What is involved in lead generation?

The term ‘lead’ refers to any person who shows that they are interested in an organisation’s product or service. Leads usually hear from a business or an organisation after they open communication (by sending in personal information for an offer, trial or – alternatively – a subscription) as opposed to receiving a random cold call from an individuals who bought their contact information.

Here’s an example of lead generation in action:

If you, for instance, take an online survey to discover more about the best way in which to take care of your car. A couple of hours later, you get an email from the auto company that designed the survey about how they could assist you with taking care of your motor vehicle.

This procedure is far less intrusive as opposed to if they’d merely called you for no reason with no knowledge of if you even care about car maintenance. From a business perspective, the information the car company collects about you, from your survey responses, assist them with personalising that opening communication in order to address your existing problems — and not waste time calling leads who aren’t at all interested in at all in their services.

Leads are part of the wider life cycle which consumers follow when they go from visitor to customer. Not all leads are created equal (nor are they qualified the same). There are different types of leads according to how they are qualified and what life cycle stage they’re in.

What is lead generation?

‘Lead generation’ is the method of attracting leads (in other words, your potential customers) into a contact management or digital marketing software system. When this information has been captured into this system, the idea is to nurture these leads throughout the buying process in order to assist with convincing them about your offerings and, after this, converting them into a paying customer.

The lead generation strategies, which are used in digital marketing in order to generate these contacts, are put in place by your organisation to ensure that your leads are quality as well as worth nurturing for future revenue-generation capabilities. Lead generation is all about developing trust with your audience, educating them regarding your industry as well as offerings along the way.

A simple five-step process to get you started with lead generation

1. Get the leads in the door

Start  by attracting leads to your website by putting together engaging content which can be shared throughout your various digital marketing channels. Design content about your company in the form of, for example:

• eBooks,
• Blog posts,
• White papers,
• Photos, or
• Infographics

Share this content across your blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare, other social channels, email – where your potential customers are active.

2. Nurture Existing Leads

After a lead is a member of your lead management system or email list, it is vital to frequently nurture them in order to ensure that they move through the sales funnel when the time is right or to encourage them to make another purchase. Keeping them interested in being part of your email list is vital. Build this lead into a long-term association that entails both trust and loyalty with your business.

3. Score Each Lead

 Ranking leads allows your organisation to comprehend which leads in your system are more important than others are. A valuable lead is one which is interacting more with your business digitally – be it that they are downloading more content or viewing more website pages as compared to other leads.

4. Pass Along Leads to Sales

Establishing the different phases in your own lead management process is vital for the continual flow of leads from beginning to end of your sales funnel. The lead generation process of acquiring leads, keeping them interested, nurturing leads in order to prevent them from dropping off as well as establishing their desire to interact with your organisation is the focus of the digital marketing team.

5. Evaluate Lead Generation Process

The entire lead generation process should be under scrutiny by your team to ensure that it is as effective as possible in bringing in new leads, nurturing them, converting them into customers and retaining those customers over time.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to find out more about other lead generation techniques for your business? A good idea to learn this information is to go on an online digital marketing course like the one that we offer. For more information, please follow this link.