What is Lead Generation And Why is It Important For The Business?
This guide will lead to understand the following:
- What lead generation means in the digital world
- Benefits of lead generation
- Different methods of lead generation
- Trends and successful lead generation examples
- Tools & strategies to run your lead generation campaign
“For 91% marketers, lead generation is their primary goal and also one of the most challenging one” (Ruler analytics)
If you reach the end of this post, you are ready to take your first step into applying lead generation and it’s not as hard as it seems!
Lead Generation Myths & Wrong Perceptions
Myth #1- Capturing leads through direct advertising
In today’s time, capturing leads through email blasting and high outbound oriented lead generation doesn’t work. In fact, lead generation in digital marketing is almost always inbound lead generation. This is evident from the fact that 97% of people now ignore cold calls and the same goes for cold mailing.
Myth #2- Once you start the process, it keeps on going
Planning, reviewing and adapting is the key to gaining new leads on a consistent basis. The way you generated leads 6 months back won’t work now!
Myth #3- All you need is a website and you have your leads coming
Just developing a website isn’t enough for gaining leads. You need valuable content, SEO, reach and engagement on your website.
Myth #4- Only experts can generate leads, other suck at it
With systematic and scientific approach, anyone can get good at generating leads. So, you don’t need to hire an expensive expert for this job!
So, What Is Lead Generation?
To understand lead generation, the following ideas might help you:
- Any person who shows interest in your company, product, service or your brand can be generally categorized as a lead. So, this could happen naturally.
- Lead generation is the process through which you can actually create that interest or reach those people who show interest in your brand.
- In modern times, you set the bait, let people reach you and gradually go down the sales funnel until they become customers.
- Lead generation starts at the top of the sales funnel where they interact with your brand in some way through social media messages, landing pages, filling out a form or simply downloading an ebook using their google account.
B2b Vs B2c Lead Generation- Is There Any Difference In Approach?
There’s definitely a difference between B2B and B2C lead generation.
For B2C, where you market directly to individual consumers, highly focused lead generation isn’t always needed. Lead generation in B2C becomes applicable when the product is high priced and the target group is specialized. Only then is it worth it.
Lead generation is almost always applicable to B2B where you have to develop a personalized connection with the customer. In B2B, you are selling your product to a business. So, the higher investment will pay off eventually.
The difference in approach is you give more value in your lead generation campaign when it comes to B2B. Because there is a need to create a trust before you can sell your high ticket item.
In normal B2C cases, you can take a more automated approach!
6 Reasons Why Lead Generation Is Extremely Important For Your Business
1.Targeting the right customer segment
Through the lead generation process, you end up targeting the right customers for your business. There’s no point marketing and advertising to the people who hardly care about your business.
In fact, the ones that show minor interest in the form of visiting your sales page, clicking an ad, etc. are the ones that will more likely convert. And after one or two lead generation campaigns, you can find your appropriate target audience.
2. More leads means more awareness
During a lead generation campaign, effort is made to educate people about your product and services. And if the experience is memorable, this creates a sort of brand awareness. Your brand will be more known to people and thus the word of mouth will also increase.
3. A sure way to collect valuable prospect credentials
Somewhere along your sales funnel, people will leave their personal information in the form of email, phone number or their social media account. This information is vital. You can do so much with them.
You can send your latest content or offers to them and there’s a high chance of conversion as these p[eople have already shown interest in your brand.
4. More leads means more revenue
It’s proven that lead generation can increase revenue by as much as 133%.
Logically, when you are just marketing to mass without any objective of gaining leads, you end up with an untargeted group. So, you end up making less revenue.
If you push your sales towards qualified leads, the conversion rate is higher. Even if the conversion rate is 10-20%, it’s still higher than other forms of marketing.
5. Expansion of target market
Imagine you are selling a specific beauty product to female customers of age 20-25. And you expect females of this age range to become your lead.
After a lead generation campaign, you might see that 35-40 years old females are also signing up to email and showing interest. You get to explore a new target group that you didn’t know existed.
This we believe is one of the most crucial advantages of lead generation, more than revenue and number of leads.
6. Cheaper than other forms of marketing
Depending on the industry you operate, the cost of generating leads can vary. If you are in technology, you can gain one lead for $31, whereas you should be looking to spend over $60 if you are in the health industry.
Based on our experience in advertising and marketing, we think this is quite low compared to traditional forms of marketing. Keep in mind, the conversion rate will be higher.
Different Phases Of Lead Generation That You Need To Consider
There are different phases or types of leads depending on how far the lead has reached down the sales funnel. Your task as a marketer is to make sure that you guide the lead towards phase four or better directly to phase 4.
Phase 1- Marketing qualified lead generation
This is when your lead is at the top of the sales funnel and has just downloaded a simple ebook or something similar. In this stage, leads are a bit curious about your brand/product but nothing strong to interact directly.
Phase 2- Sales qualified lead generation
You will know your lead has reached this phase when they ask for a price quote or filled up a contact form. This usually means, they are ready to get connected with your sales team or have high interest in seeing a demo!
Phase 3- Product qualified lead generation
Leads at this phase will make direct contact with your sales team. If it’s a Saas company, they might sign up for a free trial. This phase is important and with good strategies, you can create a high conversion rate.
Phase 4- Service qualified lead
These leads are already your paying customers in some way. But they are still leads in the sense that you can upsell with a more expensive product or cross sell with other products/services in your pipeline.
5 Ways Of Lead Generation That still Work
1. SEO
While SEO might be a complicated and time consuming strategy, 27% marketers think that organic search generates most of their leads.
The best part is SEO is far cheaper than other forms of lead generation and when done right can give you access to high quality leads.
2. Email
Email marketing is still popular among marketers! Because it still has a high CTR. Instead of selling, if you focus on nurturing, you will likely get 4-10 times more response from your email campaign.
3. Content marketing
Content marketing is the best of all forms of marketing. Without content, you will have to depend on pushy sales pages that don’t convert!
Use your blog, infographics and guides strategically to create interest. More effectively, use gated content. This type of content requires users to sign up or provide some basic information to access the content.
4. Social media marketing
Most marketers (66%) generate leads from social media investing only 6 hours per week. This sort of flexibility is hardly achievable from any other forms of lead generation.
Here are few ways to generate leads using social media:
- Video content- ads or informational
- Responding to comments and messages
- Highly targeted and personalized content that gets share
5. Influencer marketing
It’s interesting to think that influencer-generated content gains 8 times more engagement and outperforms branded content most of the time. It’s because people trust influencers!
Instead of spending thousands of dollars on ads, spend the same amount on a strong influencer who will promote your brand. You can expect a high degree of conversion friendly leads.
If You Want To Automate Your Lead Generation Campaign, Use These Tools…
1. Hubspot
scheduling blog posts, automate social profiles, live chat and ad management all in one single platform
2. Leadfeeder
Perfect for B2B as it allows you to view and track which company viewed your website pages. Provides behavioral data, contact details and industry.
3. Hootsuite
The #1 social media profile manager. Let’s schedule and manage posts across all of your social media channels from a single interface.
4. ActiveCampaign
Once you generate a lead, ActiveCampaign will help you guide your leads towards the end of the sales funnel. If you want total automation, thai is your go-to tool.
5. Everwebinar
The ultimate webinar management tool and the best way to generate leads using webinars. Schedule your webinars and capture leads without going through any manual procedure.
6. Mailchimp
Who hasn’t heard about mail chimp. If you are serious about automating your email campaigns, there’s no better alternative.
7. Zapier
One of our most favorites is Zapier. This tool will automate repetitive tasks like sending notifications upon a site visitor, following up with a lead, making an email list, etc. What it does is frees up your time to work on your business rather than working in your business.
6 Lead Generation Examples That You Can Replicate In Your Business
Example 1: GrooveHQ gained 358% conversion with their free trial offer
Example 2: Neil Patel created Ubersuggest for free SEO and gained over 300,000 users
Example 3: Almost all of brian dean’s leads came from his original research and data driven content published in Backlinko
Example 4: The owner of Tonic Site Shop, Jen Olmstead gained 2000+ email subscribers using a quiz campaign.
Example 5: Using free webinar tactics, Outfunnel saw a conversion rate of of 46.7% among the registered users.
Example 6: AirBnB launched a referral program that created a massive buzz and sustainable lead generation channel.
Current Lead Generation Trends In 2023 That Are Changing The Industry
- Account based marketing for personalized marketing tailored towards pre-defined prospect
- Hyper-personalization in B2C using custom fitted clothing or made to order products
- Community marketing by being active in your niche and engaging with real people and influencers. Follow SEMrush on twitter to learn more about how they are using this strategy to generate leads.
- Forget about one time selling, focus on the lifetime value of a customer. Which means, you don’t abandon your old customers. In fact, you nurture them to the point that the lifetime value of a customer is 10x greater than the value of one of your leads.
