The Pillars of a Successful Growth Strategy: A Q&A with UpCity’s Andy Keehn

According to Mailshake, lead generation marketing can be defined as “the process of attracting prospects and converting them into someone who has an interest in your company’s products and services.” While lead generation strategies should differ across industries, modern brands should be utilizing tactics such as blogging, email marketing, website landing pages, and more.

We spoke with our own director of demand generation, Andy Keehn, to get his take on what the pillars of a successful lead generation growth strategy are and how to bring marketing and sales together to drive meaningful results in your lead generation campaign. 

What do you think are the core components of a solid growth strategy? And could you talk a little more about each of them?

Andy Keehn: Everything starts with understanding your customer well. Understanding your buyers is the most important because it’s hard to create content that resonates with them if you don’t understand their day-to-day. You need a clear understanding of who you’re marketing to if you’re going to drive meaningful, sustainable growth over time. 

To understand your buyers, you need to answer the following questions:

• What are the main challenges they face in different parts of their job?
• What does a typical day look like for them at work?
• Who all is involved in the decision-making process?
• What are they evaluated and measured on?
• Where do they go to learn more and develop?
• Are they part of specific communities or groups that you want to build trust in?

Once you have clarity into a lot of the questions above, you need to create content that helps educate your audience on how their current processes can be improved in some way, whether that’s through simplification or enhancements that drive greater efficiency. It should be less about your product and service, and more about how they can reach their goals through your advice.  

Understanding your buyers is the most important because it’s hard to create content that resonates with them if you don’t understand their day-to-day.

Create multiple types of content, such as how-to videos, long-form blog content, product demos, customer interviews, podcasts, case studies, and more. Not all content is easily measurable, and that’s OK. People listening to your podcast or spending a few minutes reading a blog post can slowly move them towards your brand. If you offer a free trial, work on getting your potential new customer into the product as seamlessly as possible and let them see the value themselves as they talk to your team.

Segmentation is another core component. You should have a clear understanding of where there is a good product fit and where you should avoid spending money and time. To do that, look through your historical data, whether it’s a CRM or other back-end system, and see if there are specific industries, revenue ranges, job titles, and any other relevant information that can be used to help you target good companies and people.

From there, prioritize these accounts or industries appropriately based on the data you’ve uncovered. As a marketplace, we have specific categories where there is an opportunity to acquire more customers than others, and our team prioritizes marketing to them accordingly. You can also use a Marketing Automation Platform, Google Analytics, and other tools to understand. 

However, you want to make sure that you remove friction in the buying process. It’s a good idea to put together a process and overall experience with your brand that will enable interested buyers to learn as much about your product or service as possible wherever they’re consuming content. Provide pricing and product videos or a product demo so that inbound leads are at a stage where they know what they’re getting into when they talk to your team. This will reduce the sales cycle, increase the close rate, and build trust between your brand and buyers as they self-educate on their own time. 

You should provide a way for buyers to book time with your team on their own time as well, without requiring phone calls to set up a discovery call. Planting a calendar embed on a confirmation page after they submit a demo form is an easy way to accomplish this, which we do with Hubspot.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach, what works for SMB may not work at the enterprise level, and vice versa.

Another important component is understanding the financials around your customers. If you’re in hyper-growth mode, you might not care about spending more to acquire a customer than their value will be on average, but most companies use these metrics to assess the channels, cost, and goals of their campaigns to justify the spend. 

So ask yourself these questions:

• What is your customer acquisition cost?
• What does your customer lifetime value look like? 
• What does churn look like on an industry- and company-type basis?
• What is the average deal size?

Last but not least, execute! That’s the fun part, so go experiment in different channels, with different creative and different messaging to see what resonates with your audience. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, what works for SMB may not work at the enterprise level, and vice versa. 

As you carry out your strategy, have clear goals for what you want to achieve in each channel. Is it content consumption? Is it someone directly booking a demo? Continuously monitor results, and make incremental improvements to get to the level you want to be at. Keep in mind, it won’t happen overnight, but 1-2% gains in conversion will add up.