Marketers in B2B business face the challenge of lead generation. This is because they have to stand out from their competitors and compel their leads into giving their information for the purpose of selling.
It might sound daunting, but it isn’t that overwhelming once you understand the basics and importance of lead generation. In this guide, each step of lead generation is broken down into simple actionable steps you can take one at a time.
What Is A Lead?
A lead is a person who shows interest in the goods or services offered by your company but is skeptical about buying it. They are people who might be interested in doing business with you.
They provide you with some personal information such as their name or email ID in return for some information on a specific product. You should never confuse leads with prospects as leads are just potential prospects who are yet to be qualified.
What Is Lead Generation?
In order to get information from the target audience it is necessary to attract and engage them to your website. This is the lead generation process.
The process starts by welcoming the audience to your website and providing them with the information and offers related to the product. After which you will nurture the client who fits in the buyer’s persona.
Lead generation is the process of building trust, credibility and visibility from specific people. This is the first step of building a meaningful relationship with the clients.
Importance Of Lead Generation.
Leads are essential to develop and sustain your business. But how exactly? Let’s have a look
1. Inflates Your Market
Whenever you start a business, you have a specific audience whom you wish to target. But many times, while running the campaign, you might get engagement from audiences which weren’t included in marketing campaigns. Lead Generation allows you to understand your prospects as well as visualise the newly discovered audience and add them.
2. Elimination Of Cold Calls
With the help of different lead generation methods, you attract a lot of hot leads. This helps you to eliminate outbound methods such as cold calling and emailing as you are literally providing the customers with what they want.
3. Followers Growth.
Sharing valuable content helps you to build a community as you are providing information which stands out from the rest allowing you to take the lead in the competitive market. This conversion of the audience into clients will help you grow your following as they might as well become brand advocates.
4. Improve Lead Quality
Lead generation takes a highly targeted approach towards content creation. It allows you to post content which caters specific people and posts on a scheduled time period.
With the help of lead generation, you can create blogs on topics which resonate with people thereby increasing the conversion rate.
5. Automate Lead Management
There is a lot of software which helps you lead generation and management processes. Some examples are Email marketing software, CRMs and so on. Implementation of these tools will help you fasten the pipeline process.
How To Generate Leads?
This process might sound daunting but it will be easy once you decipher it. Let’s sum the entire process up into 5 steps:
- Understanding the buyer’s persona
- Creation of engaging content
- Attracting the right audience
- Acquire their information
- Qualifying leads
Providing content alone won’t encourage the audience with their information, you must be able to detect their problem which they are facing and be able to provide them with a solution. If you are able to do so, that means you understand the buyer’s persona and are able to provide the solution through content. Therefore, you end up landing on a successful lead generation strategy.
Lead Generation Marketing Strategies
In this section of blog we are going to read about different strategies that will drive traffic to your lead generation funnel.
1. Inbound Marketing
Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing focuses on creating brand awareness by attracting potential customers to your website through social media, blogs, search engines and so on.
2. Content
Content is used by customers to educate themselves on the product and provide information to the readers. It acts like a crowd-puller that forwards the leads to the landing page upon clicking call-to-action. Always remember, content is the king; the delightful the content, the better the traffic.
3. Search Engine Optimization
SEO’s help to gather a large volume of visitors to the top of the lead generation funnel. Once you have created a delightful content which contains visual content and ranked it according to the search query, it results in creating a sustained flow of traffic which is mostly free.
4. Email Marketing
This is one of the most preferred ways of marketing. In Email marketing, you reach out to the audience who are already known to your brand. You can send out Emails or forms and analyse how the audience responds to them.
5. Pay-per-click Ads
These are the ads for which you pay whenever someone clicks them as they are displayed on the search engine of google, bing, yahoo and more. Your website shows up upon the use of organic key terms which thereby leads to targeting very high-qualified leads.
Lead Scoring And Modes Of Improvement
Lead scoring is the methodology used to determine the worthiness of the leads or potential customers. This is determined by evaluating their behavior as well as interest in the product and ranking them on those basis. In short, lead scoring determines the likeliness of the customer to buy the product.
Practices To Improve Lead Scoring
- Choose your attributes effectively
- Monitor conversion rates
- Have a clear buyer’s persona
- Include score degradation
- Disqualify certain leads
Summing Up!!
Throughout the blog, you have read about lead generation and its various aspects. Yes, the entire lead generation process is daunting but the results are worth it. Once you have every tool and plan in place, you will be able to effortlessly capture hot-leads in a shorter span of time. But, it isn’t something which will be done in a jiff, lead generation is something that would require constant changes and upgrades according to the company requirements. When you realise what works best for your team and company, you can work on strengthening the strategy.