If you have anything to do with marketing, sales, or general business growth, you’ve probably heard the term “lead generation” before. Company leaders and stakeholders are usually obsessed with generating as many “high quality” leads as possible. Salespeople spend their lives pursuing leads, while marketing teams work on finding and scoring leads on a daily basis.
Yet, while “lead generation” is clearly an important part of running a successful business, there are still many people who don’t understand what this term actually means.
Whether you’re in the B2C, or B2B world, it’s worth gaining a deeper understanding of what leads are, and why they’re so crucial to your company. Today, we’re going to give you a behind the scenes look at what lead generation means, how it’s done, and why you need it.
What is Lead Generation? Defining “Leads”
Before we can cover what lead generation is, and the techniques or strategies you might use to create leads, we first need define a “lead”. So, what is a lead?
A lead is a company, person, or entity with interest in your product or service. In other words, leads are your potential customers. When you collect leads, you’re curating contact information and details about the people you want to try and convert into consumers.
There are various ways to segment your leads in any business, such as:
Leads based on “Interest”
The level of interest a person shows in your company, product or service helps to define how valuable they are as a lead. “Warm” leads are people who have already shown interest in whatever you’re selling, by subscribing to your newsletters, contacting your sales team, or downloading an eBook.
Cold leads are the people who haven’t already showed interest in what you’re selling. You may have found these people as a result of lead generation tools or cold calling.
Leads based on “Enrichment”
Another way you can identify your leads is based on their “enrichment” level. Non-enriched leads are lacking in extra information. For instance, you might have a list of names with contact details connected to them, but no details about each person’s jobs or interests.
Enriched leads come with access to additional context. For example, you may know one of your leads runs a small company in the software landscape, and has a set of specific pain points they’re trying to address. The more enriched your leads are before you give them to your sales team, the easier it is to customize the sales pitch to each individual.
What are Qualified Leads?
When identifying your leads, you may define them based on their “qualification”, or stage in the sales funnel. There are various different kinds of qualified leads to consider in your lead generation strategies, including:
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): A marketing qualified leads has shown an interest in your company, but they might not be ready to make a purchase yet. They may have interacted with your inbound marketing strategies, such as your blogs or newsletters, but they haven’t reached out and asked for prices or sales information.
- Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): A sales qualified lead is someone who expresses clear interest in becoming a customer. They might have filled out a form to have someone from your sales funnel contact them. Or they may have signed up for webinars which teach them how to use your products or services.
- Product Qualified Leads (PQL): A product qualified leads has already taken steps to become a paying client with your business. They’re similar to SQLs, but they usually will have started interacting with your product in some way. For instance, they might have downloaded your free trial, or agreed to use a demo of your tool.
What is Lead Scoring?
One point to keep in mind before you dive into any lead generation activities, is that not all leads are created equally. The right lead for your business is the one that can generate the biggest return for the lowest investment. Lead scoring is the method companies use to determine which leads are most valuable to their sales pipeline.
Using lead generation software, companies can assign a score to the leads they collect, defining where each person sits on a scale from “might be interested” to “ready to buy”. The score you give your lead will depend on the action they’ve taken and the information they’ve provided so far, as well as the engagement they’ve had with your brand.
For instance, you might use your lead management system to automatically score leads higher when they request a call back from your sales team. It’s also possible to use lead scoring to define which of your leads are most likely to turn into brand advocates. If you have a number of paying customers, scoring their engagement levels can help you to identify which types of leads are more likely to take part in referral campaigns and other strategies.
What is Lead Generation? The Basics
So, now you know what it means to bring new leads to your business, we can look at the definition of “lead generation”. If leads are your potential customers, lead generation is the process you use to find the people who might be interested in converting. It’s the first step in the sales funnel, designed to help you determine who you can sell to.
Both B2C and B2B marketers use different forms of “lead generation” to create lists of potential contacts they can reach for sales. The lead generation strategies and techniques your business uses will usually fall into two categories:
Inbound lead generation:
Inbound lead generation is a permission-based process which involves having a customer come to you. With inbound marketing strategies, like content marketing and social media, companies place their company in front of their target audience and try to convince them to get in touch.
If the inbound strategy is successful, your lead will click on your CTA, and give you their details so you can get in touch. Some of the most common inbound lead generation strategies include:
- Content marketing: Around 80% of companies today use content marketing for lead generation. Infographics, email newsletters, blog posts, webinars, and SEO optimized content all fall into this category. The type of content marketing you use will depend on your user personas. Some people will be more drawn to guides and articles, while others will prefer videos, and podcasts. Analyzing engagement rates for your content should help you to define which strategies work best for you.
- SEO: Content marketing and SEO often go hand-in-hand. With search engine optimization, you focus on improving your position in the search engines when customers search for a specific phrase or word. For instance, you might try to boost your chances of ranking for “lead generation company”, with specific pieces of content and blogs. Around 59% of B2B marketers say SEO has the biggest impact on their lead generation.
- Social media: Social media has become one of the most valuable tools for lead generation. It’s a great way to connect with your audience through both paid and organic campaigns. Plus, you can collect lists of people to connect with for your outbound marketing efforts too. Social media marketing gives companies a chance to build relationships with leads and nurture them, while collecting more data about each possible customer.
Outbound lead generation:
With outbound lead generation, you approach your prospects, rather than encouraging them to come to you. Outbound marketing and lead creations are less common these days, because they’re often seen as disruptive. However, they can still be effective in some business environments.
With outbound campaigns, you track down potential customers and reach out to them via cold calling or emails. Some of the most common types of outbound lead generation methods include:
- PPC: Pay-per-click involves paying for ads to attract people to specific pages on your website. Usually, you’ll pay for an ad on a social media platform or search engine, and connect a CTA button to a specific landing page. When a customer clicks onto the landing page, you can offer them a “lead magnet”. This is a free gift designed to encourage contacts to give you their details, such as a download or eBook.
- Cold outreach: Cold outreach involves sourcing possible leads from various environments, then reaching out to those potential customers directly. There are email finder tools which can help with this, particularly if you’re looking for B2B contact details. Cold outreach is usually associated most with “cold calling”, but today, it’s possible to reach out to possible leads on a range of different platforms. You can send cold emails, connect with people through cold social media messages, and even send cold texts.
- Offline marketing: Various forms of offline marketing also count as outbound lead generation. For instance, you can generate leads by visiting an event in-person and collecting contact details from the people you meet. It’s also possible to convince people to interact with your business by sending flyers in the post.
Why is Lead Generation Important?
Lead generation is essentially the core of any marketing strategy. Whenever you’re creating marketing campaigns for your business, your aim is to bring as many new customers to your business as possible, so you can continue to convert new clients.
While success in the business world requires a strong focus on delighting and retaining your existing customers, you still need to make sure you’re constantly refilling your customer pipeline with new prospects. After all, ever company experiences a certain level of “customer churn”, when clients stop purchasing from you. An effective lead generation campaign ensures you can:
- Target the right people: Taking an active and strategic approach to lead generation means you can focus your marketing efforts on the right customers or audience personas. This improves your chances of connecting with “qualified leads” that are more likely to convert, and reduces the money you spend on trying to sell to unqualified leads.
- Build brand awareness: The lead generation strategies you use to connect with high-quality leads throughout the customer journey also helps to boost your brand image. Creating social media or blog content, sharing thought leadership posts, and producing webinars all helps you to stand out from the competition. It also improves your credibility, and makes it easier for salespeople to get conversions.
- Generate useful data: Using lead generation software and strategies effectively will help you to experiment with your sales funnel. You’ll be able to collect information about your target audience, and which lead nurturing campaigns best. You’ll also gain insights into the details of your most valuable audience members with the highest “lead score”. This leads to the creation of more accurate customer personas.
- Increase revenue: Perhaps most importantly, bringing high-quality leads into your business through multiple forms of outreach and different marketing channels increases your chances of converting customers. The more customers you can sell to, the more profits you make. You can even use lead generation strategies to help your business break into new sectors.
Top Tips for Better Lead Generation Campaigns
There are a number of different ways to generate leads in today’s digitally evolving world. Generally, the aim of any lead generation campaign is to collect as much information as possible about potential leads, such as their phone number, interest levels, and pain points.
Effectively collecting information about the right leads is a process which takes time and practice. There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy, but there are things you can do to improve your chances of success, such as:
Use the Right Lead Generation Tools
Lead generation tools are specially designed software solutions built to improve your chances of finding and capturing leads. The companies who generate the most success from the lead generation process are generally those who have a formal system in place for lead management.
Lead generation tools come in a range of different formats, including:
- Email lookup tools: Email lookup tools are designed to help you find potential leads to connect with through outbound campaigns. The software allows you to pull email addresses from websites and social media pages, then verify them before getting in touch.
- Email outreach tools: Email outreach tools allow companies to create special email campaigns, sequences and scheduled follow-up messages to connect with their customers. They’re a time of email marketing automation solution, intended to help you connect with and nurture your leads.
- Automation tools: Sales and marketing automation tools can combine a number of the features companies need to generate leads into one package. They can automate the process of scoring leads, send notifications to sales teams on when they should follow up with contacts and so on. You can also automatically track when a lead’s status changes.
- Form scraping tools: Form scraping tools collect submissions from your website contact forms to help consolidate your leads into your contact database. These often integrate with your CRM, or “Customer Relationship Management” tools, to help you keep track of the people in your sales funnel, and how close they might be to converting.
- Visitor tracking tools: Visitor tracking tools and heatmaps allow you to evaluate how people interact with the marketing campaigns and assets you use to collect and convert leads. These solutions can also come with A/B testing functionality, so you can measure how likely a customer is to convert on one page compared to another.
Other forms of lead generation tools companies can use to enhance their chances of success include everything from CTA templates to communication tools, like chatbots for your website.
Deliver Valuable Offers Throughout the Buying Cycle
To effectively generate, nurture, and convert sales leads, companies need to be able to build relationships with prospects throughout the buying cycle. When leads approach your business, they’re likely to be in various stages within the “sales funnel”. For instance, if you connect with a lead during the “awareness” stage, they’ll likely to be most interested in reading entertaining content, and finding out what your business can do for them.
If your lead is in the “comparison” stage of the sales funnel, they’ll want to see how your solutions compare to the existing offers available on the market. The best lead generation strategies will include content and valuable offers for customers wherever they are in the buying journey. Each piece of content you produce, and every call-to-action should move your customer further towards your sales team, while helping you to collect valuable information.
To ensure you’re generating leads effectively, and increasing your conversion rates, you’ll need to measure the results of your lead generation campaigns consistently, and track the engagement of your customers when interacting with your brand.
Use Powerful CTAs and Landing Pages
Lead generation requires companies to gently nudge their customers towards the right action over and over again. When a prospect arrives on your website, you’ll want to encourage them to sign up for your newsletter, or get in touch with your team. When someone reads your emails, you’ll want them to click back into your website, and check out your latest offers.
In order to keep positively influencing your customers, you’ll need to create engaging and powerful “CTA” or “Call to Action” content. These are buttons or links which push your customers to take action with carefully crafted language.
Alongside your CTAs, you’ll also need the right landing pages intended to convert your audience. Landing pages are the tools you’ll use to collect information from your target audience. Make sure you build them with fantastic lead magnets or offers, to grab your customer’s attention. Plus, remember to experiment with your forms to ensure you’re not asking for too much information.
Engage your sales and marketing teams
Some companies see lead generation as a task for marketing teams, while others believe it’s the responsibility of the sales team. The reality is both of these groups need to work together to ensure you’re getting the best leads. Your sales professionals need to provide your marketing team with the right information about your target audience and the people who convert, so they can tailor their inbound methods, from LinkedIn ads, to blog posts.
At the same time, your marketing professionals need to provide sales teams with information about which lead gen tactics have engaged your audience, so they know what to focus on when speaking to potential customers. Whether you’re engaged in B2C or B2B lead generation, it’s important to make sure your sales and marketing professionals are aligned.
Experiment, Analyze, and Optimize
As mentioned above, the same lead generation techniques won’t necessarily provide the same results for every brand. The only way to make sure you’re consistently building your sales pipeline, is to experiment, analyze, and optimize. Use marketing tools to track metrics about audience engagement, click-through rates, impressions, and conversions.
Leverage heat mapping functionality and visitor tracking tools to find out how your audience navigates your website, and what convinces them to get in touch with your team. Certain lead generation strategies even come with analytical tools built in. For instance, if you’re connecting with your audience on social media, you can use your social insights to learn more about your target market, and what convinces them to click.
The more valuable metrics and insights you collect, the easier it will be to build lead generation strategies which generate valuable results.
Ready to Start Your Lead Generation Strategy?
No matter which industry you’re in, what kind of company you run, or what types of customers you’re trying to reach, lead generation is likely to be an essential part of making your venture a success. Committing to building the right lead generation campaigns, and experimenting with different strategies should ensure you’re ready to outshine your competition, and pull new opportunities towards your organization.
Now you know what lead generation is, how it works, and what’s involved in getting a lead generation strategy started, it’s up to you to get out there and start collecting those leads.
