Lead generation - what is it?
My agency is often approached by clients for marketing and lead generation services, and, unfortunately, each of them under the term lead generation means its own meaning and understanding of what it is.
I have seen unique cases: “sell me a rubric contact database from the 2gis directory”, “collect emails and send 100 emails” and the icing on the cake is “send SMS” to the base of numbers of unknown origin.
Internet marketing professionals may also refer to the lead agent business model (Leadgen). And all this confusion in the minds gives rise to a lot of questions that I'm tired of answering :)
Table of Contents
This term refers to the process of attracting leads to a particular business. To any business. How else? After all, everyone needs leads: both online and offline businesses, from food delivery to marketers themselves.
Lead generation is in any business, but the methods of obtaining leads may differ depending on the niche, deal cycle, or other features of the business.
The lead generation process consists of 2 stages: receiving traffic and its subsequent processing. This includes finding leads using various marketing methods and then selling a product or service.
Marketing tactics are different - incoming and outgoing. In the first case, leads are attracted by organizing an incoming lead flow and various methods are used: SEO, placement of contextual advertising or targeting, holding events and participating in them, various webinars, seminars and exhibitions, etc.
The outgoing flow can be called the organization of a call center for cold calls, the distribution of leaflets, banners and other activities.
The ultimate goal of lead generation is the sale of certain goods and services, as well as the formation and constant growth of a customer base.
To generate an incoming flow of leads, a special lead generation funnel is built - from searching for a client and warming up his interest in the product, to the final sale by various methods.
For example, a person sees an ad with a call to subscribe to a mailing list with discounts and / or receive a free bonus. The lead subscribes, receives a bonus, and then 1 or 2 times a week receives a series of informational or promotional letters by mail with various promotions, discounts, and more. Until the moment the product is purchased. After making a purchase, he begins to receive another series of letters - already as for customers. This is the lead generation auto funnel, or sales funnel in the general sense.
The tool for issuing a bonus instead of contacts is a lead magnet .
Leads in the digital age
What is digital lead generation?
The article on lead generation explains this important marketing and sales activity in general. Your handling remains up-to-date at all times. However, fast-moving times, in which digital communication and online activities determine everyday life, require and enable different ways to generate valuable customer inquiries. In fact, digital channels represent a real alternative to cold calling on the phone or acquiring new customers at the exhibition stand. Specifically, digital lead generation is the process by which a company uses digital channels to obtain the contact details of potential customers and interested parties.
Fodder for lead generation
So where does the digital information for making contact come from? Marketers particularly enjoy drawing leads from online marketing campaigns. Paid ads, social media campaigns or digital events reach many people, also in a targeted manner beforehand. But your own website and marketing automation are also effective channels for making valuable contacts. These and other sensible measures for digital lead generation are considered below.
Which marketing measures are suitable for digital lead generation?
Paid-Ads
Almost every B2B target group, from all industries, is on the Internet and finds out about solutions to specific challenges before making a specific purchase. Depending on which channel the potential customer is using, it can make sense to place targeted online ads in order to put your own offer in the foreground. Channels for paid ads include Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram Ads, LinkedIn and Xing Ads.
Marketers make sure to choose the right ad format depending on the phase of the customer journey. Early to mid-stages of the sales cycle are suitable for video and display ads, while search ads can be used throughout the sales cycle.
Digitale Events
To collect new leads, sales professionals can host a digital event. During the corona pandemic, webinars and virtual trade fairs were available on every B2B platform on various topics. As an interactive sales method, they help to identify interested parties and to get in direct personal contact with them. Better than a simple trade fair, these short seminars give the opportunity to put company expertise in the foreground.
Like eye-catchers for visual representations, event titles must arouse interest in order to generate enough participants. However, the happening should not be overcrowded, otherwise the personal touch will fizzle out and the relevance of the event will shrink to a digital mass event. Planned events can also be advertised through paid ads on social media channels.
The most important thing for the event is its content. This must deliver real added value for the virtual visitor. If the participants leave the webinar and the like without new insights, the lack of added value reflects negatively on the organizers. Therefore, the event should sparkle with expertise and inspire interested parties and describe the topic in the best possible way in advance. Commitment to the topic and solving the associated problems resonates positively.
Social Selling
New forms of sales via social media are finding their way into everyday sales in Germany. Whole sales processes sometimes take place via LinkedIn in particular - and as personally as it is digitally possible. With their own profile, salespeople bring their offers directly to the correct contact person and network with them to stay up to date. To use social selling efficiently, B2B salespeople pay attention to:
Strategic positioning
Before the Social Selling project is implemented, the values to be communicated and the benefits to be gained are clear. Tailored content for posts and comments reaches the specified target group and enables topic-specific interaction.
Profile
If you can't be found on social media, you still communicate - if there is no existing profile, a company seems unreachable. Therefore, sales and marketing should both create and maintain a company profile and encourage the workforce to keep their presence on social platforms up to date. In addition, social media algorithms place more value on the content of private profiles. Engaging sales reps to post and comment independently pays off within reach.
content planning
Content should always bring added value for the reader. A content plan helps to prepare suitable content for the social presence at an early stage and to provide enough variety for followers. How often and at what time should it be posted? What spacing should there be between posts? What kind of imagery is available for this? Can videos or infographics be created? Answers to these and other questions benefit the strategic orientation and increase the reach.
Personal contact
Not only the algorithm rewards personal interaction. An important part of future sales work lies in quick and easy contact with customers via social media. Short-term answers via direct messages appear productive and approachable. Links in articles on topics discussed in the last Business Talk strengthen customer loyalty. Sales professionals also approach potential new customers unobtrusively via social channels.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is very popular among marketers and sales staff, because after implementation, this variant convinces with its low time and cost expenditure.
As before the start of any marketing measure, those responsible should first define a strategy that works towards defined goals. Where do you want to travel? Should new leads be tapped? Do the recipients also include or only existing contacts? By asking similar questions, strategists find out which software for marketing automation best meets the set requirements.
The company website
The website of your own company is more than just a digital business card and is often the first point of contact for potential new customers. With the help of clever advertising texts, the visitor learns which problems he can solve with the products and services offered. Customer testimonials, case studies and "trust symbols" ensure the best possible first impression. A company blog also strengthens the expert status with high-quality and target group-specific content.
How wonderful that all the collected data can be used by the person in charge - but unfortunately in bulk. Because this information is only the starting point of the customer journey. As the top end of the so-called sales funnel, they contain promising new customers who first want to be found.
In the next step, B2B companies in particular filter out interested contacts: The leads can be guided through the sales funnel using white papers or checklists that automatically reach newly acquired contact persons via e-mail marketing, for example.
What are leads?
Leads are contacts of representatives of the target audience who can turn into customers.
Leads can be called users who have completed the following steps:
- submitted a purchase request;
- have registered on the site;
- leave an email in any pop-up window;
- subscribed to the newsletter in any messenger or by mail;
- Subscribed for a trial period;
- repeat customers;
- other visitors who have taken any action on the site.
Leads are divided according to the degree of interest in a product or service. Someone is not very interested and went to the site just out of curiosity, others came to get useful material or a bonus, to get acquainted with the site, but they are not yet ready to purchase goods. Or, conversely, the user is already interested in buying.
What is a qualified lead?
A qualified lead is a person who is interested in the company's services and meets the criteria for evaluating a potential client. Companies that constantly work with customer applications have their own ways of evaluating leads. These criteria allow you to assess the interest of a person and his readiness to buy. Such a system is needed in order to filter customer applications and give priority to those people who show the greatest interest. Lead qualification increases the efficiency of the marketing and sales departments.
By identifying qualified leads, the company will be able to understand who is really interested in the product and concentrate on working with these customers. The marketing department and sales managers must jointly define the criteria that will help evaluate the lead. For evaluation, you can use the application format with a questionnaire, where users will fill out preliminary information about you. Then, instead of processing all applications in a row, you will look at the completed information and sort the leads.
Regardless of the evaluation criteria chosen, the main characteristic of qualified leads is their interest in the product and the desire to make a purchase. If you are familiar with the sales funnel and the stages that customers go through, then you know that it usually takes time from getting to know a product to wanting to buy. That is why qualified leads are divided into two types: Marketing Qualified Lead and Sales Qualified Lead.
Marketing Qualified Lead or MQL are leads that have shown interest in a product or company. For example, sign up for an email newsletter. They learned about you through advertising, after which they began to study closer. These users meet the minimum criteria for a qualified lead and take time to develop a buying urge. At the very least, the company hopes that such a desire will appear, because the lead has signs that indicate this.
Sales Qualified Lead or SQL are leads that are close to making a purchase. They shared additional information about themselves with the company and showed a substantive interest in the product. For example, the lead requested a product demo, gave his phone number, described his needs to managers, etc. SQL gets to sales managers from the marketing department when they see the lead's readiness to buy. This type of leads is the most valuable for the company and they should be given the main attention.
Lead classification
Leads are divided into several types:
- Cold. Those who were not going to buy anything, but left their contacts by accident or for the sake of interest. Such contacts are interested in the potential product, but they need more time to make a decision to buy it.
- Warm. Leads who already have an idea about this product or a particular company chat, ask questions and request any information about it.
- Hot. Leads who are ready to buy the product. They are happy with the price, the terms, and all they have to do is help them buy the product or service.
Each of the types of leads needs careful study and a specific approach. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a marketing strategy for each group individually.
Important! The deeper the steps in the sales funnel and the warming up of leads in it are worked out, various strategies are developed and tested, the higher the conversion to sale / lead.
The traffic-to-lead conversion rate plays a big role. After all, this indicator affects and helps:
- reduce the cost of acquiring a lead
- increase profits while saving the budget;
- compare the performance of different channels.
Let's take a closer look at the conversion. Let's say you bought 100 uniques in any advertising system, the conversion is 2% at 15 rubles per unique visitor.
After working out the USP and marketing (usually a set of works to “improve selling qualities”), the conversion on the landing page increased by 1%.
Let's look at the table again:
Only one percent (!), And the cost of a lead is reduced by a third. This is a lot. And if you increase the conversion to 5%?
Based on this, the conversion rate is the most important success factor for building lead generation in a business. Not the number of applications or traffic (these indicators can be increased later, after adjusting the conversion rate of landing pages), but the conversion of traffic into a lead.
The lead generation scheme
looks like this:- First of all, you need to analyze your target audience, determine its triggers and, if necessary, segment it according to various criteria.
- Next - to make an offer, that is, an offer for each segment of the target audience.
- Select one or more traffic sources.
- Prepare a resource for lead traffic - a website or group on social networks or an Instagram account - depending on the traffic source (arbitrageurs call this a bunch: offer + landing page + traffic source)
- Collect a lead base and start working with it.
- Collect and process feedback from the sales department and calculate all funnel indicators: CTR in advertising, total traffic, conversion to lead, conversion to sale.
- Depending on the results of the first test launches, change traffic sources, landing pages or adjust the offer.
Leadgen traffic sources are different. This:
- Website promotion in search engines (SEO). In order to get into the top SERPs, you need a multi-page site with the ability to optimize it. No one page landings. Search traffic is the most desirable because it reflects the natural interest of users and is inexpensive. You also need to be careful when choosing a website builder: its advantage, which is efficiency and low cost, can be offset by a lack of functionality for optimizing for search engines.
- Contextual advertising. This type of advertisement is shown to the user on the relevant request that he has entered. For example, "buy running shoes". "Yandex" and "Google" in this case give out a bunch of sites where you can buy sneakers. Contextual advertising can be displayed in search engines, on websites, in mobile applications.
- Targeted advertising. Translated from English, target is the goal. It is easy to guess that such advertising is aimed at a specific audience, which can be filtered by various parameters. The latter determine the business goals of the client and the characteristics of his target audience. Similar advertising is used in social networks - LinkedIn and Twitter. Don't forget the fast growing TikTok. Keep in mind the Most Popular Facebook* and Instagram* (*Facebook and Instagram are owned by Meta, Most viewed websites in Pakistan)
- Buy ready-made leads. Purchasing leads from lead generators - companies that supply ready-made leads. The latter tend to use all or part of the above lead generation methods .
Where to send traffic?
For a long time I thought about what to call this block. Landing pages, accounts… If a website and a landing pages with a quiz can still be called landing pages, then a chatbot cannot be called such. Actually, as well as articles with publications. Therefore, you can think of how to call the tools listed below.
- Sites
- Use landing pages
- Quizzes
- Accounts in social networks, for example, personal page, VK store, installation*
- Chatbots
- Articles and publications in the media
- Start email marketing
- Video clips
- “Layers” of arbitrageurs
Conclusion
Lead generation is the process of building a database of contacts of people who are interested in receiving your offer. How to convert users into leads after they clicked on an ad? What is the Conversion Funnel, Customer Journey, and Lead Qualification? How to ensure the maximum return on attracted traffic and which channels make sense to use? What are lead magnets for and how many fields should a web form on a landing page contain? All about lead generation in simple words.