The following is a checklist to help increase your chances for a successful lead generation effort. You may wish to modify this for your own needs.
- Ideal Customer Profile: Do you have a defined and documented profile of your ideal customer, including all the stakeholders and their roles in the buying process?
- Customer Needs and Issues: Do you have clear, specific, defined and documented primary customer needs and underlying issues?
- Value Map:
- Have you documented how you provide value to customers with capabilities that address customer issues uniquely, matched with competitive alternatives, weak or non existent with customer alternatives?
- Have you tested and documented key messages for each need, issue and capability, that articulate the value you provide, in ways that resonate with customers
- Customer buying process: Have you identified, confirmed and documented your customer's buying process, including primary steps, the information required at each step, and their preferred information delivery methods?
- Determine content requirements using the value map and the customer buying process, determine priorities for specific content pieces for each stage, stakeholder, specific interest or issue, message/value point, competitive response, etc.
- Integrated Marketing Communications plan:
- Have you developed and implemented a plan to deploy content across all relevant communication channels (on-line and off-line) in order to increase your chances for attracting the prospective buyer‘s attention?
- Have you developed a contact strategy for contacting the prospective buyer at specific times based upon their action or inaction to earlier communications?
- Have you created a process for creating, reviewing, approving and producing content? Have you created an editorial calendar for producing and delivering content?
- Have you established a search engine optimization program, including resources to oversee and manage the effort, a defined and documented list of key words, and implementation of the program?
- Marketing database: Have you designed a process for capturing key data in a centralized location so that you can measure performance of key metrics such as media, creative, messages, offers?
- Program management: Have you assigned responsibility to manage the ongoing execution and oversight of these activities, and established program management plans, including for collecting and assessing feedback to make continuous improvements ?