What is Lead Generation? (+ tips how to do it)
Insights, tips & tricks
Written by
Hendrik
Sixty percent of marketers report that lead generation is a major pain point for their business. Establishing a good lead is more complex than targeting people who have downloaded your white paper, and it’s important that your salespeople don’t waste their time cold-calling unqualified leads when there are ways to narrow the group down.
Any person who has an interest in a company’s product or service is considered a lead.
Nowadays lead generation is key to having a successful marketing strategy. But most importantly, transforming those leads into sales and keeping those sales constantly engaged is a thousand times more important!
A customer relationship Management software helps you fullfill that!
Want to learn more about CRM software click here.
In this article we will cover:
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the online marketing technique where you wish to attract a potential customer or lead to your website and then leave his/her details. In exchange for this data, the lead receives a reward, e.g. a brochure, e-book, offers, …
The goal of lead generation is a long-term cooperation, but of course first and foremost to increase the revenue of your company.
Brands and companies make use of different strategies regarding lead generation such as:
- Blogging
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Networking
- Coupons
- Live events and seminars
- Website landing pages
The strategies mentioned above are just a few different strategies you can use to attract potential customers to your product or offer. Most companies stick with what works best for them, as lead generation strategies are different depending on the industry. We will discuss different means to generate leads in the section below!
Why is Lead Generation necessary?
When a stranger begins a relationship with you by showing an organic interest in your business, the transition from stranger to customer is much more natural. It’s always, always, always better to generate your leads organically. Always. Okay, it might take a little more effort and time than just buying them.
But other than that, you get much more out of it in every area: both in terms of hard sales and just… satisfaction. Trust us!
Lead generation is part of the second phase of the inbound marketing methodology. It occurs after you have attracted an audience and are ready to convert those visitors into leads for your sales team.
As you can see in the scheme above, lead generation is a fundamental point in an individual’s journey to becoming a satisfied customer.
How to Generate those Leads?
Now you know what a lead is and how lead generation can help you and how it fits in a marketing strategy, let us dive deeper into the fact of how to generate those important leads. We have listed a few key components for your lead strategy below.
1. Landing Page
A landing page is a webpage that a visitor lands on for a specific purpose.
A CTA takes your visitor to a landing page, which is a web page that is designed to capture lead information in exchange for an offer. The advantage of referring to a landing page instead of your homepage or product page is that your visitors have to make less effort to navigate themselves.
This way you can better focus on the stage of the buyer journey the reader is in. The relevance of your landing page will often also better match your keywords.
2. Content
Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content. The more delighted a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your call-to-action and move onto your landing page.
Video marketing is becoming increasingly important in today’s society. But of course, the question is how can you generate leads from a video? The answer is simple: show attractive images at the beginning of the video and ask the viewer for his or her information, such as email address to continue watching.
Want to learn more about video marketing? Read the Ultimate Guide for Video Marketing in 2022 here.
Spott can help you generate those leads from videos using interactivity!
With our interactive content software Spott you can make every kind of content interactive! If your CTA’s are embedded in interactive content they will certainly boost your lead generation strategy. According to a report by Content Marketing Institute, 81% of marketers say that interactive content is more effective at grabbing users’ attention than static content.
In addition, 66% of marketers report improved audience engagement after implementing interactive content. The reason why is simple: interactive content like interactive images, by its very definition, is designed to engage the user. Interactive content shifts the viewer into a user by giving them an array of actions they can take mid-content.
With Spott’s unique interactive software features, you can skyrocket engagement, CTR and double or even triple your conversion rates, while using a user-friendly platform.
Want to learn more about how interactive video software can boost your Ecommerce Lead generation click here.
3. Social Media
Exploiting your different social media channels is an important part of boosting your leads. Social media makes it easy to prompt your followers into action, for example a swipe-up option on Instagram Stories, and biolinks on your Facebook/Instagram page. Another way to do so is to add a call to action in your social media posts or promote your different offers.
On the other hand, using hashtags can also boost your lead generation strategy. Hashtags can be strategic and targeted. Above all they offer a great way to leverage your current social media exposure and attract new customers.
4. Email
Email is a great place to target the people who already know your brand and product or service.
It’s much easier to ask them to do an action because they’ve already subscribed to your list. Emails are often a bit cluttered, so use CTAs with compelling text and an eye-catching design and content to grab your subscribers’ attention.
5. Blog
You can generate leads related to blogs on several levels. First, there is the option for guest blogging. Guest blogging is a great way to generate referral business through content marketing while improving your SEO.
Guest blogging offers all of the following marketing benefits:
- Forms new connections in the industry
- Improves your SEO by acquiring meaningful and relevant backlinks
- Generates referral traffic to your page from a relevant audience
- You can find leads for your business by guest blogging for sites that are relevant to your industry but not in direct competition with you.
Second, you can write blog posts about various case studies. These case studies should be customer success stories; you can cover these success stories separately for each industry.
What should such a case study contain? An outline of the problem, how you helped, what method, services or products you used to achieve this and what results resulted.
Not only will you help them build awareness for their business, but the subjects of each post will also share the pieces with their respective networks. Their reputation and their trust in you will encourage others to contact you.
6. Facebook Lead Ads
When Facebook Ads launched in 2007 and the algorithm began to favor accounts that used paid advertising, there was a major shift in the way businesses used the platform to capture leads.
Facebook created Lead Ads for this purpose. Facebook also has a feature that allows you to place a simple call-to-action button at the top of your Facebook page, so you can send Facebook followers directly to your website.
It is important to consider carefully what you’re going to offer, because the more valuable or accessible your content, the lower the cost per lead. Also, decide in advance how much you want to pay per lead because it can quickly add up if you approach lead generation in this way.
7. Use a Chatbot
If you’re not using one yet, now might be the right time to add a chatbot to your website. These can help you generate free leads by improving the online experience of your web visitors.
With a chatbot, website visitors can get the information they want 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And they can get that information without your staff spending time on it.
This way a chatbot helps you generate “free” leads by ensuring that customers stay on your website for a longer time. When you provide website visitors with a positive browsing experience, they are more likely to return to you in the future.
8. Use Surveys
When you make use of surveys, you can get a better idea of what your target audience values most and how you can better meet their needs. The information you get from survey questions you’ve asked can be incredibly useful for optimizing other lead generation methods mentioned in the blog post.
When preparing a survey, you have to take into account: the survey should not be too long, what kind of questions you are going to ask, no suggestive questions, what scales you are going to use and so on. In other words, writing a good survey takes some time, but the information you get out of it is worth it!
