What Is A Lead In Business?
A lead is any person who has shown signs that they can potentially be a customer. A person is deemed to be a lead if they have interacted with your content, marketing material, or business in some way, or inquired about your products or services.
Depending on the level of interest they have shown in what you are selling, leads are placed in different baskets in a process called lead qualification.
Some leads may still be assessing their options and not be ready to buy right away. These will need to be nurtured for a while longer. In essence, you don’t want to waste your sales team’s time by sending them unqualified leads that aren’t ready to buy.
On the opposite end of the funnel are hot leads that are ready to buy. These are handed down to sales as marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). If sales agree with marketing’s assessment, they will become sales-qualified leads (SQLs) that will hopefully convert into a sale soon.
Now that we know what a lead is, let’s tackle what it means to generate leads:
What Is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the method of recruiting prospects to your business and maintaining them to the point of conversion. It involves identifying people who are interested in your product or service and nurturing their interest until they become paying customers.
The more high-quality leads you pass over to your sales team, the more sales you can potentially make. Poor-quality leads aren’t necessarily people who can’t afford what you are selling; they are mostly people who don’t have a need for it.
A person does not become a lead until they have shown you in some way that they may be interested in your company’s products. It is a waste of marketing dollars to pursue a supposed lead that may never become a customer because they don’t have a need for what you are selling.
That’s not to say you cannot self-generate leads. Application forms, blog articles, discounts, live shows, and online material are all effective tools to generate leads high-quality leads. This is the inbound strategy of attracting potential customers to your business.
What Are The 4 Main Types Of Leads In Marketing?
The different types of leads in marketing are classified as follows: 1 Qualified Marketing Lead (MQL)
Marketing qualified leads are individuals that have expressed interest in what you are selling but may not be ready to buy yet. An example of an MQL is a website visitor who opts into your email list or who downloads a free resource on your website, like an e-book or whitepaper.
2 Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
Sales-qualified leads are contacts who have demonstrated an explicit likelihood they will become a paying customer. An example of an SQL is a contact who completes a form to inquire about your service or product, indicating they are ready to be sold to.
3 Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
PQLs are contacts who have tried your product and completed steps that indicate a desire to become a paying client. PQLs are often used by businesses that offer a free or restricted form of their product with a paid upgrade option, which is popular with SaaS companies.
A PQL will typically first try the lite option but will eventually find it too limited for their needs, which makes it easier for salespeople to sell them on the premium, upgrade plan that has more features.
4 Service Qualified Prospect
Service-qualified leads are connections or users who have indicated to your customer service rep that they are interested in a new product or service you are offering. At this point, the customer service representative will hand the customer to the relevant salesperson.
Lead generation has existed for a long period of time, but approaches have evolved beyond merely identifying a customer early in their sales cycle and routing them to the sales team.
Because the self-directed consumer is overwhelmed with information, it is critical to develop fresh, innovative strategies for breaking through the clutter and reaching potential consumers.
Rather than relying on mass marketing and email blasts to acquire customers, marketers must focus on being discovered and developing connections with potential customers.
Some companies seem to do just fine without a planned lead-generation strategy in place. So you may still ask, why is it important to generate leads or potential customers for your brand?
Importance Of Lead Generation
When you started your business, you almost certainly targeted a certain demographic as your ideal customer. You had a clear idea of the profile of a person who may buy your product.
Guess what? By researching other problems your product can solve, you can expand the size of your market. These people with unmet needs are prospects you could pursue. Lead generation helps you to gather information about those prospects.
Perhaps you’re seeing engagement from businesses and job roles that aren’t targeted in your marketing initiatives. With lead generation, you’ll notice this pattern and can capitalize on it.
Additional advantages of lead creation include the following:
1 Increase Your Connections
Lead generation activities are heavily reliant on content production and communication. It entails creating high-quality material and initiating dialogues on social media platforms. The objective is to publish excellent material and leverage that content to generate leads.
If your content marketing is strategically planned with your target market in mind, you will establish yourself as an industry thought leader.
As a result, you’ll develop a community of experts that admire and support your brand. Some will become consumers, while others will become brand champions.
2 Collect More Customer Reviews
When it comes to encouraging prospects to become clients, social proof is critical. And there is no better way to do it than through a testimonial from a previous client.
However, customers are not always forthcoming with reviews and feedback. You often have to ask. And it is easier to do this if there is an existing relationship with the customer that you have cultivated through the lead generation and nurturing process.
Customer reviews are a trust signal that boosts your authority in search engines and helps cultivate a more favorable image online. The testimonials you obtain from your customers can be included in your marketing assets, like your landing and product pages, ads, videos, blog posts, and infographics.
3 Boost Your Revenue
When done properly, lead generation has a direct effect on sales. It can significantly increase your brand’s capacity to reach out to targeted prospects.
The use of appropriate, persuasive language, irresistible offers, and marketing materials that pique the attention of targeted audiences will make it easier to attract the attention of quality leads, allowing sales teams to convert them more easily.
The revenue growth potential is enormous, particularly when you focus on the interests and pain points of your audience.
4 Create New Commercial Opportunities
Lead generation is not just for identifying prospects. It can unlock new commercial opportunities. As an example, a non-competing business in your sector can approach you about the possibility of co-hosting a webinar.
The webinar gives you a larger audience of people who may not have known they have a need for what your business offers or who may know someone who has. In a way, this collaboration opens a new opportunity you may not have discovered otherwise.
Also, since both brands stand to benefit, the collaboration can create a mutually beneficial strategic partnership.
The Anatomy Of A Successful Lead Generation Campaign
Just as leads themselves, lead generation campaigns are not created equal. Some produce high-quality leads that don’t need much nurturing to convert into paying customers. Others churn out low-quality leads that may never convert.
Let’s look at the boxes your lead generation campaign needs to tick to produce enough high-quality leads for your business
1 Produces a Large Volume of Leads
Some leads are going to fall through the cracks in your funnel. Others will prove not to be a good fit. For these reasons, you want to be generating a large volume of leads to guarantee sales growth.
If you’re optimizing an existing lead gen system, you may want to re-examine your audience demographics, buyer path, channels, and strategies. Look at your buyer personas again to be sure they are a true representation of a person who could potentially become a valuable customer for your business.
Keep your goals, consumer problems, and difficulties in mind as you create content that addresses your prospects’ pain points and which nurtures those relationships—you’ll soon have a funnel brimming with high-quality leads.
Speaking of high-quality leads:
2 Defines what a high-quality lead looks like for your business
There are many reasons why your sales staff may be having difficulties converting leads into clients. For a smooth lead gen operation, sales and marketing must agree on what makes a qualified lead and when that lead should be passed over to sales teams, bearing in mind that 96% of visitors to your website are not yet ready to purchase.
If leads are not warm enough, they may become irritated if salespeople approach them too soon. Buyers nowadays generally do not want to be marketed to. While lead quality is critical, it is a significant challenge for marketers that reduce the number of qualified leads they can generate. Still, you would rather have a few qualified leads than a whole bucket of contacts that may never convert.
3 Has a comprehensive lead scoring model in place
Once you’ve gathered your leads, you must score them for their readiness to buy. If they aren’t ready, nurture them, gauging their interest levels until you deem them ready to be passed over to sales.
According to Forrester, customers are often between 75% and 90% of the way through their purchasing journey before contacting the vendor, after conducting their own research. Bear this in mind when considering where sales should enter the funnel.
4 Has clear metrics and KPIs for measuring performance
There has to be a way to measure the effectiveness of your lead generation initiatives. To do this, you must first develop a strategy and establish what to assess, when to qualify, and how to start measuring.
Choose KPIs that demonstrate how marketing is boosting overall effectiveness, producing qualified leads, accelerating the velocity of the sales funnel, and enhancing marketing and sales alignment by the use of lead generation tools.
5 Is scalable
If your lead generation approach has not yet caught up to the self-directed buyer’s era, it’s time to rethink your approach. Fortunately, this type of buyer is easier to identify, recruit, and nurture. They have a digital trail that follows them and which you can tap into with the help of lead generation software like LeadFuze.
Utilizing contemporary lead generation software allows you to create a formal system for organizing and storing your leads. This organized approach produces more predictable results.
The bigger benefit of using lead generation software is it allows you to significantly scale your lead generation initiatives.
How To Generate Leads Online – 11 Tricks That Can Supercharge Your Lead Generation
Lead generation can be a struggle at first. So if you are starting out, you may be asking, how can I improve my lead generation skills?
Here are 11 of our tried-and-tested lead generation tricks:
1 Set up an email marketing campaign to capture leads earlier in their journey
Email is an excellent way to connect with people who are already familiar with your brand, product, or service. It’s much simpler to ask individuals to take action now that they’ve opted into your email list.
Emails are infamously crowded, so utilize CTAs with engaging text and an attention-grabbing design to capture your subscriber’s interest.
As per Emma, 59% of businesses choose email as their most effective revenue-generating channel. While everybody who subscribes to your email list is already a prospective lead, email is critical for determining whether certain marketing leads are truly feasible.
While content generates volume, email assists in sorting the gold. And, certainly, cold email outreach may be used to create sales leads.
2 Add search and retargeting ads to the mix
If leads won’t come to you, go to them using ads. Everyone is pouring money into Google in an attempt to secure their business the all-important #1 place. This has to be because the evidence is there that search advertising has a good return on investment.
Be careful, though, PPC ads can be a money pit if you don’t know what you are doing.
As it turns out, just 6% of terms in a typical Search Ads account have ever resulted in a transaction. That means that 94 percent of keywords in Search Ad accounts are ineffective.
To be honest, worse than doing nothing. PPC ads are costly.
To that end, you have to master the three T’s of Search Ads: Time, Target, and Track. Do that and you will eventually create an exceptionally strong lead-generating engine that will fuel your business.
Much like its text-based equivalents, billboard (or display) advertisements across virtually any channel may be an effective source of B2B leads, but they need far more work.
They nevertheless require the same level of attention to detail about timing, targeting, and tracking. However, unlike text-only advertisements, display ads truly succeed when combined with strong creativity.
Producing effective banner advertisements is highly dependent on the resources available to your marketing team. More precisely, if they can collaborate with salespeople to determine the right messaging to use and the best offers to promote, they can create something spectacular.
If you have some cash and want to attempt something low-effort, the first step may be to retarget your website visitors with some high-quality lead magnet material.
And if you’re serious about experimenting with PPC, consider hiring a marketing agency that specializes in paid recruitment to assist you.
3 Invest in high-quality content marketing
While valuable content may be extremely beneficial for B2B lead generation, it comes with a slew of limitations. Creating high-quality content needs, arguably, an enormous amount of preparation, resources, and sheer effort than, say, emails.
Research papers, illustrations, eBooks, and white papers of high quality may take months to create when you factor in the time required to collect data, evaluate it, and then package your results into something truly valuable.
To say nothing of seminars or podcasts!
This is not to frighten you from leveraging content to create inbound leads. On the contrary, you certainly should. Simply invest a little extra time in planning it.
And if you find that all of this seems too intimidating or that you lack the necessary resources in-house, seek out freelancers for assistance. There are legions of brilliant marketers waiting to assist you.
4 Get involved in events
During Covid, many events moved online. As the Covid safety risks subside, other events will stay online. These are events you would not have been able to attend physically. So take advantage to network, grow your brand, and give your lead generation a boost.
Once the physical events resume, make it a point to attend a few to spread your net for capturing new leads as wide as you can.
When it comes to events, it is critical that your sales and marketing teams work together to establish common goals and decide which events to attend.
Depending on your sector, completing transactions on the expo floor may be a reach. Rather than that, utilize it as an opportunity to engage sales in discussion with prospects and then transfer their information to advertising so they can cultivate them if necessary.
Additionally, if you pay to attend events, you will almost always get access to the event’s connection database.
5 Get blogging
The benefit of using your blog articles to promote your business is you can completely personalize the content to the intended audience.
So, if your offer is a video tutorial on how to generate more leads, you may create a blog article on how to write cold emails… making your CTA very useful and effortless to click.
6 Tap into social media
If you know where to search, social media can be an excellent source of leads. For example, many social media sites have groups where consumers who share a common interest congregate.
However, many of these online groups have rules that prohibit explicitly commercial content, so always read the rules before publishing.
So, how can you leverage these online groups to generate leads? Locate a few groups that appear to be related to the issue you’re attempting to resolve.
Ask yourself, “where would my potential customers socialize?” Once you get there, take a look at the post history to ensure that it is not all spam.
Before you begin interacting you may need to be approved first, which entails answering a few questions for the administrators to ascertain that you share the group members’ common interests.
Once admitted post questions and respond to others’ questions. Be genuinely helpful and people will be more inclined to engage with your posts. If you discover problems your product or service can help solve, simply send the person a direct message. Remember to respond to their post in the comments section as they may miss your direct message.
7 Optimize your website and landing pages
Your homepage serves as a storefront. This is your chance to capture a visitor’s interest and convert them into a buyer.
While an occasional error is unavoidable, ensuring that your website functions smoothly and loads quickly are important for successful lead generation.The slower your website loads, the more likely it is that your visitors will abandon it before reading your content, which is a wasted opportunity.
This is a topic worthy of its own post, but here’s the short version:
Visit Google’s PageSpeed Insights to determine the performance of your home page. Use the tool’s recommendations to re-optimize your website and improve user experience.
Bear in mind the quality of your site’s usability has a direct influence on its rankings on search engines. How high you rank in Google for target terms relevant to your business and the amount of and quality of the traffic you attract has an immediate effect on your ability to create B2B leads that are more likely to buy from you.
8 Invest in lead generation tools
The most effective marketing teams manage and organize their leads using a structured framework. That is where lead gen software and tools come in.
How much information do you have on the people that visit your website? Do you have their names and email addresses? How about the sites they viewed, how they navigated, and what they did before, during, and following the completion of a lead conversion form on your website?
If you don’t have the answers to all these questions, you’re likely experiencing difficulty engaging with the visitors to your site and missing a big opportunity. There are various tools available that will help you capture leads on your website. Consider investing in one.
9 Up your SEO game
Search Engine Optimization is a method of attracting organic search traffic to your website.
Rather than paying for SERP advertisements, SEO involves tweaking certain elements of your website architecture and content for search engine algorithms to better understand what your business is about. This may be accomplished by the use of targeted keywords and accompanying tactics, content updates, and the creation of new content, depending on your goals.
10 Consider investing in Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing is a form of internet advertising in which advertisers pay search engines like Google to display advertisements on their search engine results pages (SERPS).
Because many people rely on search engines to navigate the internet, search engine marketing is an excellent tactic for increasing your brand’s visibility to your intended audience and eventually generating traffic to the site.
11 Get involved in Q&A forums
Well-organized virtual forums foster an environment where members feel seen and heard and are more encouraged to share their experiences and ask pertinent questions.
Niche forums that are founded on a common interest or pain point make an excellent channel to target for your lead generation. While you are not going to fill your sales pipeline with a large volume of leads from these niche forums, the leads you do get are likely going to be more qualified.
While consumer companies increasingly gravitate toward social networks as customer forums decline, niche communities frequently provide a rich, primary source of industry information for B2b companies. You just need to be picky about the forums you join and participate in.
So you have your leads! What happens next?
What Comes After Lead Generation?
What comes after lead generation is lead management. This includes lead nurturing and all other efforts that guarantee you don’t lose the lead before they convert. This is what turns leads into potential customers.
Acquiring a lead is akin to having a shopper in your physical store, who walks around browsing your many offerings. Because they have yet to approach a salesperson with a specific request, they may yet walk out without buying. How you handle them here is akin to what happens after lead generation.
So after you acquire a lead, you must give them your attention. Show them you appreciate their interest in your product. If you are using an inbound lead generation strategy, you might send them a thank you email after they have opted into your email list, attended your webinar, or downloaded your whitepaper.
Following those pleasantries, you want to swiftly usher them into the next stage of their lifecycle with your business. Depending on their interest level, which you have to score them on, they may not be ready to be handed over to sales. So you group them into baskets according to their interest level and readiness to make a purchase.
The aim of segmenting your leads is to nurture them with targeted educational content until they are warm enough to proceed to the next stage of the funnel.
How do you nurture your leads?
You nurture your leads by feeding them helpful content. A lead that knows enough about a problem they are seeking a solution for can make faster, more informed, more favorable decisions about your offer.
Your content at this stage should be more educational than commercial. Be genuinely helpful and solve problems with your content.
As they become more informed about their problem and what solution they seek they will start to warm up to more commercial content. This is the time to switch up your content by gently offering your product as a solution. Explain your products’ features and benefits and throw in some social proof from existing customers.
At this point, sales should now take over. The lead is successfully nurtured and is ready for a sales conversation.
Use Lead Generation To Feed Your Sales Pipeline
Whether you need to generate leads for your business or just want a little help on how to get more customers, the lead generation tips we have shared here should give you a solid platform to start from. Or, if you are short on time and want to simplify your lead generation with a ready-made tool, try LeadFuze.