Dayna Rothman

All lead-generation campaigns need to be tested to make your campaigns better over time. By testing, you also gain insight into your programs — you'll know what's working and what isn't. A marketing team that doesn't test often is a marketing team that is blind to what their leads are doing. So what do you do?

The world of marketing, sales, and lead generation has plenty of jargon, so here's a glossary of terms to help you know what's what. Also, here is a round-up of eight incredibly useful free apps that help you with everything from evaluating your website for broken links and good search engine optimization (SEO) to determining how engaging your marketing emails are.

You can quickly create a content marketing empire to be reckoned with by being smart and thrifty, and understanding how your audience consumes content. Even if you come from a large company where you have a large marketing budget and content marketing has been proven, you can always learn new ways to stretch your dollars and increase your return on investment.

So who do you need for lead generation success? It varies, based on your company size and how large your marketing team is. And in fact, you may already have many of these people employed already. But for the sake of being thorough, what follows is a list of all of the different potential hires you could make for a very robust lead generation team.

Alignment between sales and marketing during the lead generation process is critical for success. The two teams have an extremely symbiotic relationship, and companies that understand this are ahead of the game. Traditionally, sales and marketing haven't had the greatest relationship with one another. Sales thinks marketing doesn’t give them good leads, and marketing thinks sales doesn’t follow up on its perfectly good leads.

What kind of content do you want to send to your persona and when? It is crucial to send the right piece of content at the right time. This is why you want to map your organization's buying stages. Someone who is just learning about your company isn't ready for a case study, so don't send him one. Conversely, a prospect may not want another educational asset if they are ready to buy.

Everyone works for an organization that is at one level or another involved with a lead generation strategy. Some of your companies may be brand new and not yet active on social channels; others might have some lead generation campaigns in place, but not a complete strategy. Your wish list very much depends on where you are currently in your lead generation journey.

If you have a social strategy for lead generation (which you absolutely should), you need a social media tracking tool so you can measure and analyze your social interactions. Social media tracking tools enable you to listen and respond to customer and prospect interactions on all of your social channels. Through deep analytics and reporting, social media tracking tools can help you engage with your audience and provide them with relevant content based on their actions.

Aside from CTAs, having landing pages that are optimized for conversion is key to a good lead generating website. When a lead clicks on your CTA, you want to make sure that she doesn't bounce — and that certainly does happen. By ensuring that your landing page, where a lead lands after she has filled out a form, is clear and speaks directly to the CTA, you have a smaller chance of that lead bouncing.