There are plenty of lead generation tactics out there: content marketing, email marketing, B2B telemarketing, social media marketing, outbound marketing… the list goes on. Choosing which one will generate the type of leads you need to grow revenue is a bit of a gamble. How do you know which will be best at keeping your sales pipeline filled? With holistic lead generation, it’s not a question of choosing one over another – instead, you deploy a combination of tactics to yield even greater ROI than you would if you’d used a variety of tactics separately. But putting this into place requires in-depth knowledge of each constituent part of your holistic lead generation strategy, and the ability to monitor and optimise them – partnering with an integrated lead generation agency lets you do just that. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using a lead generation agency.
1) An integrated lead generation agency has the capacity to design strategies for lead capture and lead qualification
An integrated lead generation strategy can be broken down into two stages: lead capture and lead qualification. Lead capture involves attracting the right type of leads to your business or website. Lead qualification identifies which of these leads can be guided down the sales funnel to become a customer. Both these stages require different lead generation media, and the ones you choose will depend on your goals and target audience. Choosing the right media, therefore, requires a thorough understanding of your business, your target audience, the lead generation channels themselves, and the resources to execute each channel. A lead generation agency will be able to do all this and develop strategies for both the lead capture and lead qualification stages, using the best possible channels to guarantee healthy ROI on your campaign.
2) A lead generation agency can combine fast outbound lead generation with powerful long term inbound lead generation
Even though many channel-specific lead generation agencies would have you believe that you’ve got to choose between inbound or outbound marketing, the reality isn’t so cut and dry. Both inbound and outbound marketing can yield positive results, they simply work in different ways. Inbound marketing is fantastic for brand building and establishing a community of loyal brand advocates. It just takes time and patience – and sometimes your marketing goals need quick results, which makes outbound tactics more appropriate. In an integrated lead generation strategy, a combination of the two can be used to achieve both short and long term gains. An integrated lead generation agency will be able to juggle the two channels and apply them in a way that generates the right leads at the right time, and at a fraction of the cost (not to mention stress) compared to if you were to do this in-house.
3) By using a lead generation agency, your integrated campaign can be planned and executed in one go
The far more cumbersome and less desirable alternative to an integrated lead generation strategy is using a variety of channels, planning a campaign for each one, and using a separate agency for each. This requires a lot more time and resources than planning a single campaign made up of an arsenal of tactics, executed by a single lead generation agency. By using a single agency you get a lot more bang for your buck, as you’re really only investing in a single campaign, and each channel within that campaign can be aligned with the themes and goals you set for it. This alignment between channels – for example, between email marketing, display ads and search engine marketing – helps reinforce a halo effect, which amplifies the effectiveness of your campaign. Your email marketing becomes more powerful because your leads have seen your business appear in display ads and search engine results.
4) A lead generation agency helps you collect, analyse and act on data that drives the success of your campaigns
The success of an integrated lead generation strategy rests on your ability to collect, analyse and act on data. To do this, you need a thorough understanding of your own goals, how to measure them and how to analyse and interpret data from every channel within your integrated lead generation campaign. It’s not enough to understand the analytics behind one channel – content marketing, for example – you need to understand them all and how they interplay. Developing this capability in-house is a huge undertaking, especially if marketing is not your core business. A lead generation agency’s core business is marketing, which means they’re fully qualified to aggregate the data from all channels to monitor the overall success of your campaign.
Using an integrated lead generation agency gives you access to a suite of lead generation disciplines, each of which your partner agency is an expert in. For an in-depth look at the mechanics of holistic lead generation and how an integrated lead generation agency can help you attract and convert more leads, download the guide:
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