Lead generation is a marketing strategy that aims to generate interest in a product or service from prospective customers and turn them into qualified leads ready to make a purchase.
The importance of lead generation
Lead generation is a critical marketing strategy for sustainable long-term business growth as it not only works to generate MQLs (marketing qualified leads) to later become SQLs (sales qualified leads), but also to build engagement and brand trust.
Nurturing potential customers, referred to as ‘prospects’, in this way can establish rapport and positive brand sentiment.
This long-term engagement, often referred to as a lead nurturing campaign, can retain individuals and organizations as potential marketing leads for the future, even if they aren’t ready to convert and commit quite yet. Over time, more are likely to develop into sales qualified leads, which can then be passed over to your sales team to close the deal.
How lead generation works and ways to generate leads for your business
There are more ways than ever to generate qualified leads by nurturing prospective customers across all the different marketing platforms you use.
Some of the different lead generation techniques that you could use in a diverse marketing strategy include:
- Content marketing (including video, webinar, etc.)
- Email marketing
- Event Marketing
- PPC
- Social Media
These different methods fall into two broad channels: inbound marketing and outbound marketing.
Focus on inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is about attracting a larger audience to your website via landing pages (paid and organic) and other similar techniques. Once they arrive, your content can has the ability to do a few things.
Whether it’s written content like ebooks and blog posts or video content formatted as how-to’s and webinars, you have a chance to provide informational content to aid and educate website visitors. Most users online use search engines to retrieve information so creating content based around your target audience’s questions will not only help provide them with answers and action items, but help increase your visibility online.
From there, you can educate and later persuade them of the value of your product, ending with calls to action or CTAs that direct them through to your order form, e-commerce store or enquiry page. Also consider downloadable and gated content to help capture lead information.
Read more about gated content and whether it’s right for your business goals.
Don’t forget outbound marketing
In contrast, outbound marketing campaigns involve going out to meet your target audience where they are, using techniques like event marketing and trade show kiosks as well as reaching out via cold calling.
All these different methods of lead generation can feed qualified leads into your sales funnel, ready for your sales team to convert the lead into a paying customer.
The value of qualified leads
Qualifying leads involves giving them a score based on their level of interest and engagement in your product and ultimately, their readiness to make a purchasing decision. It’s an important way to identify the best prospects as part of the lead generation process, so that your sales reps can focus on selling quickly to those who are ready to buy immediately.
At the same time, this can identify qualified leads who may need a little more nurturing to get them to the end of the sales process, boosting conversion rates and order values as a core component in your sales funnel.
Lead generation is about both quantity and quality – and one highly scoring sales qualified lead can be worth many low scoring sales leads.
With inbound marketing tools and call tracking, you can qualify and score leads generated across all of your different marketing activities, giving your sales team the data they need to maximize revenues and conversion rates.
To learn more about how call analytics can improve your business, request your no obligation demo of CallRail today.
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