How do I turn my online marketing activities into concrete results?

Online marketing is a wonderful profession, but of course you don’t do your job just for fun. After all, what you want is to generate quality leads and attract new customers. Do your online marketing efforts yield the desired results?

Research by the Content Marketing Institute shows that only 30 percent of the B2B marketers feel they are using their online marketing tools effectively, hence there is still a lot to improve. How do you ensure that your marketing efforts are not in vain?

Do you generate likes or leads?

Nowadays marketers use a wide range of channels to reach their audience, with various forms of content. There are sufficient tools to create successful campaigns. Are you generating a large number of visitors to your website, and are you harvesting a lot of likes and followers on your social media channels? Then that is a sign that you are on the right track.

Yet, this only concerns the first step: at this point you have not yet achieved concrete results. The ultimate goal is to convert the attention for your online activities into new customers. In order to do so, it is important to regard the attention of your potential customers as generated leads.

The ABC of lead generation

A lead is someone who shows interest in your product or service by downloading certain content that your organization has made available. Thus, lead generation is the process in which you attract the attention of your target audience for a specific product of service. You try to seduce these leads to leave their personal details, in exchange for relevant information. This can be a blog or a whitepaper about challenges relevant to the customer. Because the customer provides you with his or her data, you can keep an eye on them and ‘feed’ them again and again with new additional content. This is called lead nurturing.

From dormant interest to qualitative leads: lead nurturing and lead qualification

Most of the leads that download content via your website for the first time, will not immediately be ready for a sales call. That’s why is wise to provide this customer with more information step by step. This continuous supply of additional, relevant information is called lead nurturing.

It guides this customer through a flow of information, until he or she is ready for the sales call. To determine whether leads are sufficiently ‘nurtured’ you use lead scoring, which assigns points to the lead. Based on the number of collected points it will be clear whether your lead is ready to be transferred to the sales department.

Would you like to know more about lead generation, and really get the most out of your online marketing activities? And do you want to learn how lead nurturing and lead scoring exactly work? Then download the eBook ‘Introduction to Lead Generation’.