MARKETING
Planning a Successful Lead Generation Process in 8 Simple Steps

Lead generation tactics are a key part of your marketing strategy, but it’s not enough to just chase all the available leads without a good plan.
Planning your lead generation process in advance will help you organize your efforts, define your goals and stay on track.
This is an essential skill because leads are the fuel that powers your sales engine. It doesn’t matter how well you design your website, sales will not happen just because of that.
Lead generation is still a necessary part of any marketing strategy.
How To Plan A Successful Lead Generation Process
- Understand Your Target Audience
- Define Your Business Goals
- Choose Your Tools
- Prep Your Landing Page
- Create Your Content Strategy
- Review Your KPIs
- Automate Your Process
- Iterate Until You’re Lovable
Planning a successful lead generation process is always a combination of art, science, and creativity. With the best practices, you can increase your chances of landing more leads and converting them into customers.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
The first and fundamental stage in a successful lead generation process is knowing who your brand will serve.
If you don’t have a clearly defined target customer, then your message will be vague and unappealing.
To be able to cater to the needs and expectations of your customer, you need to understand who they are and what’s important to them.
Rather than promoting a product to everyone, you can be more specific about who your brand serves and spend more time understanding their pain points and goals.
So, defining your target audience will help you narrow down your scope.
You can start by creating a buyer persona. The buyer persona can be created in a variety of ways, but there are three important elements you need to consider:
Group: This is the main identifiable group of target customers based on their demographics and psychographics. A group is like a target market: It serves as a general description of your brand’s target audience, which serves as the focus of your marketing efforts.
Demographics: These include the gender, age, education, and socioeconomic status of your prospective customers. Demographics can be used to narrow down your list of prospects.
Psychographics: These are the attitudes, preferences, and interests of your prospective customers. Psychographics help you understand why they would want to use your brand’s products or services.
Goals: Understanding your target customer’s goals will help you identify how your brand can serve them better. Goals are the expected outcomes customers want to achieve using your products or services.
The most important component of a lead generation process is the buyer personas and their goals. Figuring out your target market can help you narrow down your list of leads, Define the requirements of your brand first before diving into the mechanics and tactics that will generate leads.
2. Define Your Business Goals
Knowing your objectives is essential in any lead generation process. If you don’t have clear and specific goals, then it will be difficult to measure the success of your campaign. You need to know why you’re attracting and engaging leads, which will help you narrow down your list of prospects.
To define your business goals, you’ll need to consider three things:
- What do you want to accomplish?
- Why do you want to accomplish it?
- How you will accomplish it?
It may seem simple at first but it’s not. However, answering these questions will help you set specific and measurable goals for your business.
If you’re new to marketing, setting clear objectives can feel overwhelming. Ask yourself the “why” question first, because it should align with your company’s mission and vision. The “what” and “how” questions should be answered based on your business goals.
These objectives should be realistic and measurable, so you can track your progress over time and make adjustments as needed.
3. Choose Your Tools
A soldier never goes to war without his weapons, right? It’s more than wise to be well equipped when starting out in the lead generation space.
The proper tools can help you get your workflow organized, improve your productivity at important levels, and as a result, you’ll save time and you can focus more time and energy on other areas of your business.
Also, you should make sure not to spend money on shiny tools that won’t contribute to the progress and success of your campaigns.
4. Decide on Your Content Strategy
One of the most important aspects of lead generation is creating a compelling and effective content strategy.
You need to have the right content in place to capture potential customers. It will help you build trust and increase awareness for your brand.
You’ll want to focus on unique, original, informative, engaging, and eye-catching content that has a proven track record of bringing in more leads.
When thinking about your content strategy, think about the information you can provide to your target market that will meet their needs and answer their questions.
In addition to the type of content you provide, the frequency with which it’s updated will also be an important factor in identifying your brand.
You should have sufficient content to address the needs of a specific group, but not so much that it feels overwhelming.
However, the most crucial part of any content strategy is optimization. Produce highly optimized content that will attract organic traffic to your landing page. We can talk about this in another article.
5. Prep Your Landing Page
You’ve done your research: You have determined your target audience, defined the goals of your business, and identified the tools that will help you reach your objectives.
It’s time to create the ocean where you’ll attract your big fish.
No matter the method of lead generation you choose, you will eventually need to bring your leads to a landing page. Your landing page will serve as the finishing pod for your leads. It’s where they will either become paying customers or continue on their search.
To improve the chances of turning your leads into customers, make sure to prepare and optimize your landing page by keeping in mind the following:
- Make it easy to navigate; don’t bury them down several layers deep.
- Give them a clear call to action.
- Present information and pieces of content that are valuable.
One of the most important elements of a landing page is the CTA button.
Your goal is to encourage potential customers to take action, so make sure you equip your landing page with some options that will get them to click on your CTA button.
You can use the following elements to help prompt your prospects to take action:
Call to Action Button: This element gives your leads a clear call to action by telling them exactly what you want them to do. It’s important that you keep it short and concise because all too often people will skip over CTA buttons.
Form: It’s important that you’re clear about what information you need from your leads. Don’t make your form too long and don’t leave anything out.
Free Report: This can act as a gateway to prompt your leads to give you their information. A free report only requires an email address, which is a good way for you to start building trust with your new leads.
Video: If you’ve got a video that describes the value of your offer, then it’s great for increasing the chances of getting your prospects to take action.
6. Review Your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
KPIs act like a compass so you don’t lose sight of where you’re headed. Just as you set a goal when designing your lead generation process, you should be able to set the same goal again using key performance indicators.
Don’t start a sheet with 100s of KPIs when you’re just starting out. Again, start with 5-6 which are good indicators of where you’re going, and then add on as your business grows.
You need to set up your metrics so that you can measure how well your lead generation efforts are doing.
This gives you an opportunity to track every step of your campaign and identify gaps in your process that may need to be addressed.
7. Identify and Automate Your Process
It’s important to keep things moving smoothly while your lead generation is running.
Identify processes that are missing or could be streamlined and automate your lead generation process so that everything runs well at maximum capacity.
In fact, some businesses can’t function without this type of segmentation. One of the ways you can set up your process to be as efficient and effective as possible is by using automation tools.
Automation tools have been proven to help small businesses save time and money with their lead generation efforts. Not only will they automate lead tasks, but they will also ensure that the leads follow a consistent flow through your sales funnel.
8. Iterate Until You’re Lovable
A successful lead generation process is something that you can improve and refine over time.
Even if you’ve defined everything perfectly the first time, adjust continuously based on your KPIs report.
In order to make adjustments, you need to change processes and add on new elements to the lead generation process.
It’s important that you keep your business fresh with new leads, so don’t be afraid to tweak things up where necessary to get them into your sales funnel.
Wrap Up
With these few key steps, you can begin building a lead generation strategy that will help you become successful in your B2B marketing efforts.
Creating a more effective lead generation process is going to require that you think outside the box and experiment with different methods.
Even if something doesn’t work out the first time, it’s important that you try again so you can make adjustments and figure out what works best for your target market.
MARKETING
8 Effective Ways to Ensure Ecommerce Business Success

It is a known fact that the global consumers are favoring ecommerce, and the reasons for ecommerce business success are many.
According to a Statista forecast, the retail ecommerce revenue in the US is expected to cross 1.3 trillion dollars by the end of 2025.

Image via Statista
While brick-and-mortar stores are gradually losing their dominance, the digital marketplace is blazing. More and more ecommerce brands, big and small, are coming up and gaining a foothold in this ever-expanding landscape.
If you are one such ecommerce business striving to taste success, you know how demanding and competitive things can be. And you only beat the fierce competition with aggressive ecommerce marketing strategies like digital advertising, content marketing, social media marketing, etc.
In this post, I will be sharing 8 key factors you need to focus on to ensure your ecommerce business success and sustainable business growth.
Let’s get started.
8 Key Factors for Ecommerce Business Success in 2022
The future of ecommerce is bright and the small businesses that jump on the bandwagon early will reap great benefits. But what does it take to taste this success?
Here are the 8 key success factors for ecommerce businesses.
1. Target a Niche Audience
The secret to ecommerce business success lies in understanding your target audience and focusing all your efforts on engaging them. Instead of trying to attract a broad audience on the search engines, select a niche audience specific to your small business, understand their pain points and interests, and position your brand to meet their needs. An SEO tool like Semrush or Ahrefs can help you with your research to build a strong marketing strategy based on real insights.
The goal is to make your product unique and market it to a relevant audience that is more likely to make a purchase. This strategy can increase customer loyalty and win repeat customers for your small business. Therein lies the secret to your ecommerce business success.
2. Go Mobile-First
The pandemic has accelerated our shift to ecommerce and given rise to m-commerce. Insider Intelligence estimates that by 2025, m-commerce sales will account for 44.2% of total ecommerce sales in the US.
So it’s clear that the success of your ecommerce business relies on the mobile-friendliness of your site. Having a mobile-friendly online store can help you deliver a seamless online shopping experience to customers on the go.
You can begin by running Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and building a progressive web application (PWA) for your online store. A responsive design for your website will help boost sales and pave the way for your ecommerce business success.
3. Choose the Right Distribution Channels
Your audiences are active on different channels and if want your products to be visible to them, you need to choose the right distribution channels.
If your business model focuses solely on your ecommerce website, you should broaden your perspective and consider other sales channels. There are several other options to sell your products like Amazon, eBay, social media, affiliate marketing, and so on. You can manage your sales process effectively with the help of sales CRM tools. These tools integrate your different sales channels and makes your sales process more efficient.
Conduct extensive research to figure out which of these channels are preferred by your target customers. Showcase your products in an attractive way to boost your ecommerce sales. This digital marketing strategy can contribute to your ecommerce business success.
4. Create Unique Content
You heard that right. To ensure that your ecommerce brand stands out in the crowd, you should invest in high-quality and diverse content.
Today internet users are flooded with content and to grab their attention you need to think out of the box and create content marketing strategies that truly grab their attention. Remember, video content is ruling the landscape delivering great results. You can use Premiere Pro Presets to create unique and impressive videos and stay ahead of the competition.
Gather insights from customer data analysis, see what your competitors are doing, and learn from your previous digital marketing campaigns to create a more targeted content marketing strategy for your small business.
5. Continually Update Your Email Marketing List
Marketers rely on email marketing to achieve diverse marketing goals. Emails can be used to generate leads, nurture them, build relationships with customers, ensure customer satisfaction and boost ecommerce sales.
But to leverage the power of email marketing, you need to be smart about your email lists and use the right email tools to manage them. There’s no point in sending a thousand emails when only a couple of hundreds of recipients are your target audience.
That’s why segmenting your email lists and keeping them updated is crucial to your ecommerce business success. An effective way to manage your email lists is to ask for the recipients’ feedback on your emails and the information they prefer to receive.
By analyzing the responses, you can make more strategic decisions and ensure the success of your ecommerce business.
6. Deliver a Great Shopping Experience
The expectation of customers in terms of customer experience has skyrocketed and that’s why you need to work towards improving customer satisfaction.
Personalized communication could be one of the biggest game-changers, be it in recommending products, reminding them of abandoned carts, or introducing them to your latest offerings. Creating user story maps can go a long way in making your personalization efforts more effective.
Right from the moment customers land on your page to when they make a purchase, you should strive to create a smooth customer experience. You can also consider incorporating an AI-powered chatbot into your website to take your customer service to the next level.
To make your customers happy, offer them special deals and discounts. Such moves will surely boost your ecommerce business success.
7. Invest in Social Media Marketing
Social media, can be immensely effective in creating brand awareness, extending customer service, and generating leads for your ecommerce business. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube are all marketers’ favorites to reach out to niche audiences and drive traffic for their sites.
Having said that, it is a crowded market, and winning big on social media isn’t easy. As an ecommerce brand, you need to use social media analytics to create digital marketing campaigns that not only generate engagement but also fill your sales funnel with quality leads.
Ecommerce brands should also leverage social selling as it is growing into a prominent trend. This shoppable post by Macy’s allows its Facebook followers to buy what they like instantly.

Image via Facebook
If invested strategically, selling on social media can act as a profitable sales channel for your business.
8. Leverage Ecommerce Tools
Your team need not struggle to ensure the success of your ecommerce business. A variety of advanced ecommerce tools are at your disposal to optimize your efforts.
Some of the must-use tools for you are:
- Website tools – to design, set up, and manage your ecommerce site
- Ecommerce marketing tools – to help strategize and execute your campaigns with ease
- Competitor analysis tools – to understand the gaps in your planning and improve it
- Analytics tools – to help you gauge the performance of your digital marketing campaigns
- Business tools – to help you manage daily operations, finances, logistics, inventory, and customer service
Choose the ones that can boost the success of your ecommerce business.
Final Thoughts
There you have it, a list of 8 key factors you need to work on to ensure the success of your ecommerce business. Gaining this success is hard work but it is worth it.
If you want to fuel your business growth, I strongly recommend building your ecommerce marketing strategy to enhance customer experience and build your brand identity. Go ahead and give them a try to beat the competition and establish a successful ecommerce business.