One of any business’s main goals is to gather leads. Businesses invest a lot of resources in lead generation. The fact is that it will be challenging to close sales if your prospects are not prepared to purchase what you are offering.
Prospects who are interested in your product or service and in the market to buy are considered to be good leads. These high-quality leads can help businesses increase sales and return on investment. When it comes to leads, many businesses still opt to prioritize quantity over quality.
Modern marketing tools, software, and social media platforms have allowed marketers to hone their abilities in generating high-quality leads. The main difficulty is choosing which of your leads to pursue.
Table of Contents
What is Lead Generation?
Why is Lead Generation Important?
What Does the Lead Generation Process Look Like?
How to Generate Leads
How to Improve Your Lead Generation
Lead Generation Strategies
Take Away
What is Lead Generation?
A lead is anyone who expresses interest in a business’s goods or services. Given that everyone has different preferences and needs, not everyone is a lead. Many companies make the error of marketing to everyone instead of concentrating on customers interested in what the business has to offer.
The process of drawing in prospects and turning them into people interested in the goods and services offered by your business is known as lead generation. Today’s businesses employ a variety of lead generation techniques, including:
- Blogging
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Networking
- Coupons
- Seminars and live events
- Website landing pages
These are merely a few techniques you can employ to draw prospects to your service or product. Since lead generation tactics vary by industry, most businesses prefer to stick with what works better for them.
For online fashion retailers, lead generation through social media and email marketing may be effective, but software companies may not see the same results. A series of webinars or a blog may be more effective as lead generation tools for software buyers who may need more information about the product.
Why is Lead Generation Important?
There is never a 100% lead-to-customer conversion rate. The primary goal of lead generation is to generate quality leads that will fill the sales funnel. Getting good leads is obviously important. It assists you to:
- Choose the appropriate audience – You concentrate your efforts on a select group of prospects who are more likely to purchase your good or service. This results in time and money savings, process streamlining for your business, and sales growth.
- Increase brand awareness – Lead generation always involves educating your leads about your business and its product, whether you do it directly or reach out with information about the features of your product. Leads can then use word-of-mouth to promote your brand, bringing you more business.
- Gain valuable data – Typically, generating leads entails gathering data on your potential clients, their needs and wants, and your rivals. This aids you in enhancing your good or service to give it a competitive edge on the market.
- Increase revenue – With the right lead generation strategy in place, your company can expect to exceed the revenue that you’ve planned to achieve.
What Does the Lead Generation Process Look Like?
Now that we are aware of the role that lead generation plays in the inbound marketing methodology, it is time to go through the steps of the lead generation process.
- A visitor first learns about your company through one of your marketing platforms, like your blog, social media profile, or website.
- A call-to-action (CTA) is an image, button, or message that prompts website visitors to take some action. This visitor then clicks on your CTA.
- That CTA directs the user to a landing page, a web page created with the purpose of collecting lead information in exchange for an offer. An offer, such as an ebook, course, or template, is the information or something of value that is “offered” on the landing page. Visitors must believe the offer to be valuable enough to trade their personal information for access to it.
- Your visitor submits a form on the landing page in exchange for the offer. (Though technically they can be embedded anywhere on your site, forms are typically hosted on landing pages.) Voila! You now have a lead. That is if you adhere to recommended lead-capture form practices.
In short, a visitor clicks a call to action (CTA) button that directs them to a landing page where they complete a form to receive an offer, at which point they become a lead.
How to Generate Leads
Just getting started is knowing the various lead types and how unqualified leads turn into qualified leads. The next step is to create genuine leads that you can develop into brand-new clients for your company.
Let’s put theory into action by giving a general overview of lead generation.
The Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel serves as a metaphor for how potential customers develop into paying clients. The marketing funnel is composed of these three elements:
- Full of fresh leads looking for solutions but perhaps not yet prepared to buy, the top of the funnel (TOFU).
- Potential customers in the middle of the funnel (MOFU), who are displaying a keen interest in your brand’s products.
- The fewest leads are at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), but they are the most qualified.
Getting high-quality leads into the TOFU is the main goal of lead generation. Effective lead generation depends on excellent marketing. Marketing, after all, creates interest in goods and services.
The best marketing tactic is to reach out to customers where they are, which in this age of digitalization is probably online. The best place to start is by creating a fantastic website for your business. From there, you can broaden your lead-generation tactics to incorporate blogs, email campaigns, and social media, that produce inbound leads and increase site traffic. It’s also essential to make sure your campaign landing pages are set up correctly to convert leads.
Inbound Leads
Proactive outreach is a key element of outbound marketing. It includes traditional cold calling as well as television commercials, print ads, internet banners, and email lists. In contrast, inbound marketing focuses on connecting with customers along their individual journeys and providing them with resources and content that will pique their interest in your company.
Your content should improve readers’ lives and introduce them to your brand in order to produce inbound leads. As compared to most outbound marketing strategies, inbound marketing strategies like e-books, social media content, and blog posts have shown to be very effective at generating high-quality leads.
Remember that prospects for inbound marketing change constantly along with consumer behavior. Because of this, it’s crucial to periodically review your lead-generation tactics across all of your digital channels to make sure you’re keeping up with shifting consumer preferences and technological developments.
Social Media Leads
The secret to successful lead generation on social media is to pay attention to your target market. You can learn about your audience’s top interests through social listening, as well as what people are saying about your company. Additionally, you can strategically focus on important “buy words” in user comments that might suggest interest in your goods and services.
After using social listening to gather information, you can focus your messaging and produce content on social media that appeals to your target market. But be certain that each CTA enables you to move prospects to the following stage.
How to Improve Your Lead Generation
There are numerous ways you can optimize your website to generate more leads in addition to increasing site traffic.
Try out various pieces of content, call-to-action placement, and lead attractions to see which ones perform the best since the content is effective for generating leads. This usually entails determining your key customer profile and producing content that will be interesting and practical to generate quality leads.
The lead form is frequently a crucial component of the sales funnel which can be optimized in addition to incentives. More form fields result in fewer form submissions, even though it is advantageous from a business perspective to gather more information as you can about a prospect. Test out various form lengths to determine which one produces the best lead information and lead capture.
Numerous other elements of a website can be improved, such as the call-to-action, navigation, and clutter-free design, all of which will help users find the information you would like them to. To see how potential leads are using your website, it can be useful to explore the data in an analytics platform.
Lead Generation Strategies
Depending on the platform you want to use to collect leads, lead generation can refer to a wide variety of techniques, campaigns, and strategies. We discussed the best ways to capture leads once a site visitor has arrived. however, how do you first get them there?
Let’s explore lead generation tactics for a few well-known platforms.
- Facebook – Since Facebook started, it has been used to generate leads. Initially, businesses could use information from their bios and links attached to their posts to draw new visitors to their websites. However, there was a significant change in how companies used the channel to gather leads after Facebook Ads was introduced in 2007 and its algorithm started to favor accounts that made use of paid advertising. For this reason, Facebook developed Lead Ads. Additionally, Facebook has a feature that enables you to add a straightforward call-to-action button to your Facebook Page’s header, which will assist you in driving Facebook users to your website.
- Twitter – With Twitter Lead Gen Cards, you can generate leads within a tweet without ever leaving the platform. Users only need to click “Submit” to enter their lead information, which includes their name, email address, and Twitter username.
- LinkedIn – Since its inception, LinkedIn has grown its involvement in the advertising sector. LinkedIn developed Lead Gen Forms that make it simple to collect data because they auto-populate with a user’s profile information when they click a CTA.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements are those that appear on search engine result pages (SERPs). With 3.5 billion searches per day, Google is a prime location for any advertising campaign, especially lead generation. The success of your PPC campaign heavily depends on your budget, your target keywords, and other elements in addition to a smooth user flow.
- Business-to-Business (B2B) – A specific method of lead generation is needed for the B2B business model. Referrals are the best source for obtaining business leads, according to SmartInsights. In addition, effectiveness varies depending on the channel.
Take Away
Using what you’ve learned about lead generation for your company, add straightforward conversion assets to your website (or scrape the data from your current forms) to better understand your site visitors and the types of content that compel them to convert.
The fundamentals covered in this blog is just the beginning! Continue to develop excellent offers, CTAs, forms, and landing pages, and market them in multi-channel settings. To ensure that you’re consistently transferring high-quality leads, keep in close contact with your sales team. Additionally, never stop testing. You can improve lead quality and raise revenue by adjusting and testing each stage of the inbound lead generation process.