Lead Generation LAndscape

For the use case Lead Generation we'll look at how to take advantage of and read the MarTech Landscape.

The Landscape is very broad and the Lead Generation use case is relatively broad as well. To have a good outcome, we will focus on the following steps to help you decide which category you should be looking at in terms of choosing a solution for your specific organisation.

What are the main steps to generating leads:

1. Raise Awareness

Lead Generation always starts by raising awareness of your offering. This is often done by creating relevant content for that specific topic and ensuring that content can be easily found by your relevant audience. Some ways to do that are by SEO optimisation, native search optimisation and social media advertising.

2. Capture the interested people/reach

Once your initial content is out, you would then focus on capturing the information on the people interested in your topic - the ones that clicked, read the article, downloaded the whitepaper - and focus on nurturing those leads via direct marketing campaigns.Once you have a pool of leads, you would like to ensure they are qualified and nurtured - this can be done by using a number of different strategies to understand their interaction with your brand/proposition. This is the moment when you might want to make the communication more personal/direct, by deploying email marketing and/or direct marketing campaigns.

3. Lead Generation Management and Automation

Lead Generation and Management can quickly become a complicated task. In addition to creating your content, ensuring it's been seen by your potential customers and finding ways to re-engage with them, you also need a place to track and measure their interaction with your brand and have a good overview and understanding of which lead is at which stage. Additionally, you would like to have a way to automate this entire process.

Let's repeat what has been discussed in terms of strategy and steps/tools you'll need in order to be able to do Lead generation. We spoke about content creation and optimisation, SEO, email marketing, content marketing, marketing automation and lead management.

If we now look at the Landscape, we can see that most of these areas are mentioned in the Content and Experience section, where we also see DAM, MRM and a couple of other sub-sections.

Now that we know which part of the Landscape is most relevant to our use case, we can choose which sub-sections to focus on. The next step would be choosing the criteria on which you would like to evaluate each company in a specific part of the sub-category.

For example, let’s take the sub-category Marketing Automation and Campaign Lead Management.

Possible criteria you might consider include:

Does the technology simplify the process of capturing qualified leads without you needing to learn a whole new skill set?Does it allow you to build workflows specific to your business needs and automate your lead generation efforts?Does it have a track record (case studies) of successful results?Can you easily measure results?Does it comply with current Privacy regulations?Is it in your price range? Is it cost effective?Can it easily integrate with your CRM tools to ensure that lead generation can seamlessly transition to conversion and account management?

Landscapes in Marketing Technology might look complicated and overwhelming. However, if you always take your use case and your specific needs as your starting point, it is relatively simple to drill down and get a good list of companies for your qualification process.