In any business, while customer loyalty is essential, renewing your customer base is equally important. Acquiring qualified leads is a key factor in growing your business. Wondering how to improve your lead acquisition process? Discover our best practices for optimizing the effectiveness of your qualified contact generation strategy.
Lead acquisition: definition
A lead is simply a marketing or commercial contact — a person who has shown interest in your products or services without being approached by a sales representative. They are not yet considered a prospect but have a high likelihood of becoming one.
Lead acquisition brings together all techniques designed to generate qualified contacts: SEO, SEA, social media, landing pages, content marketing, and more. It represents the first stage of the conversion funnel. These channels can be used independently or in combination.
To assess which lead generation tools to prioritize, several criteria can be considered: the quantity of leads produced, their quality, and the level of human connection. For example, attending a B2B trade show can generate a large number of highly qualified contacts while also strengthening the relationship with the company. Webinars, on the other hand, tend to generate fewer leads but of similar quality — although with less opportunity for direct business relationships.
The cost per lead (CPL) is an important KPI for evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. When calculating CPL, both direct and indirect costs — from campaign design to implementation — are taken into account. This helps determine the overall budget allocated to each contact and identify which acquisition channel performs best.
However, CPL alone doesn’t reflect lead quality. Only the conversion rate provides deeper insights. To generate a large volume of qualified leads, it’s best to analyze both metrics together.
Optimize your conversion funnel
Here are the key steps to improving the performance of your conversion funnel:
- Define the ideal customer profile to target the right audience
- Capture attention with the right message
- Maintain interest with high-quality content and clear calls to action
- Collect data on your contacts to better qualify them
- Convert prospects into customers through simplicity and attractive offers (free trials, demos, promotions, or audits)
- Build loyalty by maintaining a relationship of trust
Segmentation at the heart of your lead acquisition strategy
Personalization is one of the most powerful levers for converting a lead into a customer. It’s about delivering the right message, to the right contact, at the right time. Since it’s impossible to send a personalized message to every lead, segmentation is key.
Effective segmentation means grouping contacts who share similar needs, can be reached through the same channel, and are receptive to similar communication styles. To do this, you’ll need to define segmentation criteria that are relevant to your offer — such as demographic, psychographic, or behavioral data. Creating personas can help refine this approach.
Defining personas allows you to:
- Focus your marketing efforts on specific audience segments
- Respond more precisely to your target customers’ needs
- Choose the right lead acquisition channels based on their habits and behaviors
Main acquisition channels
Here’s an overview of the main lead acquisition levers offered by Dataventure:
Emailing — With Dataventure, you can launch performance-based campaigns on Cardata Group’s databases (over 5 million active opt-in profiles) and 400 partner databases.
SMS marketing — Launch your campaign in three steps, supported by one of our experts:
- Define a custom audience segment
- Create your message, campaign scenario, and mobile landing page
- Schedule your campaign and track traffic and conversion statistics
Co-registration — The ideal solution for collecting high volumes of leads at a controlled cost.
Social media — Platforms like Messenger allow you to create lead generation campaigns designed to ask questions to interested users and continue conversations directly in instant messaging with qualified prospects.
Experts in digital acquisition, our team supports you in optimizing your return on investment (ROI).
Launch your custom lead acquisition campaign.
Acquiring qualified leads: the method
Follow these steps to generate qualified leads effectively:
- Identify the most relevant channels for your target audience
- Define clear campaign objectives using SMART KPIs
- Diversify communication channels according to your audience
- Develop a strong content marketing strategy
- Optimize calls-to-action (CTAs) and landing pages to increase conversions
- Regularly analyze and refine your performance
For more details on how to qualify a lead, read our article Everything you need to know about generating qualified leads.
Lead acquisition trends in 2022
The year 2022 accelerated the shift toward digital. To maintain performance, adapting lead acquisition strategies to market evolution has become more essential than ever.
With the rise of digital channels, B2B buyers are now behaving more like B2C consumers — nearly 70% of them conduct their own online research before making a purchase decision.
To stand out, personalization is key. Prospects expect each communication to feel authentic and tailored. Building strong relationships requires collecting and processing customer data to create relevant, emotional, and personalized experiences.
Measuring performance with Dataventure
Do you want to measure the performance and costs of your acquisition channels? Optimize your lead acquisition investments? Dataventure provides innovative lead management tools to help you evaluate, compare, and improve your results.
