The way your buyer's purchase and your competitors are going to market is changing rapidly and fundamentally. Many business owners are finding their tried and trusted lead generation techniques and tactics are failing to yield sufficient results.

But knowing you need to change and knowing how to change and specifically how MUCH to change sits at the heart of the challenge.

Understanding the buyer's journey lies at the centre of good lead generation practices. Marketers should allow the journey their buyers go on...

• from uninterested and unaware in their products or services, 
• to defining their problems and their need,
• to expressing interest in your solutions,
• to purchasing and becoming a loyal customer

...to inform every action, every campaign, and every piece of content.

Funnel maths - Measuring Your Lead Generation Effectiveness

Traditionally, one of the major issues business owners face is not being able to measure the financial return on their marketing investments. There was no way to gauge the real impact on revenue of say, print advertising or direct mail. Even knowing some data, such as email open rates isn't sufficient to understand the dollar return on that particular marketing investment.

However, a new era is upon us. An era where “Smart Marketers”, armed with the right tools, have the ability to calculate real marketing ROI. We refer to this as "knowing your funnel maths.”

Say you have 1000 visitors to your website in a given month (ie the top of the funnel). You target those visitors and turn them into leads by providing content that best suits their needs. Of those initial 1000 visitors, 50 of them become leads and enter your lead nururing campiagn (middle of the funnel). Of these 50 leads, 8  of them become sales ready leads, of which 2 of them become customers (bottom of the funnel.) The two delas are worth $5000  in new revenue to your business.

Smart lead generation is knowing the "leakage rate" of each stage in their funnel (how many propects you lose along the way) knowing the lag time from first engagement with prospects to the time they become a loyal customer. Armed with this valuable information, together with their current and planned revenue goals and average selling price, organisations can model their lead generation funnel accordingly.

Why is this important? Because it means business owners and their marketers now know the velocity they need to run their funnel to meet their revenue goals.

They know how many visitors and contacts they need at the top of the funnel in order to drive revenue at the bottom of the funnel. Now that's smart!

Employ a digital, inbound marketing methodology

Employing a lead generation strategy using digital or inbound marketing strategy saves business owners time and money. On average an inbound lead is 62% cheaper than an outbound generated lead.

Good inbound marketing attracts buyers to your site via carefully selected tactics that highlight the problems and challenges your buyers are facing in their business. Nurturing those leads using relevant targeted messages further deepens the engagement.

Now, instead of your sales team caught up cold calling or email spamming, they can establish and develop a credible and trustworthy relationship with buyers who are educated and motivated.

But perhaps the single biggest benefit of an inbound marketing approach is the ability to measure your lead generation funnel at every step of the process and then adapt your approach and retest to evaluate the success of the change. This incremental, iterative, adaptive approach yields much better and faster returns.

Use content to nurture your leads

Now we now know that people commence online searches and visit websites for a solution to a problem. What’s the most effective way to engage? Provide content such as an eBook, current industry trends or a more technical whitepaper. Nurture your lead through their buying process. If your prospect is “sitting on the fence” provide more relevant information such as product demonstrations, free trials and video testimonials to enhance your reliability whilst educating and informing buyers too.

According to Hubspot here's how your offer types change as the buying process progresses.

By focusing on these three key elements:

• Your funnel maths
• Inbound marketing
• Content that speaks to buyers

Business owners will be well on the way to revitalising their lead generation activities and providing the right volume and quality of leads to sales. If you would like to read more about this topic please feel free to download this complimentary ebook.