Consider Context and Relevance to Improve Lead Generation

I went fly fishing for the first time in my life a couple of years ago on the Provo River in Utah. On my first and only day trying this sport I did pretty well–I caught about 14 trout. And I couldn’t help but draw some parallels to lead generation in digital marketing. Because I’m that way.

Fly fishing is by no means an easy sport and for many enthusiasts, their pursuit of mastering it becomes a life-long obsession. Wild fish are very smart. They are pretty good at detecting things in their environment that look weird or potentially threatening and they stay away from them. The only reason I had any success at all was because I had an excellent guide showing me the tricks. He taught me to cast in a way that blends in with the fish’s environment and present the fly so that it looks inviting and natural. I also learned that subtlety is key if you want to hook one of those clever trout.

Lead generation is a bit like fly fishing in that getting people to bite on your offer can be a very delicate issue. Everyone is busy and our inboxes are becoming increasingly inundated with white noise. SPAM aside, even “legitimate” marketing offers that prospects have opted-in for still register in their minds as intrusions because they just aren’t timely or relevant. To secure leads, prospects need to trust you and you must offer them something of value in return for a little bit of their personal information. Like fly fishing, it helps to present your offer at the right time, in the right place, and in a way that appears natural and attractive to them. It’s about context, relevance and sometimes, the art of subtlety.

What’s the Hook?
When identifying opportunities to improve lead generation it’s helpful to start with your website. Are your offers, features and services up-to-date and relevant? What research or data have you gathered to help you be sure? It’s imperative that prospects find something desirable on your site, microsite or landing pages if you want them to engage with you and opt-in to receive communications from you. Things like free white papers, results from a proprietary survey, online educational videos, “light” versions of your subscription-based services or even a free newsletter. There are so many possibilities and what works best is different for every business. To get ideas, it helps to look at what your competition is offering, but even better, listen to your customers and prospects to understand what’s most important to them, then design offers that fulfill those needs.

Right Time, Right Place
Once your offers are designed, consider when, where and how they are presented within the customer experience. If you present the offer before your prospect is ready to seriously consider it, they will likely be turned off and abandon the process. This is a common mistake made by companies whose web services require registration, or even worse credit card info, before a prospect has had time to try the service and make a buying decision. On the other hand if the offer is presented too late in the customer experience, or is buried somewhere or lost in a bunch of clutter, prospects could miss it altogether. I remember reading an interview once with Chip Kidd where he was sharing his opinion on examples of great design. To my surprise, he cited the speed bump. He made a good point in that there are a number of ways one could try to solve the problem of regulating people’s driving speed on a street. For example, you could position signs in such a way that they would be noticed, but then you’d have to get the positioning, the color, the font face, style and wording just right for maximum effectiveness. But then people may choose to ignore it anyway. It’s not as easy to ignore a speed bump unless you drive a monster truck or don’t care about your suspension and transmission. Good design isn’t always beautiful, but it solves a problem beautifully.

Engage Gradually
The speed bump idea is interesting to consider when planning how to engage people with your offers. Many experts condone a method known as “gradual engagement”, especially when getting people to sign up for a service. The idea is to let prospects engage with your service to a certain point before asking them to fill out some kind of form, or register. Ideally, by the point you’ve prompted them to sign up, they are already engaged and have a want/need for the service. It’s as if they’re driving and encounter a small bump in the road. They’ll slow down, go over it, then continue on their way.

When designing your forms, be sure to carefully consider the data points contained within it. It’s challenging because the more you know about your leads the better, but lengthy forms turn people off and result in them abandoning the process. So you need to strive for the right balance to design a form that satisfies your business goals, but respects your users’ needs. In the end, you should have useful data that will help you nurture your leads and convert them.

Data Processing
Once you’ve done a good job of engaging prospects and they’ve become a lead by providing some of their personal information and have opted-in to receive your communications, it’s important to manage that data intelligently. Upon receipt, the data should be submitted to a central system for processing. Checking for duplicate records is a common task at this stage, but running some other processes could be helpful as well. Things like checking for return visitors, frequency of visits, the customer engagement history, etc. All of this information could be used to do more intelligent segmenting and get more targeted with your communications.

Lead Nurturing
To nurture leads effectively, it helps to define segments based on the profiles you’ve created for them. Campaigns can then be developed that guide leads down different paths relevant to their customer history, interests and needs. For example, Rhythm Interactive helped one of our clients develop a program that included a different series of targeted emails, microsites and landing pages that were relevant to the prospect or customer’s engagement history and their personal preferences in an effort to move them through the “purchase funnel”. Presenting the right message at the right time through direct, targeted communications produced a noticeable increase in business for our client.

Measurement
You’ll want to continually track the performance of your offers to understand what works best. The right analytics can help you identify potential opportunities to improve the offer itself, when, where and how it is presented, etc. Things to  consider watching are the source of the lead, the size of the conversion, at what point a lead goes cold, etc. You can use this intelligence to prioritize and adjust things like which lead paths to continue focusing on, which offers are most relevant, and the timing of your responses.

There’s a lot to know about creating an effective lead generation program and like my fly fishing experience, it helps to have an experienced guide applying his or her wisdom along the way to help you succeed. The best ones will understand the importance of context and relevance and have the technical know how to capitalize on today’s advanced tools and systems to secure the best possible outcome.