Step 1: Determine and Plan Your Approach

It’s essential that you think through your approach and develop a plan for how you will use a certain tactic. You should do this with each tactic you use, whether it is a direct mail campaign, attending a trade show, etc. Determining and planning your approach lays the foundation for a successful lead-generation campaign.

It’s amazing to me how many marketers jump into their lead-generation process without identifying their target audience or the objective for their campaign. This is one of the most common reasons why these campaigns fail. Without a strategic plan, marketers have no idea how to reach the people most likely to buy their products or services, and no way to measure their success or failure when the campaign is over. Often, they spend a big budget on the campaign, but end up reaching only a minimum number of potential customers.

Even worse, the marketers get frustrated and abandon a tactic too quickly. They assume “it just doesn’t work for us,” when that tactic might have served them well if they had stuck with it and learned how to use it properly. They also have to report bad results to their bosses, which, in turn, puts pressure on their jobs and may even cause them to doubt their own ability to generate leads. This turns into a vicious cycle: The marketers keep failing to produce the leads they need due to a lack of planning in their tactics.

The more planning and strategic evaluation you do before employing a tactic, the more you can define success, and the more you will increase your chances of achieving it. You need to think through three areas of planning:

Each of these questions requires some discussion. In the next few pages, I’ll go deeper into each question and talk about how to determine your own answers.

WHO IS YOUR TARGET CUSTOMER

The first questions to ask in planning your tactical approach are: “What is my target market? Who is my target customer?”

Surprisingly, many companies don’t take the time to—or don’t even know how to—(1) identify and pinpoint their target market and (2) research their customer to understand their lifestyles, their wants, and their needs. You’d think this would be an obvious first step for any marketing effort, but many companies plunge headlong into lead-generation campaigns with only a vague idea of what kinds of people might be interested in buying their product or service. As a result, they waste their lead-generation efforts and budget trying to market their products or services to the wrong people.

The more successful lead-generation marketers understand how crucial it is to know your target customer. Everything you know about how they think, and how they behave as consumers, serves as a guide to your lead-generation efforts.

With some lead-generation tactics, your ability to target your customer is limited. For example, trade shows offer demographic information (usually available on the show’s website) about the people who normally attend their annual show. You can choose to attend trade shows where the majority of attendees match your target audience. But once you get to the show, you are marketing to everyone who attends it, whether they fit your target profile or not.

Other tactics, such as e-mail marketing, allow you to do very specific targeting to potential customers in very well-defined demographics. Either way, your goal should be to learn as much as you can about your target customer, and to find the best, most effective tactics for reaching out to those customers and turning them into leads or sales.

RESEARCHING YOUR TARGET CUSTOMER

In general, you should try to define your target customer according to three measurements:

You can gather this information in several ways. First, if you already have an established base of customers, spend a little time gathering data about them. Customer surveys and interactive follow-up phone calls are the most reliable way to do this. Also, marketing research companies, such as Axciom and Merkle, can help you gather data about potential customers.

I think it’s mission critical that every company should do this kind of research and introspection. Understanding your current customers—who they are and why they buy from you—can give you valuable insight about your prospective customers. Again, it amazes me how many companies don’t do this. They have an established customer base, and yet they have no information about the people who buy their products or services.

E-commerce companies have a special need to know their customers, because their transactions are always done at arm’s length. Traditional brick-and-mortar companies with a sales force have an advantage over e-commerce companies, in that their salespeople often interact with target customers and get to know their wants and needs.

E-commerce companies can only gather a limited amount of information about their customers from online sales. They get some information about buying behavior based on the products their customers purchase from them. Also, e-commerce companies do occasional online customer surveys. But these surveys often get a minimal response, and usually provide very limited information about their customers. So e-commerce companies must find other ways to establish their customer profile.

If you are an e-commerce company or if you feel uncomfortable asking your customers for personal information about their lives and spending habits, marketing research companies will do the job for you. If you give them a postal or e-mail address list for your customers, these companies will research customer information and share that data with you. (Usually, they match your customer contact information against profiles they’ve already established in their consumer databases.)

EARLY ADOPTERS VS. MAINSTREAM BUYERS

Understanding who buys your product can be difficult if you don’t have a large enough customer base. If you are a brand new company, you know that millions of potential customers are out there, waiting for your product. The trick is to not fall into the trap of thinking that you know your potential customer, based on the handful of customers you have now. The first hundred or so customers who have already bought your product are not necessarily representative of all your prospective customers.

In his books Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, author Geoffrey Moore explores the marketing strategies invented by Silicon Valley’s high-tech companies to introduce and market their products. Moore recalls that in the early days of the high-tech revolution the products themselves were so new that mainstream consumers were reluctant to try them. So high-tech companies in Silicon Valley marketed their products to “early adopters”—mostly techies and visionary business owners who believed that having the latest technology (whatever it was) would give them a competitive edge. But high-tech companies soon discovered they were targeting too narrow an audience. Their marketing messages, according to Moore, were criticized for being “too long, too complicated, and, well, too nerdy.”¹

Eventually, high-tech companies realized that the best target audience for their innovations were pragmatic and conservative business owners, who would buy a technology only when it had a proven track record for serving other businesses. It took some time and effort for high-tech marketers to “cross the chasm,” as Moore put it. They had to make the transition from marketing to techies and visionaries to marketing to mainstream business owners who really had a need for their products and solutions—and, from there, to marketing to everyday consumers.

WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS

The second question you need to ask in planning your tactical approach is, “What are my goals or objectives in using this particular lead-generation tactic?” The answer goes back to how you define a lead. Is a lead, for you, a person who is ready to buy? Or is it a person who’s interested but just wants more information? What kind of action do you hope the customer will take in response to your tactic?

As I explained in Chapter 2, the type of lead or other action you are seeking often depends on where your potential customers are in the buying cycle, according to the AIDA curve. If your customers are in the Attention or Interest phases, they are still learning about your products. You may be seeking actual leads or actions (such as downloading your online catalog, or accepting an invitation to a webinar) that will cause your customers to become leads. If your customers are in the Decision or Action phases, they are making a decision to buy. You may be seeking a transaction or sale from them.

To further define your goals, you need to answer other questions:

I’ll explore the concept of cost-per-lead in full detail in Chapter 5.

HOW DO YOU MEASURE SUCCESS

The third question to ask in planning your tactical approach—and the question that too many marketers forget to ask—is: “How do I measure the success of my lead-generation campaign?”

What does success mean for you, in terms of leads (or other customer actions)? Is your campaign a success when you get the leads to raise their hands? Do you measure success by the number of people who say they are seriously considering buying your product? Or is it enough for them to say they would like more information? Do you measure success by the number of people who simply respond to your lead-generation tactic, whatever the response is?

Or is your campaign a success only when a lead is converted to an actual sale? Is it a success when your customers transact and have a pleasant experience? Is it successful when your customers refer someone to you?

Every company will have a different set of priorities for what they want their lead-generation efforts to achieve. And different lead-generation campaigns will have different goals in terms of how to measure success. But you must define the measurements for your success before you begin your efforts to connect with your customers. Without measurements, you will have no way of knowing whether your lead-generation campaign has succeeded.