Craft Your Ultimate Lead Generation Plan in 7 Steps for Agency Success

Without a lead generation plan, acquiring clients can be a chaotic, unpredictable rollercoaster ride. To achieve total agency bliss—or at least, to free up your time for more important tasks—you need a system that consistently fills your pipeline with high-quality leads, so you can focus on converting them and growing your agency.

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A well-executed lead generation marketing plan is directly tied to agency success. If you feel like you’re running on a hamster wheel looking for leads but never quite finding enough of them to make up for natural client erosion, let alone to grow your monthly revenues, the missing piece is likely your lead generation system. In this post, we’ll walk you through every step of a winning lead gen plan that you can start implementing today.

Why you need a lead generation plan

Every business needs clients, and clients start as leads. The more qualified leads you can find for your agency services, the more you’ll be able to focus on communicating your value and converting them into paying customers.

Let’s start with what lead generation is, exactly. In simple terms, lead gen refers to the practice of attracting potential customers, connecting with them or collecting their contact information, and nurturing them through your lead generation funnel to conversion.

A lead generation plan systematizes this practice, enabling your agency to get in front of your target audience, reach them with compelling messaging, and automate much of the nurturing process so you can scale your business. That brings us to the key reasons a lead generation marketing strategy is non-negotiable: it’s essential to growing your agency sustainably.

Scale your agency

Agency owners don’t have infinite time and resources, so it’s important to make strategic decisions about how you spend your marketing dollars and attention. Laying out a marketing plan for lead generation gives you clarity and control over how many leads you find, how much it costs to acquire them, and even how much value they ultimately bring to your agency. 

Instead of just creating a few campaigns and seeing what sticks, a plan provides the insights needed to be methodical in your lead acquisition, making each dollar go further so you can increase sales and revenue faster.

Essential components of a lead generation plan

We’ll get into far more detail about each stage of a successful lead generation plan in a moment, but let’s start by looking at the basic essential components:

• A well-defined target audience: As with any digital marketing campaign, crafting a message before you know who you’re speaking to is ineffective. Your lead generation marketing strategy must start with a clear vision of who your ideal customer is, so you can market with them in mind.
• Offers and lead magnets: Prospects go on a journey to becoming paying customers, and you need to entice them with a lead magnet to start them on that path. Content marketing lead generation plays an important role here, enticing leads with high-quality resources that showcase your expertise.
• A lead generation website: Your website and any additional lead generation landing pages you create are key touchpoints in the lead generation journey since this is often where you capture lead contact information. These need to be optimized with forms and calls-to-action (CTAs) to make signing up a frictionless experience.
• Nurturing strategies: Once you have the lead’s contact information, email lead generation strategies kick into gear to move them along the funnel toward conversion.

Things you'll need to create a lead generation plan

Implementing a lead gen plan requires the right lead generation tools for the job. Let’s take a look at the solutions you should line up before kick-starting your efforts.

CRM for lead generation

Since you’ll likely have many prospects in your lead generation funnel, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform is essential to keeping everything organized, tracking successful campaigns and sources, and ranking leads. This is a central lead generation database where you can manage your contacts, track interactions, and continue nurturing relationships through the sale cycle after conversion.

Here’s a peek at how centralizing your lead management can be game-changing:

Analytics and tracking tools

Keeping track of the performance of different lead sources and campaigns will help you maximize your return on investment (ROI) by enabling you to allocate more budget to the most lucrative sources. Making decisions based on lead generation metrics will result in more effective, revenue-boosting campaigns.

Content creation and marketing tools

Content creation plays a big role in generating leads since it’s a component of just about every lead-generation method. This means agencies need to regularly create blog posts, social media content, videos, ebooks, and other forms of content to entice, inform, and entertain their audiences. 

Tools like AI content marketing solutions can make this job easier while marketing automation platforms streamline the process of distributing content. 

How to create a lead generation plan 

Before jumping into the step-by-step lead generation marketing strategy, it’s worth noting the distinction between lead generation vs. demand generation, since these are related but not distinct phases of the customer journey.

Both lead and demand generation campaigns can follow the steps below, but the message of each type of campaign is unique. Demand generation is aimed at creating buzz and awareness of your agency among a broad audience, while lead generation is more geared toward converting interested prospects into paying customers. As a best practice, you should run both demand generation and lead generation campaigns, covering the whole journey from initial awareness to conversion.

Follow these steps for a revenue-boosting marketing lead-generation strategy.

1. Define your goals and objectives

Begin with clearly defining what you want to achieve with your lead generation efforts. Are you aiming to find more local leads, boost sales of a specific service, or increase your overall profitability?

Setting specific, measurable goals will help guide your strategy and enable you to gauge if you’re staying on track.

2. Identify your target audience and create buyer personas

Use research methods like surveys, questionnaires, and reviewing statistics to understand your audience's needs and preferences. Develop detailed buyer personas representing idealized buyers of your agency’s services. When it comes to creating your offers and content, it’s much easier to be effective when you have a clear persona in mind.

3. Develop compelling offers and lead magnets

Next, you need to create content that will attract your audience. For example, for lead generation email marketing, you need to grow your list. To capture email addresses from leads, you might offer them a free resource, discount, subscriber-only content, or a free consultation call. These can all be compelling lead magnets. The key is to offer something of high quality and real value to your prospects that they can’t easily find with a quick Google.

4. Create optimized landing pages and forms

Your website landing pages are a key conversion point when it comes to scoring more leads, so they need to be well-optimized.

This means taking time to create impactful, on-brand, visually appealing layouts with straightforward navigation and crystal-clear messaging. Your forms should be as simple as possible—only ask for the essentials—to make it easy for leads to sign up. Make sure your CTA buttons stand out against the rest of the design.

This isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it aspect of your lead generation plan: your landing pages should be continuously refined, and running A/B tests of elements like button color, CTA copy, form fields, and layout can help you find the most high-converting design for your agency.

5. Implement lead nurturing and follow-up strategies

Develop a lead nurturing strategy to engage and build relationships with your leads over time. This can include email drip campaigns, personalized content, targeted ads, and more.

Follow-up with leads should be prompt and consistent: you want to stay top-of-mind and make the journey to conversion as fast and frictionless as possible.

6. Use multiple channels

Don't rely on a single channel for lead generation. Using a mix of inbound and outbound marketing tactics like content marketing, social media, email marketing, SEO, PPC advertising, events, and partnerships can help you reach your target audience wherever they are.

If this all sounds a bit overwhelming for your small team, remember that lead generation outsourcing is always an option. Find reliable partners who can support you in your lead gen efforts, so you can focus on your strengths.

7. Track results and optimize

Tracking tools like Google Analytics or those built into your CRM can help you stay on top of your lead generation plan. Key metrics include conversion rates, cost per lead, ROI, and cost per customer acquisition—all of these can help you spot which parts of your plan are working and which need refinement. Based on data, continuously optimize the different parts of your plan. 

Conclusion 

Crafting a robust lead generation plan is a must for growth-minded agencies. Without one, acquiring clients is left up to fate. The 7-step approach above empowers you to consistently fill your pipeline with high-quality leads, so you can focus on conversion, growth, and delivering excellent services.

Need more support with your lead generation marketing plan? We can help—get in touch for more resources and strategies to take your agency to the next level.