Do you remember those people twirling arrow signs towards a store? These folks would twirl these around and perform tricks on the street.
They hoped to draw attention to themselves, so they can direct passers-by to the restaurant’s latest promo. Unfortunately, people are usually hurrying on their phones, so they might not even notice them.
As a result, the restaurant barely receives more customers despite the promoter’s efforts. Imagine that ignored restaurant is your brand’s products and service.
If you want more potential customers for your company, then you may need to improve your lead generation.
Everything consumers do that shows their interest in your products and services count as leads. Visiting your website and registering to your email list are just a few examples.
Since leads mean customer interest, your brand needs more right? As you’ll soon realize, creating leads helps your business in ways you’ve never thought about.
Here are the 5 important facts to know about lead generation:
#1: Lead Generation Gives Your Brand That Extra Edge
Business is a highly competitive scene, so you would need everything to stay ahead. You would need to learn about your competitors to find any weaknesses.
More importantly, you need to understand your own, so you can implement the necessary improvements. Lead generation helps you adapt in both ways.
If your competition mainly uses traditional sales, then you have a shot at exceeding theirs using lead generation. It’s also a relatively cost-effective means of tracking the market and staying ahead of competitors.
This means you’ll spend far less on marketing but yield greater sales using this technique.
#2: Lead Generation Needs A Strategy
Marketing is never as simple as most people think it is. It requires careful planning while taking factors like your budget and target audience into account.
Marketing is a precarious balance between your desired end and your available means. Similarly, you need lead generation strategies to efficiently build interest for your brand.
Specifically, you need an inbound lead generation strategy.
It aims to guide potential customers through the first three stages of the sales funnel:
1. Awareness – People find out about your brand.
2. Interest – People learn the merits of your brand.
3. Decision – People think about purchasing from your brand.
4. Action – People finally buy your products or services.
Consequently, your customers would reach the action stage, you’d secure sales from them. Your marketing team and sales team must collaborate to make sure your leads are qualified.
In other words, your leads must be willing to accept a sales pitch.
What Are The Types Of Qualified Lead Generation?
One of the first steps to your marketing plan is determining which sale funnel stage you’re struggling with. You can find out by lead scoring for those funnel stages.
This ranks your leads to show you which ones need priority. You may use the conventional BANT approach, or you could check the other models online.
It will tell which type of qualified leads you must improve for lead generation.
If you’re struggling to spread the word about your brand, you might need help with information qualified leads (IQL).
These include folks in your funnel’s awareness stage, like those who entered your landing page. They know about your brand but have no desire to buy its goods and services.
Perhaps you have trouble with lead generation for marketing qualified leads (MQL). These people know about your brand, so they’re in the interest stage of the sales funnel.
For instance, someone requesting additional information about your products is considered an MQL. If people aren’t showing any interest in purchasing afterward, you may need to improve lead generation for sales.
Sale Qualified Leads (SQL) exhibit the desire to pay for a brand’s goods and services. They may submit their contact information to a business to receive product details.
What Is The Process Of Lead Generation?
As you may have noticed, this marketing strategy spans the entire sales funnel. It starts by capturing the attention of your target audience to trigger the awareness stage.
Companies usually do this by releasing adverts on various forms of media. Meanwhile, the marketing team informs about the benefits of products similar to their brands.
They post numerous guest posts and blogs, so consumers enter the interest stage of the sales funnel. If the content successfully convinces readers, they will now find ways to purchase its products.
Typically, blogs have a call-to-action to purchase from the brand, so they would likely click it.
Once they do, sales qualified lead generation starts, and the website must persuade them to finally pay for the brand’s offerings.
#3: You Can Find Everything Needed For Lead Generation Online
The internet has almost every lead generation tool you need. Aside from a great marketing team, you’ll find essential services like Google Analytics and email marketing platforms online.
The former allows you to monitor the real-time performance of your leads. It could also notify you regarding changes to your metrics such as conversion rate.
While you could gather lead information such as email addresses by yourself, you could use automated services instead.
Some marketing platforms could even handle your lead capture and send email promos for you.
#4: You Can Perform Lead Generation Too
You’ll find many resources for lead generation such as this one on the internet. What’s more, you’re allowed to use most of them for free!
If you need additional functionality though, you might need to cough up additional funding. You and your team can follow the steps to lead generation and more importantly, success!
#5: …Or You Could Leave It To The Experts!
Like most businesses, yours may simply have no manpower to spare. You need all hands on deck, so you might not have time for better marketing.
Thankfully, you may outsource your lead generation to LeadAdvisors. They have teams of experts that can execute your content marketing strategy for you.
LeadAdvisors can handle your marketing, so your brand keeps going!
