What is lead generation?
Lead generation has changed a lot in recent years, but it remains a critical part of helping businesses build relationships, generate qualified leads, and ultimately close deals. Acquiring leads is one of the important objectives for any business. To be precise, it is the process of attracting the visitors and converting them into potential customers. Usually, businesses dedicate large resources to lead generation.
Lead generation is useful for all types of businesses in the B2B sector regardless of their business size. Lead generation can also be appropriate for certain B2C industries for high involvement purchases, where consumers are less likely to purchase immediately on a website and might need some nurturing. There might be prospects that have interest in your product or service and ready to make a purchase. These prospects are referred to as ‘good leads.’ These high-quality leads help companies’ boost sales and increase ROI significantly. However, most of the companies will choose quantity over quality, with regard to leads.
With modern marketing automation tools, marketers are able to acquire high- quality leads. The main challenge here lies in determining which leads are of high quality and are ready to buy your company’s offerings. In this guide, we’re going to run through lead generation in more detail and close with an overview of how to launch your own lead generation campaign and how to solve common challenges.
About Lead Generation
1. What is Lead Generation?
2. How does Lead Generation work?
3. Importance of Lead Generation
4. Different stages in Lead Generation
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the process of generating enquiries based on consumer interest for a product or service ultimately leading to sales. In online marketing, lead typically involves collecting a visitor’s contact information via a web form.
The evolution of lead generation, used to involve purchasing a list of names along with their contact details. In turn the sales people will start cold calling these people. Today modern advances in technology have made it a lot easier to generate leads based on specific criteria and information. Companies gather information about the potential buyers and craft marketing messages and sales pitches as per the prospects’ needs.
This is probably done using inbound and outbound marketing techniques. Being successful at lead generation can make your sales cycle much more efficient and lead to increased success rate in customer acquisition.
How does lead generation work?
Most commonly, a lead generation strategy for companies today begins with developing a website to promote their offerings. The consumer might search for a particular product/service, might as well come across these informational websites and sign up for an online request form. The information provided by them is verified and matched, and that person / lead is sent to the sales team. Some people still have a perception of lead generation as big email blasts and pushy salespeople. But in general, Lead generation is the process of getting people interested in your business and gradually moving them through a pipeline to become paying customers.
There are a variety of lead generation techniques available, and it may seem easy and simple, but in reality, it is kind of difficult to execute effectively. Businesses need to have a highly operation and a well-equipped strategy in hand for lead generation to provide favorable results. When lead generation is established successfully, it can pay off very, very well.
But today, these techniques are no longer successful.
In the modern online marketplace, both B2B and B2C consumers are overwhelmed by people vying for their attention. There is a lot of noise for businesses to cut through.
Customers have become very good at blocking out approaches and messages that don’t resonate with them or aren’t well-tailored to their needs, challenges, or opportunities.
So in the world of lead generation, a reliance on one or two channels to blast a prospect list and follow up with a phone call is the approach of yesterday.
Modern lead generation is more likely to consist of:
1. 1:1 targeting
2. Consistent messaging across multiple channels
3. A focus on educating the customer
4. Cultivating meaningful relationships
Modern lead generation is also likely to traverse multiple departments within a business. The process will typically start with marketing before moving on to the sales or business development team, and the modern lead generation program is also likely to involve either product or service teams if free trials are offered.
Importance of Lead Generation
Today most businesses heavily rely on lead generation, as it is the only way to drive traffic to their website and turn those leads into potential customers, which in turn helps the business increase their revenue or market share significantly. Without lead generation, it would become very difficult for the business teams to analyze what their audience want or what they are interested in.
Using lead generation, marketers can effectively target their audience and build an engaging website tailored to their needs and preferences. In addition, lead generation also enables businesses to: (Usually in Paid Ads)
1. Choose the geographic location from where they want to generate leads.
2. Tailor made pricing on per lead basis.
3. Help control the number of leads they wish to receive.
4. Pay only for the leads that have been successfully generated.
Embracing good lead generation is critical for all B2B businesses or any B2C business and can help your sales teams spend more time selling and less time on prospecting and administrative work. Businesses that employ a mature, well-developed lead generation process can achieve 120% greater revenue versus their plan than average companies. So there is a clear revenue generation benefit.
How important are the quality of leads?
It’s not uncommon for marketing teams to be set a ‘cost per lead’ (CPL) target for their marketing efforts, which incentivizes them to generate as many leads as possible within the marketing budget.
On the other side of things, the sales team are often set targets based on the conversion rate of the leads they are passed. If marketing is passing through a high volume of low-quality leads, this isn’t going to help the sales team achieve their targets. They would actually most likely prefer to be passed a smaller number of high-quality leads.
So it’s important from the very outset to work together across departments to define what you want to achieve from lead generation strategies, and also look at what are going to be acceptable ratios of marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead.
Different Stages in lead generation:
“Outbound prospecting is a highly effective lead generation practice for B2B” This statement is quite true. Most of the lead generation processes are based on outbound prospecting. We will outline eight different stages in the lead generation proces
In this stage, you need to make a proper plan on how you are going to generate the leads. Start by researching the market and make a complete analysis on competitors. Based on that you need to create an ideal customer profile. This profile can be based on the customer demographics, geography, and technographics that defines your ideal customer. This profile will help you get the apt leads and you will need a buyer persona which will indeed let you target those leads. The buyer persona might include the psychological traits, the buyer behavior, their goals and pain points of the potential customer.
You need to do some ground work by refining the ideal customer profiles and buyer personas. Research based on the incoming leads, their contact information, their databases should be done. It is very important to keep track of incoming leads and report it to the sales team.
Traditionally, the sales team used to email and call over and over again. It could either end up with winning or losing the lead. To get the utmost best out of cold outreach, we need to do pre-targeting. Pre-targeting is an advertising method that creates brand awareness among the target audience. With pre-targeting, you can boost brand identity, warm up the leads, boost the outbound marketing KPIs such as click through rate, response rate and conversion rate.
Landing pages can be used in the lead generation process to create pre-targeting ads and an email copy. A landing page is a website page that facilitates desired action. It is always good to have a landing page instead of the website link because landing page focuses on one action and filters all the distracting elements. Also, it will help you segment the audience into micro groups to send a highly targeted message.
There are two stages in the lead generation process where you can make your calls and send emails in sequence. A lead that shows more activity and involvement should be in the call priority compared to the one that hasn’t opened the email. After the calls and emails, you will know whether to qualify the lead down the sales funnel. Every lead response is recorded in CRM which helps track campaign performance.
Reporting should be done at each stage of the lead generation process. The reports should include, incoming leads, time spent on research, email templates, number of emails sent, bounced emails, auto-replies, opened rates, follow ups, number of qualified leads and conversion of those leads into closed deals. This process continues like a spiral and becomes wider or narrower. It is your efforts that rectifies if the process is going as planned or not.
Final Thoughts
Long gone are the days when people used to do random cold calling. Customers today are more mindful and informed about what content they want to consume. In order to reach out to them, businesses today need to invest in the lead generation process which will ultimately lead to potential buyers and increase in conversion rates . Lead generation is detrimental for the growth of businesses today. Without it, your company will have a hard time in attracting customers and opportunities.
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