Lead generation: what it is for and how it works is a vital part of the sales process in businesses. It is basically the means of attracting the interest of potential customers to increase future sales.
Firstly, we should define what a ‘’lead’’ is. A lead is a person who once came across and interacted with your brand. Moreover, they have the potential as a result to become a future customer.
Lead Generation, what it is for
Gaining leads is clearly at the forefront of any business, in fact, it is well worth the investment, because if you don’t have customers, then you won’t have sales. In order to guide potential customers to your product, obviously one must think of who and why they want to attract, regardless of it being for B2B or B2C.
Lead generation begins at the second stage of the in-bound marketing strategy. Now that you have attracted a potential lead or leads, the aim is to convert these leads into becoming customers. Generating leads is one of the hardest parts of any sales funnel. Hence, it all boils down to finding the most innovative ways of ensuring that your landing page is dedicated and adapted to high conversion of its visitors.
How lead generation works
- Attract strangers via different tools and contents, i.e. get discovered through a blog, a keyword search, or by social media.
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Convert these strangers are now your visitors, but you want to convert them into leads, so they need an action to follow, for example, they may submit a form, a specific call-to-action, or simply the landing page.
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Close the sale stage is where good use of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) comes into play. Because, platforms such as HubSpot ensure that you can maintain all the details of your newly converted lead, helping to promote and maintain a great relationship.
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Delight them by asking for feedback, see what they are saying on social or kindly ask them to complete a survey.
Finally, once the visitor has clicked on the call-to-action they have now become a lead. Therefore, you can use your various marketing channels to funnel more website traffic and constantly generate leads.
By the way, if you need help in capturing and generating leads, then check out HubSpot for example and its free lead generation tool.
Why is lead generation important?
We briefly touched on the importance of sales and ROI as shown above. Therefore the importance of lead generation is essential if you want to maximize your income and grow your business.
In doing so, lead generation allows you to build and nurture a relationship of trust between your brand and your potential customers. With the correct strategy you can drive more prospects to your brand and reap the rewards.
Well done! Now you’ve gotten the grasp of lead generation what it is and how it works. However, let’s look at some tips to boost your strategies in lead generation.
Our tips for lead generation
Consider starting a blog
It’s all about the content and if you want to really grab and maintain your target audience’s attention, then a blog is a great way to begin. Moreover, B2B brands use content marketing to generate new leads all the time. Indeed they put a lot of effort into SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a result their articles will rank high in search engines. Lastly, the great thing about blogs is that you can include CTAs within the body of the blog and equally at the end of the blog. This way, you can encourage your target audience to read the topics of interest to them.
Take advantage of social media
Lead generation relies a lot on social media channels, and it is where your leads go to talk about you. Thanks to social media, you have the possibility to engage with your audience and provide them with customer service and promote your brand or product.
Networking
A great place to start networking is LinkedIn, because here you will find a throve of like-minded people and you can instantly make connections and draw leads to your company. It is an inspiring platform where you have the advantage of starting the conversation and gain followers.
E-mails
This is certainly a great way to generate new leads. Think about it, you can make direct communication with a lead through their inbox. Furthermore, these e-mails can be scheduled and customized to get as much information as possible from your new or existing lead.
Key Takeaway
Finally, communication is key for lead generation, as a result of good communication with your target and above all, by targeting them in a personalized way and nurture them more and more.
If you would like to know more about CRM you can learn more from our recent blog customer relationship management blog.
If you need help with lead generation in your business, you can contact us at Ekeria for a free consultation!
