Where does lead generation fit in your marketing strategy?

At every second of every day, there a new start-up takes birth in this world. What does this mean for your existing business? New competitors in the industry means a new option for the customers to switch to. What can your company do about this? Nothing. You cannot control the external environment of your business. But you can definitely focus on the internal marketing plan for your company. Making changes to it, inculcating trends, and organizing marketing efforts to hold on to your position in the market and retain your customers. How do we do this? A successful marketing plan. Many components make up this concept. However, the integral part is lead generation.

Lead generation is the process of getting a customer’s organic interest into your business. It falls in every stage of a company’s marketing plan. According to Forbes, the five essential elements of a marketing plan are—setting marketing goals and objectives, defining the target audience, researching marketing tactics, planning your marketing tactics, and developing your timeline and budget. When thinking about these five steps, lead generation falls into each category and influences it directly or indirectly. Let us understand how.

Set Goals

The first step of our marketing plan is to set marketing goals and objectives. This is relatively self-explanatory. You need to create a foundation for all your marketing efforts. They will be concentrated around these goals and will be formulated keeping these goals and objectives into consideration. Lead generation comes into the picture for this stage when the goals and objectives are set. The business will target to achieve these objectives by the deadline. Still, it will depend on the plans to determine what emphasis lead generation will be given. For example, suppose the goals are to increase sales by ten percent. In that case, the focus on lead generation will differ from when the objective is to increase lead generation by some other statistic. The business could also aim at entering a new market or plan as its goal, making lead generation extremely important and a core component of the marketing plan.

Choose your Audience

Then follows, defining a target audience. As indicated in the step, lead generation would be influenced highly by this step. While determining the target audience, the company will conduct many forms of research and analysis on different characteristics of the audience. In the end, coming up with a set of features that their customer or customer segment would possess. This makes the target audience for the business. This target audience determines what efforts will be taken to generate leads and what kind of leads the company is looking for. The steps that will be taken to generate leads would also differ with the different sets of the target audience.

Conduct Research

Next, we research marketing tactics. The marketing plan now has data about what we want to accomplish and who we want to target. We will now decide how this can be done. With the constant evolvement of marketing strategies in the marketing industry, a company can choose and incorporate thousands of options into its marketing plan. Through thorough research on marketing tactics and complying with the target audience and marketing goals, the marketing team will deduce a list of shortlisted options that would work and attract the most customers (i.e., generate leads). In addition, the research will give an insight into results achieved by market leaders and competitors. This can help us understand more about what the business needs to focus on to get the best results possible.

Plan your tactics

Then comes planning the marketing tactics. The team has shortlisted all the strategies that have the potential to prove profitable for the business. What needs to be done now is to decide on a particular group of marketing tactics that the company would stick to. These will analyze the competitors and their projected figures, the industry predictions, etc. With this, the marketing team will make sure what they have chosen yields maximum results. And most importantly, total lead generation and conversion from the customers will define the marketing plan’s success.

Work on Execution

Ultimately, we focus on the timeline for implementing this marketing plan and the budget allocated. A particular timeline would give more effectiveness to the marketing plan. The audience doesn’t enjoy a stretched campaign. It should have a good start and a crisp farewell which would retain the customers’ curiosity for marketing efforts that will follow in the future. A proper time-based campaign would affect lead generation positively. The company will also select a timeline that suits its target audience the most, generating as many leads as possible through the marketing strategy. While allocating a budget to the marketing plan, what will be kept in mind is the overall importance of this campaign, the funds available for the marketing team, and the type of target audience. The timeline plays a role in budget allocation for a marketing campaign. If the marketing plan is a primary part of all the company plans to undertake, there would be a high budget. Similarly, the target audience’s characteristics will influence how much must be invested in a successful marketing strategy for the company.

As discussed above, lead generation plays a role in formulating and implementing a marketing plan at every step. The components of any marketing plan are all intertwined. Each significantly influences the other and cannot be ignored. Hence, each business should consider what impacts would be seen in lead generation when a marketing plan is implemented, regardless of how big or small the effect is.

Lead generation is done best when the interest is organic. But with this immense amount of competition, you must ensure that your efforts are practical. In this time and age, the audience does not want businesses to buy their attention, instead to earn it. This is where lead generation becomes a challenging concept. To explore solutions for this hurdle, read how you can maximize lead generation.

Author – Ishita Jain

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