Lead generation is the process of using marketing channels, software and strategies together to attract leads (also known as prospects) into the sales and marketing funnel.
What Is A Lead?
A lead is a person who has expressed interest in your product or service in some way.
Leads can show their interest in several ways. Examples include downloading your eBook, signing up for your newsletter, joining your community, following your social media profiles, completing a survey, and filling in your contact form.
Leads are often required to leave some kind of personal information like their name, email, address or phone number.
The goal from there is to nurture these leads and ultimately generate sales from them.
Why Is Lead Generation Important?
Lead generation is important to businesses for a couple of reasons.
The first reason is that lead generation is cheaper than other methods. Compared to traditional marketing like billboards, TV, and print advertising, lead generation costs less.
The second reason is that it is effective. The reason why a lot of companies invest in lead generation is because it just works!
B2B companies for example mostly have high price points and hence their customers take their time when making buying decisions. Lead generation serves as the first point of taking them through a buyer's journey that can tilt things in their favour.
Last but not least, it provides the support system for growth. Companies cannot grow without new customers. Having a robust lead generation strategy in place means a company can keep attracting new prospects consistently. Some of these leads will become customers.
How to Generate High-Quality Leads
There are a couple of ways a business can attract leads. Here are the most effective strategies you can start using today:
1. Invest in SEO
One of the best ways to attract leads is to optimise your website for search engines. Every internet user utilises search engines to find information, products, services, and brands.
Optimising your website for search engines puts your business in a position to be found by your target prospects.
2. Run Paid Ads
Another way to generate leads is to run paid ads. There are several websites platforms where you can run paid ads to generate leads.
Social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook have lead generation ads that are very effective.
Ads on niche websites are also very effective in generating leads.
3. Build an Audience on Social Media
A lot of businesses think social media isn’t for them. They are wrong!
Everyone is on social media these days. Having a presence on social media is crucial for every business.
With a solid social media marketing strategy, you can generate a ton of leads for your business.
4. Hire a Professional
Lead generation can be a daunting task if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Instead of trying to do it by yourself, you can leave it in the hands of professionals like our company whilst you focus on what you do best - building your business.
HubSpot is an inbound marketing platform that helps businesses grow traffic, generate leads and increase conversions. This all-in-one system has a HubSpot Marketing Hubfeaturewhich helps you increase your customers by publishing highly optimized content, capturing leads through forms and landing pages, and building automated workflows to communicate with your contacts.
This software boasts a wide range of email templates for various purposes: welcome emails, event invitations, email newsletters, ebook launch, etc. The email editor lets you flexibly customize the content blocks and design of the template.
You can also personalize the email with personal contact details (name, location, company name, and industry) or according to the customer’s lifecycle stage.
HubSpot’s landing page features help you create landing pages from scratch or from ready-made templates. You can grow your email list, capture leads and improve conversions by building pages that target specific groups of customers.
You can also create popup forms to collect more signups and to inform customers of special offers.
OptinMonster is a software that allows you to add forms to your website for the purpose of lead generation. This tool has a user-friendly interface and a wide collection of sleek and attractive form templates: slide-in forms, lightboxes, footer bars, etc. You can tweak these templates and even add custom HTML and CSS to forms.
In addition to giving you the ability to create unlimited forms for different web pages, OptinMonster also has a special feature called Exit intent - when this feature is enabled, popup forms are triggered when a web visitor is about to leave the site.
This tool integrates seamlessly with major email marketing services and e-commerce apps like Mailerlite, Shopify, Thrivecart and SamCart.
Unbounce is a platform that helps you create landing pages that are optimized for lead generation and conversions. This platform is very easy-to-use and does not require any knowledge of web design or web development.
It features 100+ attractive landing page templates that you can customize to build the page that best suits your business.
Unbounce offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop landing page builder, which helps you drag and organize text, images and videos into your landing page. You can also integrate subscription forms and downloadable files, and link to your social media pages.
Once your landing page is complete, you can use A/B testing to improve your results and measure site visits and conversion rates.
This platform integrates with popular marketing tools like MailChimp, Marketo, WordPress, HubSpot, Salesforce and more.
Leadfeeder is a software that tracks website analytics to help B2B businesses generate leads. With the use of Google Analytics, this software provides you with valuable insights by gathering historical data, contact information and company details from your current traffic.
It also lets you see the content that each visitor browses on your site, so you can identify their interests and predict their needs.
This software removes bots, ISPs and other shady traffic sources that can prevent you from getting quality leads. It also lets you remove unwanted leads, allowing you to focus more on high-quality prospects. It assigns scores to leads based on their site activity, and subsequently ranks them according to their scores.
Once your leads have been generated, Leadfeeder will provide you with a list of high-intent leads that you can put into categories such as web activity, industry, geography, custom properties, etc. It will also notify you when new companies or contacts are added to the list.
Hunter is a cloud-based solution that helps businesses find and verify professional email addresses from companies, domains or a specific professional on the internet.
This email management tool has a Domain Search feature through which you can look for the contact details, job titles and social media handles of any business or company personnel. This tool also lets you find large amounts of data and verify lists of business emails/addresses easily.
Hunter also lets you link your Gmail account to gather more high-quality leads for your business outreach. This software has integrated campaigns that let you perform outreaches directly rather than upload your contacts to another CRM.
Other tools include Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, Sumo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Facebook Leads Ads etc.
How Can We Help?
Like the thought of getting in a pro? Contact us today - we can set you up with a free strategy session.
If you’ve already got a marketing team, send them over to our training courses where they can find the latest tips and lessons in marketing that will be sure to help you get the edge on your competition.
