Posted by: Kelly Hall, Account Manager

When you start any lead generation or lead nurturing campaign, one of the biggest questions to answer is what you’ll offer your prospects. What you offer is very influential in how prospects will interact with your company. If you offer something requiring very little involvement, then you may wind up with a large volume of unqualified leads. However, if you offer something requiring a lot of involvement then you may wind up with a very small volume of leads – albeit more likely to be highly qualified. Using the purchase cycle, and your goals therein, can help to identify what offers to lead with.

How your lead generation campaign speaks to your prospects is entirely in your control. First, you need to identify the goal of your campaign. Are you just looking for people ready to buy? If so, your offer should align with Decision Phase needs.  Are you looking to educate your audience? Then an offer that assists with prospects in the Research Phase would be most appropriate.

How will your campaign communicate these offers? Through media insertions. Planned media insertions are hinged upon a media strategy aimed at communicating with prospects in different purchase phases and using different offers to do so. Some possible offers to leverage for lead generation campaigns include:

-    White papers (Research Phase): These are a great way to educate your prospects about what your product/service brings to the table.
-    Online calculators (Evaluation Phase): These effectively show your prospects how your products/services could impact them.
-    Contact us form (Decision Phase): Providing an easy, straightforward way for your prospects to reach out to you is an important way of bringing in prospects in the Decision Phase.

Keep in mind that pure lead generation is different from lead nurturing. With lead nurturing you are oftentimes communicating with the leads that were generated during the initial campaign launch. Generally speaking, many of the exact same offers can be leveraged here. The important thing is to evaluate what phase of the purchase cycle your prospects are in when you communicate with them. For instance, if your initial lead generation campaign launch was successful in generating a lot of white paper leads, your lead nurturing campaign should help to bubble them up to the next phase – Evaluation. Therefore, in your communications with them you may want to offer an online calculator.

At the end of the day the best thing we can do as marketers is evaluate our offers from the standpoint of our prospects. Would they find this useful/helpful? If so, how? By answering these questions, we’re better able to identify where our offers fall in the purchase cycle and where to use them in our lead generation and lead nurturing endeavors.