Lead Gen: The 3 pillars of lead generation

Most marketers of the world can be broken down into two groups – lead generation marketers or e-commerce marketers (and perhaps, Beatles or Elvis fans).

While in the worlds of A/B testing and optimization, sometimes the focus seems to be on e-commerce, lead gen marketers can utilize these techniques to learn about their customers and improve their marketing performance, as well.

But, the lead gen marketer interested in conversion rate optimization can have a bigger challenge than the e-commerce marketer since they are dealing with a complex sale and, usually, many more moving parts.

Next week, the MarketingExperiments team will be heading out to San Francisco for MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013 (both MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa are owned by MECLABS).

We’ll be interviewing brand-side marketers about A/B testing and landing page optimization, along with many other lead gen related topics. We’ve aligned the Summit around the three pillars of lead gen, and I’ve included some further reading about these pillars in this post to help marketers interested in discovering more about their customers through testing understand all of the factors at play.

Plus, for those marketers joining us in San Francisco, I hope this serves as a good background prep so you’re ready to dive into the content on day one.

Capture

This is the main focus of many lead gen marketers. Capture as many leads as possible. Here are some related resources to get you thinking about ways you can improve, test and perhaps radically change your process:

Lead Generation Optimization: How Expedia CruiseShipCenters’ increased previous customer conversions 22% by removing its lead capture form

Lead Generation Optimization: Two simple changes increase lead rate 166%

Landing Page Optimization: Test ideas for a B2B lead capture page

Qualify

While lead capture is undeniably the focus for many lead gen marketers, and will be a major element of Lead Gen Summit 2013, it is also important to understand not all leads should be sent directly to Sales.

By determining which leads are ready to go directly to Sales, and which need to be nurtured (more on that in a bit), you can optimize not just your lead capture forms, but your entire lead gen process. Here is some further research on lead qualification:

Universal Lead Definition: Why 61% of B2B marketers are wasting resources and how they can stop

A Proven Playbook for Growing Your Leads

B2B Marketing: How to auto-qualify new leads without a CRM or lead scoring

Nurture

There are often many steps an individual and an organization needs to go through from initial interest in a product to the purchase.

Those steps usually involve questions like:

• How can my organization use this software platform to be effective?
• Why should I trust this company with my business?
• How much do these products cost?
• Will I be successful in implementing them?

Lead nurturing content can help you nurture the leads you’ve captured until they qualify to talk to a sales representative. Below is some further reading to learn more about nurturing:

Lead Nurturing – Ripening the Right Bananas

The difference between lead nurturing and lead generation explained in two minutes

Marketing Research Chart: Messaging tactics for effective lead nurturing