With so many available marketing channels, entrepreneurs looking for leads could have a hard time navigating the process. Business growth is directly connected with finding new clients or customers, and the faster this process is, the more time entrepreneurs and managers can devote to business development.
Lead generation is not a new way of growing customers network, but there are new ways of getting new clients that are time-saving. There is no need for long exhibitions at a trade show or setting up displays hoping someone will fill the form. Entrepreneurs and managers can spend their time much better now because new technologies can find leads on their own.
The lead generation process involves attracting more visitors from your marketing strategy and qualifying them. Lead generation is all about building trust with your audience and educating them about your industry and offerings along the way. Lead generation means being available at multiple touchpoints to address customers’ concerns quickly and encourage them to progress towards a sale.
In this article, we’ll first discuss what lead generation is and why your business needs a lead generation strategy. Then, we’ll discuss lead generation funnels, how to get the most out of your lead generation efforts, and then main channels or lead generation strategies to generate high-quality leads for your business.
What is lead generation?
The process of using digital marketing channels to find and attract potential clients is called lead generation. Leads are defined as people who could be interested in your product or service. They show such interest by interacting with your brand at some point, online or offline, but they haven’t made the purchase yet.
For these people to become your clients or customers, goal number one is to attract their attention. Goal number two is for this attraction to become action, and that action could be a newsletter subscription, a phone call, or a social media post, among other things.
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When people show any kind of interest for your brand, they are becoming leads. The ultimate goal is to make a customer or a client out of a lead, but sometimes, that is easier said than done.
Businesses’ success mainly depends on how many customers they can get out of the leads and how many leads they can attract. This is why it is so important to learn how to attract new customers to grow business.
What is a lead?
A lead is a person who has shown interest in the product or service you offer. They may become your paying customers in the future. There are two types of leads – marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs).
MQLs are leads that have shown interest in your company. They have provided you with their contact details to learn more about your product or services.
SQLs are your customers who are past the engagement state. You’ve given the product demo or service description or a sales presentation. Your next goal is to close the lead and convert them into a customer.
If we talk about B2C businesses, the distinction between SQLs or MQLs is not as important. The price point for the product or service is often lower, so the buyer journey is shorter. In B2B businesses where a product or service cost can be much higher, MQLs and SQLs matter.
Why your business needs to focus on lead generation
Every business needs a comprehensive system for generating and developing leads. The primary reason for this is straightforward; people rarely buy a product or service after viewing it on your website the first time.
That’s a problem when most of the people who visit your site never return.
Lead generation strategies help you grow an audience of people who have shown an interest in your company. As you grow an audience, you can develop your relationship with your subscribers, site visitors, social media followers, or video viewers.
The outcome of developing that relationship is that you’re more likely to turn a prospect into a customer. Fundamentally, the more customers you get, the faster your business should grow.
For a company operating in the B2B sector, lead generation efforts are particularly important. In a B2B business, sales take time.
Data shows most B2B businesses take more than a month to close a deal. For 10% of businesses, it takes more than a year to do that. So, it’s important to have a pipeline of leads to ensure you have a steady cash flow.
The final benefit of implementing a coherent lead generation strategy is that you can shorten the customer journey. Rather than waiting for a lead to naturally turn into a customer, you can implement strategies to develop that relationship, deal with their pain points and objections, and incentivize them to get out their credit card.
Hopefully, those insights will also help you improve your conversion rates.
Is lead generation process expensive?
The main goal of every campaign is to collect as many leads as possible, and it is almost never entirely free. Lead generation campaigns take time and money to create, and a lot of resources to set them up, optimize, and run.
Obviously, better crafted campaigns with more information entail more expenses. If you’re worried about the costs of advertising online, they will rarely be higher than the costs of offline promotions. However, unlike offline marketing, online lead generation tactics are proven to be more efficient.
The most important part to memorize is to make sure you are earning more in sales than you are spending on lead generation. For this process, the customer acquisition cost is very important.
To count customer acquisition cost, you have to divide your lead generation marketing spending by the number of customers acquired. This is the most precise way to count how much one lead cost your company. This way, you will also discover the success rate of the campaign.
Customer acquisition costs will also show you if your campaign needs to be rebuilt or modified.
How does lead generation work?
The magic begins with attracting marketing leads and then turning them into sales leads. But to do this, one has to know how the lead generation funnel looks like. Describing leads path as a funnel is a great way to understand how potential customer becomes an actual customer. Some of the most important parts of the sales funnel are the following:
- Brand awareness – the first stage of the funnel, which happens when people are getting to know about the brand and what it offers.
- Consideration – people now know they have the option of hiring you or buying from you. They are evaluating what you are offering and maybe looking at what your competition has to offer.
- Decision – People are choosing to buy a product or a service. This is the funnel-bottom when the lead either becomes a customer or a lost lead.
Brand awareness is accomplished through social media updates, blog posting, social media videos, images, ads, etc. SEO plays an important role in this part of the funnel too. In fact, 57% of B2B marketers said that keyword rankings generate more leads than any other marketing technique.
We can imagine sales funnel as a huge group of people who have never heard of your brand before. Marketers are putting efforts into bringing their attention by using social media, content marketing, and SEO, among other things.
These people find you online and become aware of your existence as a brand, but they are not leads yet. To become a lead, one must engage with the brand in some way. Potential customers should respond to your ad, ask about the price of your products or services, or subscribe to your newsletter.
All this means they are becoming interested in buying from you, which is why they become sales leads.
What is a lead generation funnel?
Increasing the volume of quality leads for your business is a challenge. Most companies will admit that lead generation is one of the top marketing challenges they face.
As described earlier, customers don’t buy products immediately, especially in a B2B business. So, you need a road map or a system to qualify your customers in each stage of their buying journey. That road map that segregates your audience based on the level of their interest in your product is called the lead generation funnel.
Creating and subsequently optimizing your lead generation funnel is a full-time job for many marketing teams. You need to develop marketing strategies that naturally push people down your funnel coherently using various marketing channels.
Lead generation funnel stages
The lead generation funnel has three stages: the Top of the Funnel (TOFU), the Middle of the Funnel (MOFU), and the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Each stage of the lead generation funnel is nicely classified into separate categories.
Many marketers also use a nice graphic to illustrate how a lead generation funnel works.
The top of the funnel is broad, and the bottom is narrow.
While I’m going to stick to the analogy when discussing lead generation strategies for your business, I do want to highlight that real-life marketing is a lot messier. People rarely follow your marketing funnel from top to bottom unless it’s in a very short time frame.
For example, you send people from a Facebook ad to a webinar where they make a purchase.
Assuming that the people who viewed your ad have never heard of you before, that marketing journey is direct and follows the funnel model. In most cases, though, people tend to operate more like a drunken person struggling to remember the way home.
Someone might find out about your company now, and in six months without any additional contact, make a purchase. Someone else who found your company on the same day might sign up for your newsletter and become a customer in two months.
The possibilities are multiple and varied. Your lead generation funnel provides a framework for the customer journey. A good lead generation funnel makes it more likely that a person repeatedly encounters your company, becomes familiar with the company, and decides to spend their money with you.
While the analogy of a funnel does have its faults, it’s still good to use this framework for thinking about how to develop leads. With that out of the way, let’s quickly discuss the different parts of the lead generation funnel.
1. Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
At the top of the funnel, the main goal is to attract customers and build awareness of your product or services. You need to create a connection with your audience.
Most top-of-the-funnel marketing strategies aim to engage the largest possible audience. Businesses will invest in various marketing channels to generate awareness about their business and the products or services they offer.
For example, creating blog content, running a YouTube channel, getting active on various social media platforms, and podcasting are all examples of top-of-the-funnel marketing strategies. Often, the marketing content produced by the company isn’t directly related to the service offering.
For example, CoSchedule has a podcast where they interview marketers.
They’ve interviewed a lot of really interesting people. The podcast doesn’t promote CoSchedule directly, though. It’s a medium to raise awareness about the company to people who fit their target demographic.
The target audience is business owners, managers, and entrepreneurs. These are all groups that might find a team management tool useful. CoSchedule hopes that a percentage of podcast listeners will decide to learn more about the company and maybe become a customer.
There are a couple of steps here between learning about the company and becoming customers.
2. Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)
In the second stage, your audiences become your MQL leads. So, business relationships are built here. Middle of the funnel lead generation strategies involve developing that relationship with your prospect.
Examples of middle of the funnel marketing strategies and channels include email marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, webinar marketing, and marketing assets like eBooks. You can also use the other marketing strategies I touched on earlier at this stage of the funnel.
The goal of middle of the funnel marketing is to either:
- Develop trust with your lead so you can pitch your products or services later
- Highlight how the goods or services you offer can help with their problem/ need
The type of content you produce for the middle of the funnel will differ slightly from top of the funnel content. With middle of the funnel content, you’re generally trying to establish your niche expertise.
So, you might release a white paper, for example, on industry trends. Or, you might create comparison articles for people who are thinking about purchasing something.
Here’s an example of a piece of middle of the funnel content.
If you like wine, which I do, you might read this article and think about buying some wine.
The article isn’t trying to get you to purchase anything. It’s a useful resource, though, for people who are thinking about purchasing a bottle of wine. Maybe not right now, but probably in the not too distant future.
3. Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)
The bottom of the funnel is where you present your product or service. To encourage your prospects to make a purchase, you can provide case studies, give product demos, or show product reviews.
You can use all of the marketing channels used in the earlier stages of the lead generation funnel to generate a conversion. The key difference here is you’re pushing the lead to make a purchase.
In the case of email marketing, you might do something like run a short promotion to generate those sales. Here’s an example of a bottom-of-the-funnel email campaign.
There’s a clear attempt to generate that Fear Of Missing Out.
Bottom of the funnel blog content might include things like product reviews, for example. Or, you might share case studies about the services you offer.
With bottom of the funnel marketing, your goal is to:
- Remove objections that are stopping people from purchasing
- Create a desire to make people want to make a purchase
Hopefully, you now have a better sense of how a lead generation funnel functions. Let’s dive into the next section of this guide.
How to start with lead generation marketing?
Making a strategy for lead generation is never easy. You need to know who your potential customer is, where to find her, and what you have to offer her to give you trust, money, and loyalty.
Define your ideal customer
Get to know your potential customer. Be as specific as you can to target them more precisely. Discover how old they are, what are their education level, how much does they earn, what are they interested in, what does they do for fun, what are the problems they might need you to help them with, and so on.
Start with social media analytics to find out who are the persons interested in your product. Sales personnel can be of great help here as they can provide important insights for the research, thanks to their everyday customer interactions.
Adjust your website
Every lead generation action has one main purpose – to bring more visitors to your site or landing page. On the website, they will learn more about the business, products, and services. At the same time, you will earn their trust, or you will miss the chance to convert them into your customers.
That said, make sure you have multiple landing pages with specific offers, email sign-up forms, and pop-ups linked to the content people like consuming. The more time they spend on your website, the more interested in the product or services they will become, and you will have more time to make a closer relationship with them.
Invest in content marketing
Content plays a role at each stage of the lead generation funnel. Creating great content doesn’t require you to be an artist, but you need to have empathy with your readers. The content you create needs to be relevant to the interests of your leads.
You can create many types of content, from E-books to infographics, whitepapers, and blog posts. Whatever content you create, the principle remains the same. Address the problem your audience faces and provide a solution to those problems.
An example of great content is Backlinko’s post on Google’s 200 Ranking factors.
The blog provides in-depth information about how the search engine works. It’s comprehensive. It’s written in a fun and engaging way.
Anyone who reads the blog post won’t just learn a bit more about SEO. They’d be impressed by how much Brian knows and would be tempted to learn more about him. They may even subscribe to his newsletters and become a lead.
Businesses take content marketing seriously because of its effectiveness.
As per the recent survey conducted by SEMRush, 84% of companies out of 1500+ have a content marketing strategy. Content marketing works because it often doesn’t feel like marketing at all.
Get to know the basics of SEO
Creating content is one thing; making it suitable for search engines is another. Your business needs to get online traffic first, so that it could gain leads later. There is one important thing you need to memorize — you can not cheat search engines. In other words, you may not use black hat SEO techniques, or else the search engine will penalize your website.
Google has to see that your content is written for humans, not for its system that indexes websites. Studying and implementing proper SEO techniques (also known as “white hat SEO) will definitely help you stand out from the crowded competition.
Paid ads
Paid ads are one of the quickest and best lead generation strategies. As long as you have the money and can turn a profit, you get access to a global audience of millions of people.
There are two broad types of ads. You have the ads that are provided next to search results on Google or another platform. These are intent-based ads. People are searching for a result and either looking to buy something or are interested in a topic.
You can advertise to people as they go through the buying or research process.
Next, you have passive ads. These are ads delivered to people as they browse social media or various websites. With these types of ads, people are rarely in the buying mood. More often than not, they have no intention of making a purchase.
You should use these types of ads towards the top of the lead generation funnel. Ideally, your goal should be to generate a conversion, such as getting people to sign up for your email list.
Somewhere between these two types of ads, you have retargeting ads. You can run retargeting ads at any stage of the lead funnel.
Email marketing
Did you know that 99% of people check their email inbox every day? Almost half of them leave their email addresses on different websites to get coupons or valuable information. That said, email marketing is still one of the most intimate ways of building a relationship with customers.
To use email marketing efficiently, you need first to install a header or sidebar where people can leave their emails. Second, you need to give them something valuable in exchange for their email address. Once you have their email addresses, you get the chance to send them promo material and content you think they will find interesting and relevant. Needless to say, spamming them is a big no-no.
If you don’t have an email list, then you should create one. You can grow a list by offering a valuable resource that your customers will love, such as an ebook or free webinar or a course, in exchange for their email addresses.
You can use email marketing at every stage of the lead generation funnel. Email marketing is a great way to engage with new prospects and develop relationships with new
Lead magnets
Simply put, a lead magnet is something you are offering to your customers in exchange for their email addresses. For example, ebooks and checklists are great lead magnets. These are valuable content you give out for free, which will convince a lot of your website visitors to trust you with their contact details.
Social media
According to We are Socials, around 4.5 billion people use social networks at the moment. For this reason, social media is one of the most powerful lead generation strategies. Not every social network channel will be the right choice for your content, though, so you need to learn which one of them your audience is most likely to use.
To discover this, you can use analytics to see what type of content is popular in your niche area and learn what your audience wants to see. This is the only way for you to decide what kind of content you should create and where to post it.
Once you learn all this, you will start attracting leads by sharing your content, running giveaways, publishing lead magnets, interacting with your online audience, and sponsoring your online ads.
Facebook is the most affordable and easy lead discovery platform as it has the largest people database. The software CUCOMM is able to automatically send messages to users and add them as friends. This significantly reduces the search time and helps in promoting business projects.
Products
If you are selling a software solution, you can generate leads by offering a trial version of your product at a minimal cost. Or you can offer a full free version of your product to your customers for a limited time period.
You know that your product is of high quality, but your customers don’t. That’s why allowing people to try your product is among the lead generation strategies that work so well. You’re allowing your customers to experience your product instead of just praising its features.
Offline businesses use this strategy all the time. You walk around a home for a home viewing before purchasing a house, for example, and take a test drive of a car before buying the vehicle.
Some online eCommerce companies are experimenting with this approach. For example, Amazon has tested sending product samples as a surprise to people they thought would make a purchase. It’s too early to know if this approach will work, of course.
How to measure lead generation success?
You have created the lead generation strategy, but how will you know if it works? One of the most important parts of every strategy is monitoring its success. First, you need to define what success is. Sometimes, lead campaign success means collecting your customers’ email addresses, but sometimes it could mean increasing sales.
In these cases, be aware of the number of people that sign up for a newsletter or visit the sales landing page. These are great measurement criteria for a successful lead generation strategy.
Sometimes, you will have to adjust strategy several times until you find out what works best for your business, your audience, and potential customers. This should not worry you, though. Remember that the lead generation process is a marathon, not a sprint.
Conclusion
Adopting a lead generation strategy is a must because, without a proper plan, your lead generation efforts are going to fail. You must also understand the importance of a lead generation funnel. Identifying the stage of your customer’s buying journey will help you plan your promotional strategies better.
The alignment of the sales and marketing team is also important for the success of your lead generation strategy. Make sure you define clear boundaries and roles for each member of the team to avoid conflict.
Finally, there are several ways to generate leads for your business. You can choose one or more of them depending on your budget and your product. Whichever strategy you choose, make sure, though, that the product or service you offer is high-quality. Without a great product, even the best of lead generation strategies can fail.
