Lead Generation is the act or procedure of identifying and nurturing potential customers for a company’s product or service.
What is Lead ?
A lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service in some way, shape or form.
A fine way to approach leads is not to simply call them out of nowhere or otherwise bombard them with your product or service during an offer or trial.
You need to show that you are trustworthy, professional and most importantly credible so that people will be more
inclined to sign up for something if you happen to call.
I’m sure you’ll agree that being sent an email by the manufacturer of a product isn’t nearly as invasive as potentially getting a phone call out of the blue.
After all, social proof only works when people have a way to help them decide what’s right to do.
This is why online support communities are so popular – they offer more information and resources than would be possible in an email, but their messages aren’t intrusive like unsolicited phone calls.
Leads come in many different flavors and are a part of the huge pie that represents the lifecycle of a potential customer. Leads are basically depending on how qualified they are, during which stage they’re in, you could say that they’re either your chumps, fans or customers.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): The first step of the marketing process is lead generation. In this stage we collect as much information as possible about our targeted audience, i.e., potential clients and their needs through forms on websites. An example of an MQL is a contact who fills out a landing page form for an offer.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): Sales qualified leads are contacts who’ve indicated interest in purchasing your product or service. An example of a sales qualified lead would be someone who fills out a form to ask a question about your product or service.
Product Qualified Lead (PQL): Product qualified leads are contacts who have been identified as potential paying customers after taking actions related to your product or service. For example, they might have downloaded a free e-book version of your product but then asked you how they can upgrade the free version to a paid one.
Before sales teams begin calling potential leads, your marketing team should evaluate which ones are now highly likely to become paying customers and take care of converting them into users first by offering discounts and other
promotions that turn potential leads into actual users.
Service Qualified Lead: Sales qualified leads are potential prospects that have attained a higher status within your sales pipeline because they’ve progressed to the point where they’re in the pre-sale evaluation phase.
For example, as soon as a pre-sales employee is on the line with a lead, then this person is officially designated as a sales-qualified lead. As you do business with each of your market’s prospects and customers, it goes to say that not everyone will progress to an STQL after interacting with your company’s pre-sales team or even its sales staff.
These lead generation strategies are a few examples of how one can attract potential customers and direct them towards your offers. Whenever someone asks us what we do in our job, we can’t easily say we’re content marketing experts who work on creating original ideas and distributing that content via text, images, audio and video formats to boost traffic.
The truth is often lost on people who aren’t already familiar with all the work our job entails. So instead, we say, “We work on finding ways to entertain people with incentives that will get their interest even before they realize it’s for my company.”
There’s always more to our job than meets the eye and oftentimes it takes explaining in an entirely new way before others can understand what we‘re actually doing here.
That usually resonates better, and that’s exactly what lead generation is: It’s a way of introducing your products and services to the right people so that they become interested enough in what you’re doing to reach out and learn more.
Why do you need lead generation?
When a stranger initiates a relationship with you in an organic manner, they are showing genuine interest in your product because they know that through your product they’ll be able to achieve a goal.
It is the same kind of interest that drives someone to buy a particular item at their local supermarket.
The transition from “stranger” to “customer” is much more natural when there is already an existing foundation — and it’s all built around marketing, just like how grocery stores strategically place products on their shelves so as to increase the likelihood of customers purchasing those products based on natural human instinct.
Lead generation takes place at one of the most critical stages of a business’ lifecycle. By reaching out to local and global prospects, you can build your contacts database while also establishing credibility and trustworthiness in their eyes. If a product is good enough, your reputation will precede you.
The Process of Lead Generation
Now that you understand how lead generation will fit into a content-driven marketing campaign, below is a rundown of how to generate quality leads successfully:
First, a visitor discovers your business through one of your marketing channels, such as your website or a blog post.
They’re then presented with a call-to-action (CTA) to learn more about your company by filling out a form and providing some details.
That CTA takes them to a landing page that offers something of value in exchange for an email address.
Once on the landing page, your visitor fills out a form in exchange for an incentive. (Forms are typically hosted on landing pages, although they can technically be embedded anywhere on your site.) Voila! You have a new lead.
That is as long as you’re following lead-capture form best practices by doing things such as using targeted and engaging subject lines, restricting questions to the basics that collect the most information and keeping forms short.
Lead Generation Marketing
Once you’ve invested in constructing a landing page — which is the first step when it comes down to using the process of lead generation for your business or organization to generate those all-important leads .
you can start driving free traffic to it through various promotional channels that you have at your disposal.
However, there are many different types of lead gen marketing channels, so which ones should you concentrate on?
Let’s talk about the front end of lead gen marketing — that is driving traffic to a landing page.
Content: Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Content typically includes posts and pages you create, where you provide visitors with useful, free and original information that might help to catch their interest. Your content isn’t just the main attraction.
You may want to include a call-to-action somewhere in it. For example, in the post area of your site, when someone is about to leave your page for good.
The more delighted a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are going to click your call-to-action button and visit your landing page.
Email: Email is a great tool for sending communications to people who are already familiar with your brand and product/service.
Customers typically trust brands they’re familiar with, so it’s easier to get them to take action more readily than cold prospects who might not be eager to do business with an unknown entity.
That said, email marketing is a popular enough tactic that it tends to get lost in the noise; you’ll want your CTAs and their accompanying copy to be particularly compelling if you hope to catch reader eyes amid all of the other noise clogging up their inboxes every day.
Ads and Retargeting: At the end of the day, an ad’s explicit purpose is to convince potential customers to make a purchase. If you’re not convinced that your company will make what it guarantees, don’t promise anything! Make sure your landing page reflects the ad and offer exactly as they have been presented in order to convert as many customers as possible.
Blog: The best way to implement a call-to-action is to make sure you’re taking advantage of the right tools.
For example, if your CTA calls for a video testimonial that showcases just how helpful your product is (if you work in the eCommerce sector) then it makes sense to ask for it as part of a special promotion.
You can write about why customers should purchase your product based on what they could gain from using it, maybe using a case study or specific success story.
Not only does this add content that’s meant not only to entertain but also to educate and inform – but it might even encourage those who use the offer to write their own published story.
Social Media: Social media platforms make it easy to guide your followers and customers to take action. From the swipe-up options on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links to bitly URLs on Twitter you can encourage your customers or clients to interact in a way that’s most applicable to the platform they’re using.
whether it’s clicking a website or downloading an app or entering their email address.
Product Trials: By offering your product for a trial period, you’re making it very easy for potential customers to try before they buy. This works well in circumstances where the company is selling proprietary products such as software.
For example, either on the first stage of setting up an account or downloading a piece of software and then paying for it later.
Another great strategy to use when you’re trying to entice customers into buying your product is to give away
some free stuff that ties back into your branding.
This helps convert more virtual visitors into tangible buyers.
Referral Marketing: The process of word-of-mouth marketing can be effective on its own and in conjunction with a different channel such as advertising.
The reason for this is that it gets your brand in front of more people, which then increases the odds of generating leads.
However, there is one thing you will want to do – guide users to your landing page.
For example, if you are using pay-per-click advertising, then you will want to direct people at some point after they click an ad onto a specific landing page while knowing that as long as you’ve created a landing page that converts then the rest should take care of itself.
Why not just buy leads?
Marketers and salespeople alike want to fill their sales funnel as quickly as possible.
Sometimes, people think the best way to do this is to acquire (purchase) leads. Don’t buy your leads.
It may be a better ROI than if you were to pay for ads, but the leads aren’t actually going toward your bottom line.
You see, most of these leads are purchased from another company and didn’t give you permission to contact them in the first place – unlike professionally generated ones which are also more likely to make it past a sales rep’s cold call filter.
Without consent, leads that have been purchased through other companies can’t make it past a sales rep’s cold call filter; they will be marked down as spam.
This means that any leads you acquire through paid sources will not move your company any closer to its goals than options like Facebook ads would unless they were organically tied with other methods, such as word-of-mouth referrals or an enticing social following on Twitter or Instagram.
How to Qualify a Lead?
A lead is a person who has shown interest in your company’s product. While there are many ways to create leads for your business, the specific details of each happening differ from company to company.
Sales leads are created when people show interest in your services or products by filling out an application at a job board, shopping online and sharing their information in exchange for points, members of an organization sharing their contact information after signing up for content via email, or filling out a form on your website to download an informative piece of content.
Lead Generation Strategies
Online lead generation is a lot like fishing. Fundamentally, you need to know what kind of bait and equipment you’re going to need for your hook.
The same goes for an online lead capture strategy: it depends a lot on what type of bait you’re going to use in order to attract the right kind of customers at the right time with any given campaign that’s supposed to convert leads into direct sales opportunities and new clients. Some of the most popular methods are:
● Facebook Lead Generation
● Twitter Lead Generation
● LinkedIn Lead Generation
● PPC Lead Generation
● B2B Lead Generation
Tips for Lead Generation Campaigns
For any given lead generation campaign, there are a lot of moving parts and each one needs to be working towards the same result – that being more clients.
It can be difficult to distinguish which parts of your campaign are working and which aren’t when they’re all working in the background, but what exactly goes into a best-in-class lead generation engine?
The answer is simple: reliability, knowledge and effort. Here’s a few tips when building lead gen campaigns for
your own business.
● Using the right lead generation tools.
● Creating amazing offers for all different stages of the buying cycle.
● Keep your messaging consistent and deliver on your promise.
● Link your CTA to a dedicated landing page.
● Get your sales team involved.
While these points can help you tremendously, if you’re looking to generate leads for your brand
and need help, get in touch with us today.
