What if you could double or triple the number of qualified leads for your business. Imagine the impact this could have on your overall business performance!
The lead generation process is a business’s way to find quality leads and entice them to buy your products or services.
When companies actively look for leads in their market, they substantially increase their chances of gaining more valuable customers.
In this blog, you will learn the basics of lead generation, how to generate more leads, and the impact it can have on your business.
- What is a Lead?
- How Does The Lead Generation Process Work?
- Is Lead Generation Marketing Necessary?
- 7 Smart Ways to Generate More Leads
- Benefits & Expected Results of Lead Generation
- Implementing Lead Generation for Your Business
What is a Lead?
First, let us understand what the term “Lead” means. In short, a lead is a company’s potential customer. This includes anyone who is interested in or is likely to be interested in purchasing a company’s product or service.
How Does The Lead Generation Process Work?
Whether it’s a small coffee shop, a medical clinic or an innovative tech startup, every business needs customers to survive. The lead generation process involves making a prospective customer aware and interested in your product offerings and guiding them down the marketing funnel for lead nurturing. The ultimate goal of the lead generation process is to increase the likelihood that prospects become purchasing customers.
All these marketing terms might be a little too much for you to digest. Let’s break that down for you!
What is Lead Generation
Lead generation is the stage in which a business generates awareness and interest in their business to help attract prospective customers. During this stage, companies gather vital information about prospects such as their wants, needs, and preferences. This information can then be used to tailor their lead nurturing process to satisfy the customer. Once leads are generated they move on to the lead nurturing stage.
What is Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is defined as the process of guiding and building a relationship with leads during their journey through the marketing funnel. It guides prospects through the lead generation journey for them to easily find their way towards your company’s products and services. This is an essential part of a lead generation strategy, as it provides prospects with all the information they need to entice them to make a purchase.
What is a Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel includes all the steps a prospective client will be guided through before making a purchase. It includes awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation and finally, purchase.
Is Lead Generation Marketing Necessary?
Lead generation strategy is essential to startups and small businesses because customers are the bedrock of all businesses. Even with an amazing product, your company is unable to survive if there are no customers willing to buy from you. There is so much activity in today’s marketing that companies are bound to compete against a plethora of other similar businesses looking to acquire the same customers. Businesses that wait for customers to locate them, rather than actively seek their customers, are likely to be missing out on a significant portion of their revenue. After all, businesses that can generate more qualified leads will always make more sales.
7 Smart Ways to Generate More Leads
With the growth of digital lead generation, marketers often use digital marketing tactics to generate as many qualified leads as possible. Here’s a list of lead generating tactics that allow companies to get the best ROI on their lead generation strategy.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is considered to be the most effective way to generate leads. Around 90 billion emails are sent every day and there are no indications that this number will drop anytime soon. They allow you to send personalized emails to prospects who are likely to express interest in your company. It also allows for strategic targeted campaigns and follow-up emails based on their response.
Website / Landing pages
Companies looking for qualified leads should also focus on optimizing their website and their landing pages. A company’s website and landing pages are often the first points of contact between a company and its consumers. Thus, digital marketers should optimize websites and landing pages to improve their traffic and provide their leads with interesting and enticing content that encourages purchase.
Content Marketing
One of the best ways to generate leads is to organically attract prospects with the use of content marketing. Time and time again, statistics demonstrate that high-quality content that your prospective customers seek and are interested in, perform better than ads. Content marketing can range from written articles, blogs, infographics, videos and much more.
Search Engine Optimization
No matter how strong your online content is, it won’t generate any leads until it is visible to your target audience. SEO practices help your online content become highly ranked in search engine pages and increase customer awareness and reach.
Social Media Marketing
With approximately 45% of the worldwide population using social media and almost half of those people using it on a daily basis, social media is a great way to drive leads to businesses. A business that interacts with its prospects on social media channels is bound to generate more leads than those that do not. By making regular posts, engaging with prospects and participating in groups on popular social media channels, a business is practically guaranteed an increase in leads.
Paid Search or Online Advertising
Paid search advertising allows a company to reach out to an enormous amount of customers almost instantaneously. Paid advertising channels, notably pay per click advertising through Google Ads, is an effective method to reach your target audience and attract them to your products or services.
Collaboration / Partnerships
Last but not least, companies can substantially increase their leads by collaborating with complementary businesses, influencers or partners. One study suggests that over 90% of customers trust referrals over advertising. Thus, it can be very valuable to initiate strong long-term partnerships.
Benefits & Expected Results of Lead Generation
Enhance Brand Metrics
On a scale of 1-10, how well do you think your brand is known? Statistics show that over 80% of customers will turn to a familiar brand when they need to make a purchase. Lead generation informs and educates people within a target market about the products and services of a business. The awareness, reputation and credibility of a brand increases as more people hear and learn about them.
Increased Sales
Do you know that over 55% of business-to-business markets allocate more than half of their marketing budget to generate leads? Brands that incorporate lead generation as part of their marketing strategy are more likely to close on sales and convert prospects into returning customers.
Improve Return On Investment
An increase in the number of generated leads is directly proportional to an increase in revenue. In addition, due to their often lower cost than other marketing tactics, lead generation programs also contribute to a positive ROI. This makes it a must for every business.
Implementing Lead Generation for Your Business
There are 2 primary ways to implement a lead generation strategy for your business – DIY or hiring a marketing agency.
Doing your company’s own lead generation is recommended for companies that find themselves constrained by a tight budget. Performing lead generation yourself is going to cost you much less but unfortunately, it is unlikely to generate the same results. This is because lead generation takes time and requires specific skills. Although it is still possible to generate favorable results from performing your own lead generation, calling in a professional marketing agency remains the best option.
