After 16 years and over $1,000,000,000 in managed ad spend I've launched, tested, and optimized just about every type of digital marketing channel in nearly every industry you can image for brands big and small.

I can pretty much tell you all of the wrong approaches to lead generation. Fortunately, I can also tell you the correct approach.. that took me nearly 10 years to figure out but which had led to highly consistent prospecting for what I call a "lead machine".

If your prospecting efforts often lead to raging mad email responses and cold call then that might be a hint that you're barking up the wrong tree.

So what lead generation should you NOT be doing?

• Telemarketing or unwanted cold calling
• Unsolicited cold emailing
• Wasting time meeting and following up with unqualified leads
• Awareness campaigns
• Writing blogs no one will ever read
• Posting on social media that gets no engagement
• Promotional thumb drives and stress balls

The broad "spray-and-pray" approach to lead generation is dead. There's just too much noise now and people are drowning in a sea of ads that they can easily tune out. The unfortunate thing is that most brands build great products... only to fail in reaching their ideal customers. The problem is that they are targeting everyone with ad that is specific to no one.

A better approach is to use hyper-targeted marketing to generate specifically the consistent, qualified visitors who buy.

When I say "hyper-targeted" I mean serving customized ads and offers to your target account's key decision-makers across search and social media. We achieve this by using the same ABM (account-based marketing) approach that sales teams use, but digital marketing.

I have found that for dozens of clients this yields an explosive increase in the targeted account leads that become sales opportunities and booked clients.

Your dream customers are online if you just know how to reach them, show them how what you're selling is the only solution to their problem, and reach them at the right time.

Turning on a steady pipeline of qualified leads and customers is the ultimate goal of every marketer. But most struggle with finding a way to get the results they want.

Traditional digital marketing agencies will go straight into launching ad campaigns or optimizing your website for search engines.

They can show you you're getting more impressions, more clicks, and high keyword rankings but more often than not it doesn't translating into leads or bottom line sales.

Fortunately we've been able to solve this and build a "lead machine" for our clients by adding these 4 approaches in addition to a best-in-class marketing team executing for your clients:

• Deeply Understand the Customer - knowing your audience personas and the problems that your solution solves for them is key. That's why we start every new client engagement with a detailed questionnaire, discovery research, and analytics review.
• Follow a Check List System - for each channel (i.e. SEO, SEM, Social Ads) we go down a detailed checklist every day, week, and month. This disciplined approach ensures no element goes "unoptimized".
• Build a Better Landing Page - rather than just deliver traffic to your website, we go a step further than most agencies to plan, design, and optimize marketing landing pages as well. With more influence on the full marketing funnel, we can rapidly improve performance and scale.
• Segmentation and Relevance - building a series of audiences, ads, and landing pages that resonate with different customer segments is the best way we've found to increase relevance which leads to higher conversion rates.

Following this framework and applying it to the different channels we can then see results unlike you've ever seen.

Fully managed, strategic, and coordinated performance marketing channels:

• SEO
• Google Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Twitter Ads
• Content Syndication
• Landing Pages
• Web Analytics

If you're serious about lead generation and ready to commit to not just dabbling with some "toe in the water" digital ads but really establishing a "lead machine" that will deliver for years to come, then let's start with a diagnostic call.