Integrating Lead-Generation Marketing Campaigns

An integrated lead-generation marketing campaign is a campaign that uses two or more lead-generation tactics at once. I recommend that you use seven lead-generation tactics: email, search engine, social media marketing, banner advertising, direct mail, cold-calling and trade shows. If all seven tactics work for your business, try to use them all. If only four or five tactics are appropriate, use those.

You can, of course, use lead-generation tactics individually and create separate marketing campaigns for each tactic, but what I love about integrated marketing campaigns is the halo effect. This occurs when the positive effect of one marketing tactic provides a performance boost for other marketing tactics.

Time and again, marketers have proven that when it comes to marketing tactics, one plus one equals three, not two. The more you target your customers through different marketing media, the more you create an impression of your brand and company in customers’ minds, and the more inclined they are to consider your products or services.

Another benefit of using your lead-generation tactics in an integrated campaign is that it allows you to plan and coordinate your efforts around common themes and goals. To begin with, you can do all your upfront planning for the campaign in a single stroke. Once you determine your target audience and its demographics, you can coordinate tactics toward gaining leads from that audience.

If you do an integrated campaign of multiple tactics, you can create a common message and build your creatives for each tactic around those themes. You can create one brief that each of your internal marketers can work from in developing collateral for each tactic. Or you can share this creative brief with agencies, consultants, interns and other participants, who can then do the work for you.

If you use a series of tactics, you don’t necessarily have to spend equal budget, time and energy on each. You can spend the bulk of your time and money on a primary tactic that you know will work well for you, while devoting less to secondary tactics. You can even test one or two tactics against a baseline primary tactic to see how well the test tactics work.

For example, say target customers read an article about one of your company’s vice presidents of sales in a trade magazine. A few days later, they see a display ad for your company on a website. A couple of weeks go by, and a customer gets a call from one of your salespeople. They remember seeing your company name in the article they read and in the display ad they saw online. So they listen to the salesperson and sign up as a lead.

In this example, your use of several integrated tactics created a halo effect that added value to your lead-generation marketing campaign. At first glance, you might think your display ads didn’t work because the cold call captured the lead. But the display ads and the article about your executive caught the customers’ attention and helped to create an impression of your brand. When your salesperson called, this initial impression was enough to spark interest. If customers had not seen your display ads, they might have dismissed the sales call.

When I combine multiple lead-generation tactics, I often see a measurable lift in overall performance. For instance, a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign may be humming along at a 2 percent click through rate. Then I do an email marketing push, sending out 50,000 emails. In addition to the traffic generated from the email campaign, I’ll also see at least a 50 percent increase in my SEM performance. People who received the email may not have clicked on it, but some will search for the company on Google and Bing to find out more about it. A percentage of those people will click on the search engine ad.

You can also build momentum for your brand using nurturing campaigns. Using a “drip bucket” strategy, you keep sending emails to qualified leads over time, keeping them informed about special offers and company events. The more they see of your brand, the more they will take you seriously. Using a variety of lead-generation tactics in an integrated marketing campaign helps to accomplish this same goal, and integrated lead-generation marketing works as well, if not better, than nurture marketing.