The 7-Step Marketing Plan for Lead Generation in 2018
As 2017 comes to a close, it's time to start looking ahead to the new year.
When one year ends, and another begins, we tend to embrace the idea of a clean slate - a new opportunity to start again and implement new systems and strategies that we have waited weeks, maybe months, to employ.
And for businesses and marketers, it's always important to hit the ground running. To do that, we need to continue the relentless search for ways to increase the effectiveness of our marketing efforts.
Lead generation plays an enormous role, but it's hard work. List building takes plenty of time and effort, and convincing someone that you have a product worthy of their time and money is a difficult task.
So as 2018 approaches, we need to ensure that we start strong. Let's flesh out a practical, 7-step marketing plan that will help you generate leads early on in the new year.
1. Set clear goals for your marketing team
Collecting data and making adjustments is pointless unless you develop a clear set of goals. Spend some time thinking about exactly what it is your business wants to accomplish in 2018.
Make sure your goals are achievable, but also make sure they're ambitious enough that you'll need to work hard in order to meet them. And once you've identified your goals for 2018, clearly convey them to your team so that all efforts are aligned.
2. Perform a comprehensive website check
Websites can be difficult to maintain, especially if there are a number of moving parts. That's why it's a good idea to perform an annual audit on your site.
In just a year, much may have changed without you even noticing! Your site may load and run slowly, it may contain broken links and pages, and your content may have loading errors - maybe even formatting errors and typos. The ramifications of leaving these things unmanaged can be severe. After all, your website is the hub where visitors come to learn more about your company, its products, and its services.
Make a website audit one of your first priorities in the new year. It will serve as a base line for the maintenance work that your business needs.
3. Perform a comprehensive content check
If your business was active in 2017, you likely published plenty of content to your site and social media pages. And one of the best ways to improve your marketing strategy is by analyzing the data from the previous year and adjusting as needed.
What trends can you identify? Did a certain type of content perform better than other types? Did your content see more traffic during a particular time of day or day of the week?
And what about the things you can improve on? Were there posts where keywords weren't used or emphasized? Were there missed opportunities to engage with your audience?
4. Evaluate your competition
In order to achieve greater success, it's essential that you pay attention to what your competitors are doing. This may even require that you learn from them.
Assess some of their data in the same way that you would your own. What do they do well? What do they do poorly? And once again, can you spot any trends that produce strong results and engagements?
5. Create your ideal customer profile
Next, it's time to build an ideal customer profile. This is an underrated and important element that some businesses neglect to implement. How can you narrow your audience and target the right prospects if you don't actually know whom you're marketing to?
Without an ideal customer profile, the content you create will cover a much broader field, and it won't be as purposeful. Similarly, the various members of your marketing team will create content for the different versions of customers they have in mind.
Don't let your content suffer! Figure out whom you're targeting early on, and then work towards reaching those people together.
6. Create a plan for your content
In order for your content to be effective, yes, it needs to be good; but it also needs to make sense within the context of your overall plan.
So if you haven't already created a content plan, now is the time to do so. Each piece should serve a specific purpose, and it should lead to the next step in your plan. Otherwise, even the best blog post or video may go to waste; if it leads to nowhere, it will only bring traffic to a halt.
Plan out your content well in advance and ensure that each piece is a powerful cog in your lead generation machine.
7. Promote your content properly
You have a content plan, and you produce great content, but if you don't make an effort to promote your content effectively, it's all for nothing.
The first rule is: promote everywhere! There's no harm in sharing content to your site and all of your social media platforms.
Second, from the previous steps in this plan, you should have a strong sense of what content works best, which social media pages have the larger audiences, and which posts see the most engagements. Use this information to promote accordingly.
If 5,000 people viewed your last video on Facebook but only 500 viewed that same video on Twitter, it's nonsensical to promote that content equally on both platforms. Ramp up promotional efforts where you are achieving the best results. Just don't make the mistake of neglecting your other pages altogether.
This concludes our 7-step marketing plan for lead generation in 2018. As a business executive or marketer, you understand how important it is to start strong and identify the best ways to achieve results. We hope that you'll use these steps to align your team's efforts and generate valuable leads early on in the year.