GENERATING LEADS, WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

WHAT IS LEAD GENERATION?

First, a lead refers to someone who has shown interest in your company or your offer. A person is considered a lead when they contact you or fill out an online contact form. 

Generating leads will allow you to increase your sales and gain notoriety. On average, 60% of businesses with qualified leads grow faster.  

Lead (or prospect) generation refers to all the marketing and technical strategies your company can implement to acquire qualified contacts to increase your sales. A company can generate leads through digital marketing, inbound marketing or prospecting strategies.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LEAD AND QUALIFIED LEAD

A lead is defined as qualified when it has characteristics that bring it closer to the ideal customer. Indeed, a prospect will express a strong interest in your product or service and is part of your target (or persona). A qualified lead is rarer, but you have the assurance of an easier conversion and, therefore, a higher ROI. This is why you need to focus on quality over quantity. The more your website is optimized according to the expectations of your target users via UX, the more qualified leads you will collect via this channel.

A simple lead is a prospect who is still undecided. They need to get all the information they want about your business, or they’re just looking for information and need more time to be ready to convert. Although he is not the best customer for your business, the unqualified lead can allow you to highlight your website’s flaws, particularly via the “conversion rate.” If the lead leaves your interface in a matter of seconds or wanders through your web pages without finding what he is looking for, this requires areas for improvement on your part.

HOW TO QUALIFY FOR A LEAD?

DETERMINE LEAD QUALIFICATION STEPS

A good contact will become more or less mature through your website’s conversion funnel. To better follow the evolution of each lead that can lead to a contract, you will have to follow the different stages of qualification of the said lead. 

SEGMENT LEADS

Given the many contacts you collected, you will need more than 100% personalized speech for each one to meet their needs. But you can at least categorize them.

You will therefore need to segment your customers according to their common characteristics. Once this action has been completed, you can send the same messages to a group of prospects and tune your speech to their expectations. 

And this segmentation can be based on different criteria depending on the activity of your company: 

Company size

Industry

Geographical location

The nature of their activity

CLASSIFY LEADS

You have now qualified and segmented your leads. To determine lead progress through the conversion funnel, you must create a scoring system.

The principle? You award points based on the action taken by the lead. For example, if your lead clicks on the link in your welcome email, it may be worth 10 points. These scores then act as milestones to track progress.

ANALYZE QUALIFICATION DATA IN AN IMPROVEMENT PROCESS

Your leads, interactions with them, or the information you collect are not fixed and can change over time. Your qualification actions must then be constantly adjusted to identify, for example, the appearance of new needs and major changes. 

Therefore, monitoring the data of your CRM, Customer Relationship Management, is essential to be aware of the need to adapt your segmentation or the scoring scale. Indeed, managing your customer relationship via a CRM is essential to optimize your experience.

HOW TO GENERATE QUALIFIED LEADS?

You now know how to qualify your customers, but how do you generate qualified leads? Here are our methods and tips to apply.

KNOW YOUR PERSONA

A persona is a typical customer, stereotyped, representing your ideal target and for which you adapt your marketing actions. To work on your persona, you need to identify the characteristics of the perfect customer. 

This persona is built from behavioral, socio-demographic and psychographic data from market studies that you will have carried out beforehand. 

Among these data, you will have to identify, among others: 

• Centers of interest 

• Age

• Buying behaviors

• The motivations and barriers to action.

The persona is also widely used in UX Design to determine clear expectations and the UX workflow adapted to your users. It is then called persona UX.

DESIGN YOUR BUYING JOURNEY

To generate qualified leads, you must design your path to purchase adapted to your target. The goal? Attract their attention by offering coherent and adapted content on each site page, thus bringing added value. 

This content should address the issues your personas encounter and answer the questions they will have along this buying journey. 

This consists of three phases: 

• Awareness: the prospect becomes aware of his problem 
• Consideration: he becomes aware of the solutions available to him and compares them
• Decision: the prospect chooses the solution that suits him best and seeks to validate that he is making the right choice.

During his buying journey, the prospect will ask himself questions between each phase. To generate qualified leads, you must determine the expectations, needs and questions that your prospects will have during each stage and how to provide the right solutions. 

This is why understanding the path to purchase is the key to successful lead generation. You can also collect the most asked questions in your industry to include and answer them in your website content. 

OPTIMIZE THE CONVERSION FUNNEL

Your website should be the centerpiece of your lead generation strategy. It should be built like a funnel. This is why this process is called a funnel or conversion funnel. You attract your visitors and then encourage them to click on a call-to-action button which directs them to a Landing Page on which they can fill out a form. Your visitor has then become a leader since he has performed the action you expected of him.

To transform this lead into a qualified one, you must optimize this conversion tunnel by giving importance to the design of your site by placing the appropriate Calls-to-Action in the right place. 

They can, depending on the context:

• “Share”

• “Download it now!”

• “Find out more.”

• “Also read”

• “About us”

• “Click here”

• “Contact us”

• “Tell us about your project.”

It is imperative to create the right content according to the stage of the buyer’s journey that your prospect is in. You must ask for more information in the 1st phase than in the 3rd, in which your lead will be more engaged. When we talk about lead, we can also talk about cold/hot. A lead that matures is, therefore, a lead that gets hot. Therefore, everything is a question of dosage and “lead maturity.”

OPERATE ALL THE LEVERS AT YOUR DISPOSAL

To make your site a real lead machine, activate all the levers at your disposal. Your visitors should be able to contact you from any page on your site. 

For this, you have different Call-to-Action choices available to you: 

• Propose a telephone meeting with one of your experts.

• Suggest a demo request. 

• Give the possibility of dialogue via chat. 

• Offer a free audit 

• Provide a white paper.

ESTABLISH AN INBOUND MARKETING STRATEGY

Lead generation will only happen with visitors to your website. But you have to bring them to your website. Thanks to a content marketing strategy, you can bring your prospects to your website. This strategy is also called the inbound marketing strategy. 

When a prospect conducts research on the Internet, he will find information on products or services similar to yours. He can find what he wants on social media profiles, blog posts, web pages or other content that will answer his quest. A content or inbound marketing strategy will allow you to direct your prospects to your website. 

Depending on your prospects’ needs and your target’s preferences, you can offer blog articles, guides, white papers or even videos. This quality and relevant content aim to generate website traffic, serve your marketing and prospecting strategy, and position you as an expert. Having expert content on your site adds value to your brand, both in terms of brand awareness and claiming your expertise.

PUBLISH CONTENT WITH HIGH-ADDED VALUE

To convert your leads into customers, you must meet their expectations and, above all, inspire them with confidence. Each page of your site must have content with high-added value to convert. 

Your visitors will not expect your company to sell them its offer, but rather that you guide them in their thinking by showing them that you are the company they need. Your target must therefore recognize themselves through the different issues and content on your website.

STRENGTHEN YOUR SOCIAL NETWORKS

To stand out on your social networks, it is important to know your target and your competitors to offer differentiating content. 

You must define the social networks you want to develop: Facebook to create a community? Instagram to support your identity? Or LinkedIn to position you as an expert in your sector of activity? 

In your lead generation process, the use of social networks will allow you to gain the following: 

visibility, thanks to frequent publications

authenticity, based on the opinions and testimonials of your customers

Notoriety, thanks to the expertise that you will offer to your readers 

promotion, highlighting your services or products

CREATE A CONVERSION-OPTIMIZED LANDING PAGE

Called a destination page in French, a landing page is an independent web page created solely to convert and serve the needs of a marketing campaign. 

His goal? Encourage the visitor to take a specific action from your content, most often by clicking on a Call-to-Action or an advertisement as a sponsored link. 

Usually used to launch a product or service, you can also use it to: 

Collect information, opinions, contact details… 

Encourage your customers to take action: subscribe to your newsletter, download your application… 

• Estimate a project

• Become a partner

• Join a team

• Make presales 

• Offer a discount code. 

• Submit content such as a white paper or guide for download.

• Offer to make an appointment with someone from your company.

A landing page will help you quickly test whether your target is interested in the content offered.

SET UP MARKETING AUTOMATION

Marketing automation concerns automated marketing campaigns triggered when visitors act on your website. It can be in several forms, such as a follow-up email a few hours after abandoning a basket of items on an e-commerce site.

INCREASE YOUR VISIBILITY WITH PAID ADVERTISING

The Internet offers advertising formats adapted to all business needs. Well-honed, your paid acquisition strategy is a very good way to generate quality leads. 

Different formats are available to you: 

• paid referencing (SEA) with sponsored links in the first results of search engines

• Display advertisements in the form of inserts, banners or videos on websites with a large audience

• acquisition campaigns on Google at cost per click 

• socials Ads as an advertising solution based on the power of the algorithm 

• affiliation by creating strategic partnerships 

Be careful; advertising is one of many keys to attracting your prospects. You must guarantee that your product or service aligns with your market and target.

WORK ON YOUR NATURAL REFERENCING

SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ), or natural referencing in French, must be part of your visibility and marketing strategy. The results are only sometimes visible overnight; it is a work of endurance. 

By working correctly on your SEO, you can invest less money in your SEA strategy. SEO consists of working on keywords and inserting them into your content pages to appear on the first pages of search engines like Google. 

For quality SEO, the key is to identify the right keywords and place them in the right places on your content pages. These keywords can be inserted into the structure of your website (your titles, subtitles or menus) and the formatting (your visuals, internal links, Call-to-Action ). Traffic growth is based on using the right keywords that improve SEO, as well as the work done on your website’s user experience (behavioral design).

ANALYZE ALL YOUR ACTIONS

To generate qualified leads, you absolutely must analyze your actions. 

This step needs to be more frequently addressed by companies. However, analyzing your actions allows you to identify which ones are performing and which are not. This is to adapt and readjust your marketing strategy at each stage. 

Unlike a traditional marketing strategy, generating leads online allows you to monitor your performance in real-time, thanks to marketing automation or analysis tools such as Google Analytics. 

By defining your marketing and sales objectives, you can come up with key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor to verify that your strategy is working. 

The only way to generate qualified leads online is to test, fail, refine, and repeat until you find the strategy that works for your business. And because a strategy is never fixed, yours will also need readjusting as your business evolves.

In the long term, you will need analysis to generate ROI, even if you can generate some of them over time without knowing how they arrived.

Also Read: Tips For Creating Advertisement Videos

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What Is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is when potential customers are engaged and nurtured with targeted content to build relationships with leads. It is usually done through targeted content and communications. The goal is to gain the trust and credibility of potential buyers. 

Lead nurturing can take many forms, but it will usually involve a combination of email marketing, content marketing, and social media outreach.  

For example, you can send educational emails to potential customers shortly after they visit your website. Or, you can share helpful blog posts or infographics on social media to generate leads.  

This method takes time and effort, but it’s worth the effort. Building a relationship with potential customers long before they’re ready to buy increases the likelihood that they’ll choose you when they’re finally ready. 

Here are six tips for implementing an effective lead-nurturing strategy

Define your target audience

Before creating targeted content, you must identify who you want to reach.  

Lead nurturing requires a deep understanding of your target audience. The idea is to give each of your leads the right content at the right time to move them through the funnel.  

Only by truly understanding your target audience can you create content that will resonate with them and inspire them to take action.  

To get started, try creating a persona for your target audience. Please give him a name, age, profession and family situation. Next, think about his needs and interests. What motivates him? What are the challenges it faces? What information does he need to make a purchase?

Identify the critical stages of the buyer’s journey.

Lead nurturing must consider the different stages of the buyer’s journey. Because to be relevant, the content proposal must be adapted to each stage of the journey in which the prospect finds himself. This will bring potential customers closer to a purchasing decision.  

For example, someone in the research stage may need educational content that helps them understand their problem, while someone in the decision stage may be ready to compare products and price options. 

Create varied content to optimize lead nurturing.

Not all lead nurturing content has to be sales-oriented. Content that needs to be more sales-oriented can turn off potential customers. 

Develop lead magnets. A lead magnet is an incentive you offer potential customers in exchange for their contact information.  

It should be something that your target audience finds valuable and meets their needs. For example, if you sell software, you can offer a free trial or demo in exchange for their contact information. 

A mix of educational articles, blog posts, infographics, ebooks, and white papers will engage your lead nurturing strategy. 

Create a lead capture form.

Once you’ve set up your lead magnet or created your varied content, you must find a way to capture lead information.  

This usually takes a lead capture form, which should be placed on your website or blog so potential customers can easily find it and sign up. Be sure to include fields for name, email, and company name to segment your leads later.

Create and send targeted emails

Now that you have the information about your potential customers, you can start crafting targeted email campaigns designed to nurture those customers for conversion. Again, each email should be tailored to the person at a stage in the buyer’s journey, providing them with relevant and valuable information at each stage.  

You can also automate this lead nurturing process with marketing automation software. It will allow you to set up lead nurturing workflows that automatically send targeted content to leads based on their stage in the buyer’s journey.  

This lets you stay in touch with prospects without manually sending them one-to-one emails. 

Implement lead scoring

Finally, develop a lead scoring system. Lead scoring is a way to prioritize leads based on factors like level of engagement and purchase intent. This lets you focus on the hottest leads to close more deals faster.  

There are many ways to assess leads, but the most common factors are website activity, email engagement, and demographic information such as your prospects’ job titles or industry. 

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In addition, you should consider advertising on other websites like using Google ads and YouTube channel ads or video content. All of these require you to have relevant skills that you can master by taking a digital marketing course such as the Fractional Content course. You can read the fractional content strategy reviews to kickstart your marketing career. Other than that, here are tips to help you level up organic lead generation: 

1. Leverage Product Videos 

Video advertising is one certain way to improve your leads with a big margin. Its success is attributed to the interactive nature of videos. As potential clients watch your videos, the duration of their interest will depend on the video’s visual nature. Here is a pro tip for you: ensure that your video is as short as possible. In addition, be personal and use imagery and topics that will relate to your viewers.
Moreover, your videos should be high quality to enhance the listener’s watching experience. You can also include subtitles in your videos to improve the viewer’s engagement. Finally, don’t hang up without a call to action to the viewer.

2. Use Google Ads 

Apart from vlogging, Google ads are also preferred by many online marketers. However, you need to ensure that your ads have enhanced search engine optimization (SEO) to match the search criteria of your potential clients. A well-optimized ad can easily appear in the search results whenever clients search for similar content on the search engines. To further improve the performance of your ads, you can consider using paid ad advertisement. Though it adds to your budget, they’re more effective than free ads. You can level up your online selling skills by taking relevant courses or you may read articles such as the consultant next door eBook review to beef up your knowledge.  

3. Create Interactive Content 

Interactive content is effective, especially in business-to-consumer (B2C) product marketing. The size and color of the font you use in your blogs should be thoroughly considered. It should be easy for the reader to read without straining their eyes. In addition, make your content more interactive by breaking your paragraphs and inserting pictures and videos that one can watch, such as a product demo. It’d help if you do it in a way that doesn’t break the flow of ideas. Moreover, your language should be conversational and have a good tone to avoid monotony. Beware that if you don’t capture the reader’s interest in the introduction paragraph, they will likely leave your blog before seeing the call-to-action part.

4. Blog Consistently 

One way of improving your SEO ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is by ensuring that you are blogging consistently. However, don’t churn out content for the sake of publishing regularly. Ensure that your blog content is informative and educative. By doing so, you reduce the bounce-back rate and improve your click-through rate. Moreover, your blogs should be SEO optimized with the right keywords, may it be short or long-tailed. You may also consider adding your keywords in the meta-title, meta-description, and image descriptions. 

5. Initiate Personalized Email Marketing 

Personalized email marketing can work miracles to level up your business’s organic leads. On your home page, you can use a lead magnet such as a free eBook or webinar that one can register to receive in exchange for personal information. The personal information that you can collect includes name, email address, and mobile phone number.  

You can later use this information to send advertising emails to your target audience’s inbox. However, ensure that you address your target using their name to boost their connection with your brand. Furthermore, before signing off your email, include a call-to-action that has a link to your website. This link should lead to the product that you’re advertising

Wrapping Up 

Digital marketing can ensure the success of your business’s lead generation. However, you have to be aware that different marketing strategies can give you different results. So, while utilizing the tips above, consider your business goals and target audience to benefit from these lead generation strategies.  

Also Read: Microsoft Improves Small Business Communication And Collaboration With Teams Essentials

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The term lead is a concept widely used today by both agencies and marketing professionals and companies. Leads increase their presence and importance with the entry of digitization in marketing, being an essential factor in almost any online marketing strategy that seeks to increase the level of sales. However, the lead does not always fulfill its function of offering direct results if it is not used correctly. So today we are going to see what a marketing lead is (or a marketing lead) and what it is used for.

Lead definition

• The word Lead is acquired from English and its literal translation means to lead. The term Lead in english, although it shares that characteristic of directing towards the sale, is understood more as a request for information about a product or service. I think the best answer or definition would be the potential customer. Among marketers, we also refer to leads as conversions. In short, a potential client, who has shown interest and transferred his contact details (name, telephone, email, or how far you want to go) to a company.
• Lead is a term that is used to refer to an opportunity or prospect that has been achieved thanks to the fact that the user has been directed to the objective. This is so because the lead has allowed us to obtain the data of the individual who has entered any of our spaces on the Internet (blog, page, etc.). These data are revealing since they indicate that said individual is interested in something that we have even if we don’t know what it is about. Why have you really given us your email? Are you really interested in what we offer or have you only done it to take advantage of the incentive we offer for giving your email? Will you be a potential client who will end up acquiring our services/products? In principle, it is not possible to find the answers to these questions through a lead. Once we have captured the user’s attention to answer these questions, we must take action.
• In marketing, a lead is usually placed in a strategic position when detecting the interest of a visitor, although later that lead will have to be nurtured to encourage the visitor to buy the product that is the final objective. The success of this action will depend on the way of nurturing the lead.
• To give an example, every time a user leaves their data through Google, Facebook, Twitter, blog, etc., a lead is generated.
• The concepts of lead and conversion are closely related: every time there is a lead, a conversion occurs. The Internet is the most important lead capture channel because it allows us to know who, when, and how the conversion has taken place. Digital marketing, well done, allows us to measure and know what price we are paying for a lead (CPL) and if it then manages to close a sale. In this regard, it is necessary to know that there are also different ways of producing leads or achieving conversions.

Types of leads: good and bad quality leads

Within the information requests generated, differences can be found between qualified leads (hot leads) or unskilled leads. The difference is in the quality or the real interest that the user shows and the probability that the subsequent sale will materialize. To determine which category the request belongs to is the conversion percentage understood as the number of sales produced among the number of leads generated per hundred.

A good tactic to improve the quality of a leader is to increase the information that the user has before requesting information or to increase the form fields so that only those who are really interested fill in.

As anyone interested or who works in the world of marketing knows, measurement is becoming more accurate and there are more tools to assess quality, leading to prediction through data analysis and big data. It is here when we find the term lead scoring.

Lead scoring

Within lead management, it consists of establishing the probability of conversion to sale of an information request based on a history and predictive algorithms of automatic qualification. It is usually used in large companies with great capacity to generate conversions and in many cases they need to assign a score to prioritize monitoring or determine which online marketing channels are most effective in optimizing resources and efforts.

This does not mean that the lead with the least probability of becoming a sale should be discarded. These can be matured or improved through lead nurturing strategies that make the user carry out new actions or interact until reaching the final objective. Lead nurturing can be understood as the process of preparing those users who are not yet ready to purchase with valuable information. You can use email marketing strategies, marketing automation, retargeting, etc.

How can leads and conversions be generated?

We already understand the definitions of lead and conversion and their qualification. The next thing to ask yourself is how to generate leads or what is lead generation. There are digital marketing tools and tactics such as Google Adwords, the services of an SEM agency, a good well-implemented SEO strategy, or the appropriate use of advertising on social networks.

The fundamental thing, in any case, is a good definition of the marketing objectives that you want to obtain and to have a method that allows real monitoring.

To increase leads, whether you dedicate yourself to educational marketing, the sale of tourist products, the  promotion of sporting events, fashion marketing or any sector there are always some common points to keep in mind:

Landing page

Almost any digital marketing campaign aims at a landing page where the user can expand their information about the product or service. The usual thing is to provide information that generates interest in the user (the more information they have, the higher the quality of the lead) but that is not completely complete and leads to the need to get in touch to collect all the data. Therefore, the contact form that is capable of attracting the information of the user-directed through our campaigns is essential.

Every landing page must be created based on the digital marketing strategy and thought based on your objectives, we are talking about optimizing landing pages for conversion.

Keys to a good landing page: 

• Focused on our objective and not that of the user Attractive title.
• Concordance with the campaign and your creativity (colors, images, copies …)
• Responsive landing. It must adapt to any device, traffic is increasingly mobile.
• Lead capture form. The fewer number of fields, the greater the conversion.
• Give something in exchange for your data: PDFs, ebooks …
• Images, videos, and testimonials that support us and build trust.
• Product or service benefits. What sets us apart from the competition?
• Feeling of offer or unique opportunity.
• Call to action. What do you want the user to do on your landing page? Tell her!

Also Read: How have live chatbots turned beneficial for online businesses?

Give something in return

In order for the user to leave their data voluntarily, they must obtain something in exchange. It may be the simple need for information, but if we are able to offer you something “free” we will see how our conversion increases. Some examples are participation in a contest, an ebook, or access to certain content. It is essential that in exchange for a lead, we offer quality, for example, creating good content on our website.

Lead capture channels

All this is great, we already know what a lead is and what we need on the landing to get it, but where am I going to look for it? There are many digital marketing channels that allow you to create campaigns focused on the conversion or achievement of leads. Among them we can find:

• SEO positioning
• Content marketing
• Inbound marketing
• E-mailing or Email marketing
• SEM Positioning or Search Engine Marketing

                         Search network campaigns

                         Display

                         Remarketing

                         Youtube Ads

                         Gmail Ads

• RTB or Programmatic purchase of advertising space
• Social Media Marketing

                         Facebook Ads

                         Twitter Ads

                         Linkedin Ads

• Agreements and directories with payment to CPL
• Affiliate Marketing

Deal of the lead: Closing the sale.

Voucher. We know what a lead is, how to qualify them, how and where to get them, but the most important thing is missing … Converting leads for sale!

Depending on the type of business or company we are in, we must follow one strategy or another. We are going to focus on the most common, the treatment from a call center. That is, the tactic Lead contact sale.

• Act quickly. Do not let lead cool down or you will lose the sales opportunity. Think that if a user is interested in your product or service, they will surely also be visiting competitors. Being the first is essential.
• Contact better by phone.
• Establish a monitoring system.
• Analyze the information. What hours or what days are the most pointers?
• Establish and hold your care accountable. Who is in charge of dealing with potential clients?
• Remember that behind the lead is a person. Be nice and talk.
• Confirm your needs.
• Insist but do not overwhelm. It is possible that you cannot contact the first one or that you are busy, do not throw in the towel.
• Make personalized offers. Reserve an acquisition margin or CPA to be able to offer what the client really needs.
• Take note and learn for future contacts.

conclusion

In short, a lead can become the best asset of a company or project, so focusing on getting leads is a way of working for the future of that company or project.

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