The Lead Generation Process: A Marathon, Not a Sprint

As a business owner, chances are you’ve begun looking more closely at your lead generation process. You know, the methods and tactics you put into place to drive targeted traffic to your website. More often than not, there is significant research put into the setup of your lead generation process. Consideration is given towards how to attract traffic to your website, using both SEO and content marketing tactics, and then how to most effectively convert leads to sales.

Oftentimes, once the tactics are in place and the marketing plan begins to grind into motion, the focus turns to the results of those carefully planned tactics. This is where the expectations in the lead generation process go slightly askew. However, to truly understand why lead generation is a marathon, not a sprint, it’s important to understand a few key practices that are part of any successful marketing strategy. (Yes, the platitudes you see below are related to lead generation.)

Consistency is Key

Once a lead generation process is set in motion, the key focus turns to the content development tactics that will drive targeted traffic to a company’s website. With a content marketing strategy, it’s important to remember that to successfully build attention within a target market, content needs to be posted through various sources on a consistent basis.

That said, each target market has a unique definition of what “consistent” is. In other words, each company needs ot have an understanding of their target market and how often they should release new content to them to garnet the best results. Monitoring the metrics from the first two months of content marketing can help confirm theories on how often content should be shared for best results.

Quality not Quantity

Adversely, if attempting to reach a target market’s most effective “consistency” leads to low-quality content that does not drive leads, then cut back the quantity of posts, tweets, articles or other content to meet the higher criteria of high-quality content. While it’s important to write content with SEO in mind, using keywords and tags effectively for search engines to find online, it’s most important to write for the audience. Even if a blog post shoots to the first page on Google or Bing thanks to great SEO writing, if the target market doesn’t read and or act on the action items in the content, then the post is useless in a lead generation process.

Patience is a Virtue

So, writing is being done in a consistent basis through multiple sources and it walks the fine line of SEO and reader-effective. What now? Patience, dear business owner. Lead generation is a building process taking the above key criteria into account over time. There is no “immediate” response and it shouldn’t be a goal. A slow, consistent build will be much more effective over time, as your followers, subscribers and visitors build a relationship with your brand through shared content.

The best advice once things are in motion is to monitor the lead generation for all your content regularly, tweak as necessary and project the sales potential of your leads to come. (Read more about projecting leads to potential sales in our next post.)

Feel a little pressured with your company’s ability to build SEO and reader-effective, consistent content that will drive leads? Reach out to a marketing services company with experience in lead generation and conversions.