once you put all of these important elements together, you can utilize these few effective elements as promotional channels to drive traffic to your landing pages to start generating leads.

Ways to Generate Leads for your Business

1. Content Marketing

 

Content is the key to good lead generation and, once you’ve defined your key personas, you can then start to focus on the content that you’re going to create. The important point is to make sure that the content you produce is relevant to your buyer persona, whatever the format.

You can include CTAs anywhere in your content. The more delighted a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your call-to-action and move onto your landing page.

 

Related Post – Content Strategy: Your Company needs it, Surely!

2. Social Media

 

By monitoring your posts, find out the best time to release new content and how often you should release it. Social media platforms make it easy to guide your followers to take action and to measure your engagement. From the swipe up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links to bitly URLs on Twitter, you can find out what kind of posts are converting, and on which channels.

 

3. Email Marketing

 

Email has an incredible ability to effectively build relationships. As a follow-up to lead generation, email is the perfect lead nurturing tool. According to an InsideSales.com study, a lead has a 100x higher chance of being contacted and a 21x higher chance of qualifying if contacted within 5 minutes as opposed to 30 minutes.

As mentioned earlier, a single effective CTA is extremely important in your emails. Stick to one action and make it clear what that is and what’s in it for the lead.

 

Related Read –  11 Successful Email Marketing Strategies & Tips

 

4. Product Trials

Product trials are one of the best ways to offer a free first hand experience of your product to the users. By offering trials of your product or service you can break down a lot of barriers that lead to the actual sale.

Another benefit of trials is that you gain the trust of your potential customers since you are ready to let them try before buy and this shows the confidence that you have in your product/service. Once a prospect is using your product, you can entice them with additional offers or resources to encourage them to buy and ultimately gain a customer.

5. Develop an Off-page SEO Strategy

Off-page SEO deals with building inbound links to your website and landing pages. Holistically, the search engines see inbound links as “votes” for your content. The more inbound links you have to your site, the more valuable your content must be. That’s what Google thinks and accordingly ranks your content in the search results

Whatever channel you use to generate leads, you’ll want to guide users to your landing page. As long as you’ve built a landing page that converts, the rest will handle itself.

It’s always, always, always better to generate leads organically rather than buy them.

The major reason why inbound lead generation is much more effective than simply buying leads is that, a sales lead in inbound is generated through information collection. That information collection could come as a result of a job seeker showing interest in a position by completing an application, a shopper sharing contact information in exchange for a coupon, or a person filling out a form to download an educational piece of content.

 

6. Website

Your website plays a huge role in generating leads. According to sources; 83% of B2B marketers rated their company website as an effective lead generation tactic, with 23% saying it is “very effective.”

 

Create calls to action that result in clicks. When it comes right down to it, the only effective call to action is the one that results in a click. From this perspective, creating effective calls to action is a matter of addressing the two questions your visitors will ask:

1) Where should I click? and 2) Why should I click?

 

Use of Marketing Automation Software for Lead Generation

A massive advantage of utilising a marketing automation software (like HubSpot or Marketo) is that it provides help to qualify leads quantitatively. Using this technique, leads are assigned a numerical value (or score) to determine where they fall on the scale from “interested” to “ready for a sale”. This process is known as lead scoring.

A lead’s score is based on the actions that the lead has taken, the information they’ve provided, their level of engagement with your brand, and other such criteria. The higher a lead’s score, the closer they are to becoming a sales-qualified lead (SQL), which is only a step away from becoming a customer.
By following these tips, you’ll generate more of the leads that are a good fit for your business.

 

The more you tweak and test every step of your inbound lead generation process, the more you’ll improve lead quality and increase revenue.

 

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