Lead Generation First Step: Awareness
Lead generation is a complex topic. To properly cover lead-gen, you would need to discuss the strategies to take towards different product verticals, various ways to engage and nurture leads depending on where they are in the funnel, and even content strategy. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The bottom line is, It’s a lot to unravel.
That being said, our goal with this post is to provide guidance to direct response advertisers who are just getting started. So let’s begin with one of the biggest questions about lead-gen: what are the first steps you need to take to actually start generating leads?
Let’s start by taking a look at the marketing funnel:
From the above image, you can see that the marketing funnel is divided into three main sections: ToFu (Top of Funnel), MoFu (Middle of Funnel) and BoFu (Bottom of Funnel). The main difference between these sections is your prospects’ level of awareness of your product/service, and therefore how close they are to making a purchase. In this post, we’ll discuss the ToFu section.
The ToFu section of the funnel is when your prospects first become aware of a problem that they want to solve. At this stage, it’s your job to educate them on why your product offers the best solution to their problem.
Since your prospects are actively seeking out solutions, they will likely turn to a search engine for answers. SEO will thus play an essential role in building your brand visibility. A strong content strategy is a necessity, and is the lynchpin of any SEO effort. Blog posts, newsletters, webinars and other such educational content should be made easily discoverable by prospective leads, and offered for free in exchange for their email address. In particular, content that lives on your website is great. This is because:
- You have complete control over the messaging.
- You can insert relevant keywords into your blog posts or other website content.
- Google favors well-written, relevant content. This means that your next blog post – even if it’s promotional in nature – can help your Google search ranking. The caveat is that your content should offer useful information to people, instead of being purely promotional.
Keep in mind that search engine results pages (SERPs) represent only one part of the internet. You should aim to be as visible as possible across the entire internet. That means building a presence on various social media platforms, and being represented in industry forums and news articles whenever possible. To get started, we recommend doing searches on a wide variety of social media platforms for terms relevant to your industry. This way, you can get an idea of which platform(s) your clients frequent, and start building a following there. All of this work will benefit your SEO efforts, too.
Finally, let’s talk metrics. At the ToFu stage in the funnel, your performance metrics will likely include website traffic, PR presence, and social media followers. Once you’ve built up a content and engagement strategy that spans several channels, you can start monitoring performance on a weekly and monthly basis and make channel-specific optimizations as necessary.
That covers our first post on the awareness (ToFu) part of the marketing funnel. With this knowledge in hand, you should be ready to form your engagement strategy and start measuring results!
In our next post, we’ll discuss the consideration portion of the funnel. Remember to check back in on the MediaGo blog to see our latest digital ad advice.