The new year is a great time to evaluate and set the foundation for how you’re going to accomplish your goals for the remainder of the year. It’s also a great time to commit yourself to improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing programs. To help you do just that, I’ve created this list of five resolutions you can make to improve your B2B lead generation programs and capture more prospects right now.
1) Build a Plan for Managing Your B & C Leads
B2B lead generation programs are designed to identify and collect quality, sales ready, A-leads. Often overlooked are those second tier B and C level leads that aren’t quite ready for sales, but are definitely prospects on the horizon. Developing a marketing process for managing, tracking and staying in-touch with these prospects is the easiest way to fill your pipeline with more, better quality leads in the future.
2) Repurpose a Proven Program from the Past
What’s old and familiar to you is only a faint memory to your customers and prospects. Look at your programs for the past few years and find a campaign that produced good results, then repurpose the content and creative for the new year. Instead of recreating the wheel, use your resources to make it better. For significantly less time, money and effort, you can build a program that’s ready to go now; meaning you can start benefiting from the leads it produces, that much sooner.
3) Be Consistent in your Communications
Good intentions are easily forgotten when priorities start to pile up. Blogs and newsletters are usually the first things to suffer. Commit yourself to writing at least one blog entry a week and sending out a monthly newsletter. If that seems unreasonable, look for support from vendors that specialize in turnkey newsletter programs and writing blog content. For a few hundred dollars a month, you can get both, freeing up your own time to focus on other priorities.
4) Track Your Actual Lead Costs
Knowing what’s working and what’s not is the key to improving your B2B lead generation programs. To do that, you need good, reliable data. With a little planning and preparation, you can easily track any marketing activity to determine the exact value of each lead produced. From there, it’s simply a matter of reviewing the data and allocating your funds to the marketing programs that are the most successful.
5) Automate a Routine Process
Repetition is expensive. Spending time every day to respond to the routine sales inquiries or review your marketing database to identify potential sales leads is expensive and a waste of time. With new technologies, these processes and many others can be automated to free up your time. This can also improve your B2B lead generation programs at the same time because customers will be better served, communications will be more timely and you’ll be able to focus on improving other processes to capture even more leads with each program.
