Lead generation is an essential and critical step in every marketing strategy. It is known to be one of the most effective growth fundamentals for businesses.
According to one Marketo study, companies using effective lead generation practices have achieved approximately 133% more revenue than the companies who are not using this strategy.
What is lead generation?
It is the process of converting an interested stranger into a customer. It is an approach that you will use to support, attract and capture a lead (or potential new customer) in a more effective way.
What is a lead?
A lead is a potential prospect who has shown his interest in your services or products via sharing his contact information with you, either by email or phone.
Why do you need lead generation?
Here are the reasons which are essential for every business:
- To reach out right customers
- Opportunity to collect valuable information
- Increased awareness
- Improved brand loyalty
What are MQLs and SQLs
MQL stands for Marketing qualified leads. These are prospects who look promising but may not be ready to buy just yet.
However, on the other hand, SQLs or B2B sales-qualified leads, are the prospects who are interested in your product or service and now ready to be taken to the next step after analyzing both marketing and sales teams.
Why is Lead Generation Important?
Lead generation is an essential process for both sales and marketing departments within your business. This process will not only help you capture new leads but will help you to generate the right ones as well.
The 4 Phases of the Lead Generation Process
Here are the most important phases that you should consider in this regard:
1. The Content Strategy Phase
Here are the essential steps that you must know:
- Visualize your potential audience with a detailed persona. This is important to understand your potential reader and help you to align your message to specific people.
- The next step is to figure out how you will convert this target audience into a high-quality lead with your content. The best way here is to consider your audience’s pain points and provide concise visuals to soothe them quickly. You can convince your potential audience by:
- Adding value to your target audience
- Offering content that is quick and easy to digest
- Solving their problems
To make the most out of your content, start repurposing it. It means use your top-performing content, reformat that and reuse it across multiple channels.
You can even use a lead magnet here as well to convert your potential audience into a lead. Consider lead magnet as an incentive that you will offer to your target audience for their contact information. A lead magnet is absolute to convert your audience into a quality lead.
2. The Visual Phase
Overall, the visuals are undoubtedly awesome. It is important to incorporate more visuals in your lead generation process. You can either add these in your content or use visuals to generate leads directly. Even though there is no fit for all formulas regarding which visuals should be used.
However, here are some recommendations to consider in this regard:
- Infographics
Infographics are meant to stay here for longer. So you can easily summarize your best performing content with infographics.
- eBooks and guides
These are not only the best to generate leads but great to connect with your audience as well.
- Presentation and Webinars
These are easier alternative to guides or eBooks to generate leads. As these take less time and can attract more people with ease.
- Videos
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then undoubtedly, a video can worth a thousand pictures as well. Incorporating a video in your content can be great as 87% of marketers prefer to use videos in their content. Overall, you can use any of your preferred visual format to attract more leads easily.
3. The Promotional Phase
So, after having a perfect piece of content and knowing your audience well, it is time to enter promotional phase.
Here you have to create a compelling landing page that you will connect with your:
- PPC ads
- Social media posts
- Promo emails
This will help you to bring more traffic to your landing page and generate more leads here with ease.
4. The Nurturing Phase
In this phase, you will develop a positive relationships with your customers at each stage of your journey. Here you will let your leads know how your services or products are effective for them. Don’t bombard them with emails enlisting your product features, rather:
- Gain trust
- Add value
- Educate your audience
Develop a nurturing strategy that can deliver you 100% positive results
Lead Generation and best-practice strategies for B2B companies.
Lead Generation Challenges
Here are some of the key challenges that you must know:
- How to come up with the right offer for your target audience?
- How you can engage enough people to generate a quality leads list?
- How to measure the lead generation campaign’s success rate?
Lead Generation Strategy
There are a couple of elements involved in terms of sources from which you can generate leads or contacts for new business.
- Facebook Lead Generation
Facebook ads and algorithms are favoring the accounts in the process that are using paid ads.
- Twitter Lead Generation
Twitter allows you to use lead generation cards which can let you generate leads within your tweets. These cards can pull twitter username, email, and user’s name with ease.
- LinkedIn Lead Generation
LinkedIn is offering vast space to advertise since its earlier days. With lead generation forms through LinkedIn, you can capture user data including what and when they click to perform your CTA.
- PPC Lead Generation
With 3.5 billion daily searches, Google has become a prime location for your ads. However, you can use PPC ads to generate leads as well.
- B2B Lead Generation
This is a specific business model that comes up with certain requirements. You can use different strategies to capture B2B leads easily.
- Search Engine Optimization
As per HubSpot, SEO is the major resource for capturing quality business leads. You can use different SEO tactics for more effectiveness.
Lead Generation Tools
There are numerous lead generation tools available that help to make the process easier and automated. Here are some of the best options enlisted for your ease:
- Albacross
- JotForm
- Marketo
- HubSpot
Lead Generation Trends
Here are some of the most common trends to consider for 2021:
- Chatbots: These are crazily useful. Almost every platform is leveraging the effectiveness of chatbots to create leads for their businesses. SaaS companies using chatbots are experiencing 4x conversion in their leads’ growth.
- Adding CTAs: These are meant to direct your audience to perform a specific action.
- Video Marketing: Using video marketing has become the latest trend to boost your efforts.
Lead Generation Metrics
Here are the common metrics that you can consider:
- Cost per lead
- Click through Rate
- Conversion rate
- Time to convert
- CPM or CPC
- ROI
Lead Generation vs. Demand Generation
Lead generation is a process of collecting certain information such as contact information and current company information about your potential prospects.
Demand Generation is a strategy for creating or increasing the need of your service or product. You can consider raising awareness about your product as an effective pillar of your demand generation strategy.
If you are looking for ways to engage your audience and develop smart lead generation strategies, Bython Media can help. With effective content marketing and lead generation solutions, your company can be nurturing your existing client base and reaching new clients far into the future. Contact us today.
