Strategic Marketing Solutions, LLC

As a manager, your results depend on your team’s ability to perform to their full potential. You can enable them with processes and high-tech tools, but to eke out the best performance day-in and day-out you need to focus on engaging your team in their work and developing them to be the best they can be.

Here are seven tips for doing just that.

1.Communicate Openly

New team members start their positions energized and curious. If you can channel that enthusiasm, they’ll quickly be able to gain valuable ground-level insight into the work they are performing. You can maintain their engagement by creating an environment for open two-way communication between your team members and management. Let them know what factors into your decisions, solicit their feedback and benefit from the “wisdom of crowds.”

Of course, projects don’t always follow a straight trajectory. You learn as you go. Budgets shrink and expand, deadlines move, and priorities shift. Keep your team informed of the twists and turns — not just what’s happening, but why and how it impacts their work. When your team understands the decisions affecting their work, they are more likely to feel valued and keep a high level of engagement with the project.

Read more: 7 Guidelines for Creating a High-Performing Lead Generation Team

Whether you’re looking to get into sales or not, the sales process is key to the success of any new business. Be it B2C or B2B lead generation, the process is long, complicated and a crucial part of the success of any organization. If your lead generation system isn’t yielding the results you intended, then you’ll need to spend a bit of time figuring out how to get more bang for your buck. Here are a few tips to help you refine your lead generation.

Target the customer not the lead
One of the fastest ways to get bogged down in lead generation is to follow up on every cold lead, no matter how strong it may or may not be. Instead of throwing your line into the water, hoping to catch a nibble, spend some time up-front listing out a thorough customer profile. This should start with your basic questions, including budget, decision-making authority, needs and timeline for delivery, but should also go further into factors like demographics, growth projections and organizational structure. The more you can hone in on your target customer, the more you can develop your leads without wasting a lot of time.

Deliver great content
Any marketer will tell you that when it comes to content, consistency is key. However, if you’re delivering regular content that is not of any real value, you’re simply spinning your wheels again, and your content won’t generate any solid leads for you. It’s a careful balance to strike, as you weigh the time invested to create the content versus the outcome of sales leads generated by said content. You’ll also want to pay attention to the time of day you’re posting your content. Social media channels speed through timelines so quickly, it’s very easy to get lost in the shuffle.

Use the right metrics
There is a plethora of metrics available and you’ll want to use them to weigh each and every decision you make as a business owner. However, when it comes to lead generation, metrics are crucial to your success. You’re spending a lot of money on each lead you get, so you’ll want to develop a metric to measure the return on your investment. There are many tools out there to make the job easier for you, including gamification of lead generation and predictive lead scoring. Take advantage of the tools available to you and you’ll find tracking your ROI on lead generation to be much easier than you expected it to be.

Read more: Lead Generation: 4 Ways To Jump-Start Your Company Sales

In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Ben Angel begins by covering the importance of the opt-in page. This page can be a portal to any sort of free offering, including a free book or a free webinar series.

An important aspect to an effective opt-in page is its design. Without a compelling design, there will be fewer conversions from the leads you may be generating. If you’re at a loss for crafting an interesting design, go online and look for templates that are simple and uncluttered.

To increase credibility in your business, consider adding a section offering social proof on your website. This can mean links to your social presence, or it can mean showcasing positive testimonials or notable press coverage.

The final step for many landing pages is to direct people to a call-to-action — which tells people what is the next thing they should do and leads them to a purchase.

Entrepreneur Network is a premium video network providing entertainment, education and inspiration from successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders. We provide expertise and opportunities to accelerate brand growth and effectively monetize video and audio content distributed across all digital platforms for the business genre.

EN is partnered with hundreds of top YouTube channels in the business vertical. Watch video from our network partners on demand on Roku, Apple TV and the Entrepreneur App available on iOS and Android devices.

Read more: Does Your Website Have This Important Lead-Generation Feature?

Are you leaking your gated content in organic search?

Personally, I’m not a fan of finding portable document format (PDF) documents in the search results.

There are multiple reasons why PDFs are not ideal for an organic searcher to land on:

• Most PDFs do not have navigation, so users are forced to read through to find what they want.
• More often than not, webmasters don’t link to their website from the PDF.
• If there are no links in a PDF, so the opportunity for a call to action is lost.
• PDFs can’t house analytics tracking code.
• PDFs aren’t as malleable as web pages. You can’t add many fancy enhancements to a PDF.
• PDFs generally do not contain lead generation forms.

I could go on forever about my dislike of PDFs, because I believe they are a problem for marketers. While they are easy and fast to generate, they can be problematic when it comes to SEO, tracking and conversion.

Do you have a leaky lead generation funnel?
If you’re using PDFs on your site for any type of lead generation and you are gating that content (requiring registration via a landing page), you need to find out if the PDF has been indexed and is available in the organic search engine results pages (SERPs).

If the PDFs can be found in the SERPs, potential leads are bypassing your sign-up form, since they can find the content directly. A simple way to test for this is to use the site and filetype search operators together. For example, for my own website, I would perform this search:

A recent search for a client’s white papers found they have 633 white papers produced as PDFs in Google’s index. Yikes!

How do you know it’s a problem?
Because lead generation filetypes like PDFs are not trackable in Google Analytics, you may be wondering, “Are these exposed PDF resources really that big a problem?” Using Google Search Console (GSC), you can get some idea of just how impactful these PDFs might be.

Using the Search Analytics report in GSC, set the data type to “Pages” and filter to show those with .pdf in the filename.

Over the last 90 days, the client with 633 white paper PDFs had over 12,075 clicks from Google organic search to the PDF pages.

Read more: Do you have a leaky lead generation funnel?

In today’s digital world, it’s difficult to find someone who doesn’t engage on social media no matter what demographic they are in. Gone are the days of being nervous of our parents having a Facebook account when in these times family events and social gatherings are easier to plan online.

Key Stat: According to the Pew Research Center, nearly 70% of adults in the US are on at least one social media site.

If you’re in the business of gaining prospects, your role will be a lot more challenging if you don’t take advantage of the information your potential clients already provide online. Investing in social media lead generation (using social for prospecting new leads) is extremely effective when done right.

Interested in learning how to get started?

The following steps will take you through what to look for when it comes to navigating social media platforms for prospecting success.

Research and Identify Your Prospects

Before you even begin to engage with your prospects, do a bit of research online to develop a list of the type of clients you are looking for. Social media lead generation doesn’t mean you randomly select and message any account with your pitch. Once you fall into the area of spam, you have already failed.

Read more: How to Use Social Media Lead Generation for Prospecting Success 

So you have been hearing about social media for years. You spent money and time getting more likes, followers, etc.
But, likes don’t equal cash, and Mark Zuckerberg owns those likes. Not you.

Social media was the craze 3-4 years ago, but now people have millions of likes, followers etc. and nothing to show for it. Having lots of fans and followers does not mean that all of them can be termed as leads.

Don’t focus on those numbers that are not really helping you. You need to focus on getting leads, and not a social following. Remember that social networks keep coming and going, and for your business to be sustainable, the focus should be on lead generation.

How exactly do you generate leads?

Social Media Lead Generation Tips
Integrate Email Marketing Into Your Lead Generation Strategy

Studies show that email marketing conversion rates are 300 percent higher than social media. Therefore, it is imperative to have this as your main lead conversion strategy.

Instead of giving away all your valuable content, simply ask them to fill out a simple form to get access to your best information.
You can then use an email marketing software such as GetResponse to convert your leads. This will enable you to send them both informative and marketing emails. When done well, email marketing will help you make repeat sales to specific leads who have warmed up to your content.

To get people to sign up, you need to have a strong lead magnet. This is a piece of content that convinces your leads to enter their name, email address, and more details. This enables them to access that content. Studies show that courses perform better as lead magnets than eBooks. However, be it a course, a journey, an eBook, an event, a webinar, a video, etc., get a lead magnet that can work great with your audience.

Read more: How to Turn Your Social Following into Leads