Lead acquisition: 5 simple steps to success

Lead acquisition plays a crucial role in the growth and sustainability of a company. But what does it really mean? 🧐

This term refers to all the techniques and strategies used to attract and capture contact information from potential leads.

🥰 The information gathered is then used to qualify them, converting them into prospects and then loyal customers.

More often than not: no lead acquisition, no customers. And, no customers, no business. 😱

So, whether you’re a marketer looking to optimize your campaigns, an entrepreneur seeking rapid growth, or a consultant looking to offer innovative solutions to your customers… 🚀

You’ll soon be able to achieve all your acquisition goals thanks to this article! 📈

👉🏼 Here’s the planned program, detailing the 5 steps to successful lead acquisition.

We’ll teach you how to master lead marketing acquisition to, finally, increase your conversions and grow your business! 🤑

5 easy steps to a successful lead acquisition strategy

As you can see, lead acquisition is almost always essential… But succeeding is far from easy! 💪

To achieve this, you obviously need to implement a lead marketing acquisition (and lead nurturing) strategy with multiple objectives, such as :

• Establish a market presence and attract the first customers 🌟
• Maintain market position and generate a steady stream of qualified leads. 🔄
• Accelerate growth and diversify the customer base, increasing the number of qualified prospects. 🚀
• Improve sales, revenue and income 💰
• Stand out from the competition. 💎

These will, of course, depend on the type of strategy chosen (which we’ll detail later), as well as the type of company (start-up, SME or GE).

📋 An effective lead marketing acquisition strategy brings many benefits afterwards, including:

• Solid database for future marketing campaigns. 📊
• Knowledge of potential customers‘ needs and behaviors. 🔍
• Development of brand awareness and acceleration of growth. 🌱

We’ll now go into detail about the 5 key steps to building and implementing a solid lead acquisition strategy.👇🏼

Step 1: Define, target and precise segmentation of potential leads

This is the obligatory step in building any type of strategy. 🛠️

First of all, you’ll need to define your buyer persona, i.e. the ideal profile of the potential leads you want to acquire: who they are, what they’re looking for and how they behave.🕵️‍♂️

🎯 Then, based on this data, you’ll segment and/or sub-segment your contacts into smaller groups and link them to specific objectives.

Waalaxy is the ideal tool for targeting and segmenting leads in your social networking and emailing campaigns. 📨

Once you’ve chosen the appropriate segmentation type and performed your search and filtering. Simply click on the Waalaxy extension and choose or create the list corresponding to your segment! 👽

❌ Of course, building a strategy lead acquisition marketing must be established before the campaign is sent, and is not limited to targeting and segmentation!

On to stage 2! 👇🏼

Step 2: Build a multichannel lead acquisition marketing strategy

➡️ There are two main types of customer acquisition strategy, both of which are multichannel : inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

These two strategies are combined with different channels and techniques, bringing multiple benefits:

• Diversify to reduce risk. 💥
• Better cover the market and reach a wider audience. 🌍
• Benefit from a complete vision and knowledge of targets. 🧠
• Deliver an integrated customer experience that enhances customer relationships and satisfaction. 🤝
• Reinforce the overall effectiveness of marketing campaigns and messages. 🚀
• Strengthen brand presence, awareness and/or trust. 💡
• Increase conversion rate and benefit from a better return on investment. 💸

So, to stack the odds in your favor… We wouldn’t recommend limiting yourself to just one, but rather diversifying by combining the two. 🤩

🎯 Choose one or more complementary actions and/or channels to adopt, in each of the two marketing strategies!

Since we can’t go into detail on all the channels and techniques, we’ll just present the ones that are mainly used for each strategy. 👇🏼

Acquisition channel #1 : Social networks

Social networks are an inbound marketing technique, but above all a powerful channel and lever for lead acquisition. 🌐

🎁 Used effectively, they offer reach, precise targeting, and essential engagement opportunities for businesses to attract, engage and convert leads (organic and paid).

➡️ Here are the main lead marketing acquisition actions that can be carried out on social networks :

• Creating value and sharing quality content. ✨
• Lead engagement and interaction. 💬
• Ads with ultra-targeted options (specific to each platform). 🎯
• Lead Magnets and Call-to-Actions (CTA). 🧲
• Retargeting. 🔄
• Performance analysis and optimization. 🔧

Because of their unique characteristics and audience, here are the platforms we recommend you use for your lead acquisition:

• Instagram (BtoC): which has a high engagement rate on a diversified audience thanks to these tools (Instagram Ads, stories, ads and CTA…). 📸
• LinkedIn (BtoB): which brings together valuable content with precise targeting features and specific tools(Linkedin Ads, Lead Gen, or LinkedIn Sales Navigator). 💼

Acquisition channel #2: Emailing

📬 Emailing is an outbound marketing technique, but also another powerful channel and lever in lead marketing acquisition.

More precisely, this involves sending personalized, targeted email campaigns to a list of qualified leads, with the aim of attracting them and then converting them into potential customers. 🚀

Used well, as well as with a well-thought-out strategy, they offer a combination of precise targeting, cost-effectiveness, and qualified traffic generation with warmer, more engaged leads. 🔥

The main lead acquisition actions that can be carried out via email are quite similar to those that can be carried out on social networks:

• Lead Magnets and Registration forms. 📝
• Lead nurturing campaigns. 📧
• Segmentation of e-mail lists. 📊
• Personalization and dynamic content. 🎨
• A/B testing and optimization. 🧪

That’s it, we’ve detailed the two main customer acquisition channels. 🎉 Of course, there are other techniques: SEO, SEA, content marketing, SMS marketing, events…

Once you’ve built your lead marketing acquisition strategy and chosen your channels/techniques… You’ll need to choose the right tools to help you prospect and acquire leads. 🛠️

Let’s take a quick look at them. 👇🏼

Step 3: Choosing tools to help with prospecting and lead acquisition

When you have hundreds, even thousands of prospects… 🤯 It becomes almost mandatory to adopt decision support tools to overcome common campaign and strategy management problems.

These tools automate repetitive tasks and help you to :

• 📏 Regularly measure the effectiveness and accuracy of marketing efforts,
• 🎯 Establish precise targeting and segmentation,
• 🤝 Facilitate the personalization of interactions,
• 🤲🏼 Increase prospect engagement and improve results,
• 🔍 Identify and engage the most qualified prospects quickly,
• 📊 Get detailed analytics to optimize campaigns,
• 📈 Accelerate the sales cycle and achieve growth targets.

Without CRM or automation software, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed : lack of efficiency, difficulty in segmenting, random performance tracking… 👇🏼

Automation software

Waalaxy is the perfect tool for acquiring quality leads (by Email and on LinkedIn) as well as converting them into customers. 🔐

👽 Once you’ve chosen or created the list corresponding to your segment, simply select the action sequence (LinkedIn or Email) best suited to your campaign strategy from the templates on offer. Then let the tool guide you!

The tool has become the market leader, offering the simplest, most intuitive and effective digital solution! 🚀 Here’s a list of Waalaxy’s main features ✅ :

• Automatic import of prospect lists.
• Launch of automated mass prospecting campaigns, via LinkedIn and Cold Email.
• Use AI to prospect, retrieve emails, personalize your messages and optimize them for conversion.
• LinkedIn messaging for more efficient conversation management and better response/engagement management.
• Support for users with multiple resources for successful prospecting.
• Automated, real-time campaign performance tracking data.

You really don’t want to miss this. 🤩 Try it now.

➡️ Of course, there are others, which is why we’ve created a series of comparative articles . Including, for example, Waalaxy VS Lemlist.

CRM tools

🤖 The automation tool you choose should enable integration with other tools, as you’ll probably need to complement it with a CRM!

These will enable you to organize and synchronize certain stages, as well as refine your performance analysis. 💎

Of course, Waalaxy offers you the possibility of integrating the platform with various CRM tools : Hubspot, NoCRM, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho…

Your strategy and tools are ready. 👌🏼 Now it’s time to tackle the creation and optimization of content for lead acquisition, to be carried out before the campaign is sent out. 👇🏼

Step 4: Creating and optimizing content for lead acquisition

To acquire leads, you need to know how to create content that will capture the attention and arouse the interest of your targets. 🤩

For this reason, and whatever the format, your message must be optimized for conversion and include various elements:

• ℹ️ Subject (for e-mails).
• 🧲 Catchphrase.
• *️⃣ Variables (first name, last name and company).
• 💎 Value proposition/solution.
• 🕹️ Call-to-Action (CTA)
• 📸 Visual(s).
• 🔗 Attachment.
• ➡️ Other: GIFs, voice notes, links to external resources…

In addition to the elements to be included, you need to take great care with the copywriting. ✍🏼 Then, before launching the campaign, proofread and check the overall rendering/functioning.

🛟 Here again, Waalaxy offers solutions to help you write and optimize your content:

• Checklist with writing tips. ✍🏼
• Preview to perform various checks. 👀
• Add a message template for reuse. ♻️
• Waami AI assistant, to instantly write the perfect message. 🦾

Back to theory! When you’re happy with the content, you can launch your campaign (or schedule it for a later launch). 🚀

Then, when the campaign has been closed. We can move on to the final step in successful lead acquisition. 👇🏼

Step 5: Track, analyze and optimize of lead acquisition campaigns

The big advantage of automation and campaign management tools is the ability to allocate, track and analyze performance in greater detail. 🔍

⬇️ Here are the main indicators to follow when evaluating the effectiveness of a lead marketing acquisition campaign:

1. Open rate.
2. Click-through rate (CTR).
3. Conversion rates.
4. Cost per lead (CPL).
5. Qualification rate.
6. Rejection and dropout rates.
7. Average conversion time.
8. Engagement (number of likes, shares, comments, clicks, etc.).
9. Unsubscribe rate.
10. Response rate.
11. Bounce rate(soft bounce and hard bounce).
12. Satisfaction rate.
13. Return on investment (ROI).

📊 With Waalaxy, you’ll be able to track key campaign data from the dashboard. Indicators absent from the dashboard can be accessed by integrating a CRM tool. 😇

You can also use Google Analytics to complete the tracking and analysis of these indicators. This system will enable you to make decisions to optimize your strategies, campaigns, results and adjust budgets. 💰

Conclusion : Waalaxy, the best tool for acquiring and converting leads?

💡 To recap, Waalaxy lets you automate and manage your multichannel campaigns, from lead acquisition to lead conversion.💥 You can:

• Generate leads, then target and segment/group them into lists.
• Enrich your lists and retrieve emails thanks to AI.
• Choose from a multitude of campaign templates.
• Optimize and personalize your content for interaction.
• Analyze lead behavior and track performance.
• Prioritize, manage and contact (or recontact) leads.

Unlike other tools on the market, it is accessible to beginners, as well as more advanced profiles. 😇

✨ Waalaxy also offers quality support through multiple resources:

• Latest news.
• FAQ.
• Chat support.
• Help Center.
• Newsletters.
• Supernova media.
• YouTube channel.
• Blog with thousands of articles on digital marketing.
• Webinars.

And, to top it all off, the tool offers a freely accessible version. 🤑 So there’s no reason not to adopt it! 🔥

🏁 To conclude, we share with you the answers to the most frequently asked questions on this topic.👇🏼

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

What’s the difference between a prospect, a lead and a customer?

Lead VS prospect VS customer… We understand why you’re lost! 😞

👤 These three terms refer to one and the same person at different stages of the marketing funnel :

• A lead is a contact who has expressed an interest in your company, products or services. 👀
• Prospects are qualified contacts likely to make a purchase. 💰
• A customer is a qualified lead, converted into a customer by the act of buying. 💸

What’s the difference between lead acquisition and lead generation?

Although they are often used interchangeably, there is a difference: the methods and objectives associated with each term. 🎯 Explanations 👇🏼 :

➡️ Lead generation (BtoB or BtoC) is the first step, the starting point of the sales tunnel.

• Objectives: to create interest in and attract potential prospects to a company or its products/services.
• Strategy: Inbound marketing.
• Techniques: SEO, content marketing, social networks, paid advertising, landing pages…

➡️ Lead acquisition goes beyond simple lead generation.

• Objectives: governs the entire acquisition process (capturing, managing and converting leads into real customers).
• Strategy: Inbound + outbound marketing.
• Techniques: lead nurturing, email marketing, CRM, marketing automation, virtual events…

What budget should you set aside for your lead acquisition strategy?

💰 The budget for a lead marketing acquisition can vary considerably, depending on a number of factors.

☝🏼 First of all, before estimating the budget, you need to have built a solid, “definitive” strategy, and have clearly defined your objectives:

• Number of leads required (per month or quarter),
• Quality level of desired leads,
• Conversion rate (how many leads to convert into paying customers).

In this way, you’ll be able to choose the acquisition channels and/or actions that will enable you to achieve your objectives, and therefore estimate the costs as well as the overall budget. 🧐 The main expense items to plan for are :

• Channel-specific cost-per-lead (CPL).
• Technology and tool costs.
• Human Resources (HR): essentially team salaries.
• External support (if needed): consultants or marketing agencies.
• Margin for contingencies and adjustments (10% to 20% of total budget).

Finally, it’s essential to adapt the budget to the company’s needs, as well as to measure results regularly to optimize spending and maximize ROI. 📈

This time, you’ve got it! You know how to successfully acquire leads and convert as many prospects as possible. 🚀 See you soon! 👽