Lead Generation is about the effort and actions you do to attract stranger people and convert them into leads. Exist many strategies to make a person interested in your company and make them want to request more information from you. For example, online content, coupons, content offers, blog post, networking, etc.
Many marketing departments are investing more budget to lead generation tactics, that’s because the buying process has changed. Marketers are more focus on creating a solid and ongoing relationship with customers than just sell a product.
Generate leads organically will help your business’ growth. This first challenge of defining exactly who should you attract with your marketing efforts it's actually a game-changer, it’s not about offering your products or services to everyone to sell more. It’s about getting known with the right people in the right way, at the right time. In that way, the transition to convert a lead into a customer will be more natural.
First, a new prospect finds your business through any of your marketing channels, such as your social media page, blog, adds.
Then your prospect clicks on a Call to Action (CTA), it could be a button, an image or a text CTA that encourages website visitors to take some sort of action.
That CTA takes your prospect to a landing page, a web page designed to promote any product or service and that has a form to help you capture your visitor’s information like name, email, company name, etc, in exchange for an offer.
This offer could be an ebook, guide, checklist, webinar or any valuable content that helps your new prospect to solve any problem with a specific topic. Learn more about lead magnets examples to triple your conversions in this post
Once the visitor fills out the form to download an offer, he or she converts into a new lead.
And that’s how to lead Generation works, It’s not too complicated, right? well, now you know the process let’s see how can you attract visitors to your website.
Lead Generation Marketing refers to the channels you can use to drive traffic to your website. We talked about the lead generation process and how it works but before initiating this process, people have to know who you are and what you’re offering. How are you going to do this? Let’s talk about what channels you should use to promote your landing page.
As you know, in the Inbound Methodology content is king. Create relevant and educational content is the best way to attract new prospects. That’s how you demonstrate your target that you’re the best option to solve their problems.
Content should be focused on helping your audience instead of promoting your brand. Remember that people don’t know you yet, they’re just looking for symptoms and possible solutions to their pain points.
You can include CTAs anywhere in your content, try to do something visually attractive, the most helpful is your content, the more likely they are to click your call-to-action and move onto your landing page.
Emails are a great channel to engage with people who already know you. One of the advantages of emails is that can be very personalized so you have more chances to get a conversion.
Design matters. Even though the most important thing about your email is the quality of the content, an eye-catching design of your CTAs can grab your clients’ attention.
Social Networks are powerful channels to share your content and generate leads. Use social media channels to maximize your client’s engagement. These platforms make it easy to encourage your prospects to take action like click on a CTA, share your content or get some feedback from them.
Offering trials of your product or services can help you increase your conversions. Free trials are also useful to build the credibility of your brand. Once a prospect is using your product or service you can catch their attention with new offers, discounts or a premium version of your product to encourage them to buy.
Featured Resource
How to Jumpstart a Lead Generation Marketing Campaign
5 Free Trial Marketing Strategies You Can Implement this Quarter
These are just a few channels you can use to generate leads. We recommend this post to learn more about How to Jumpstart a Lead Generation Marketing Campaign
Sometimes the Lead Generation process could be overwhelming especially when you want to make your business grow. At this point, some marketers may be tempted to buy leads, but here’s the thing:
Imagine that you have a pet online supply store but instead of following the lead generation process you decide to buy a list of 100 leads. You add all contacts to your email list and send them offers or discounts on your products.
How do you know if all those contacts are interested in your product? How many people on that list have pets? How many people have a credit card to buy something online?
Without a proper lead gen process is difficult to have all this information and probably you won’t have the results you expected for the investment you made.
Remember that any leads you've purchased don't actually know you. The messages you send them are therefore unwanted messages. In addition, they could flag your messages as spam which is bad for you.
Once enough people flag your messages as spam, you go on a "blacklist," which is then shared with other email providers. Once you get on the blacklist, it’s really hard to get back off of it.
In summary, it’s much better to generate leads in an inbound way than buying them. No one likes to feel invaded by unwanted messages and advertising. So try to build a solid relationship with your prospects with relevant and helpful content, so they will trust you and your products or services.
Lead Scoring helps you save your company (mostly your sales team) a lot of hours by identifying only those leads that are ready to buy and separating them from those who are super cold yet and those who need a bit more nurturing.
Well, to simplify the method: To score a lead you need to assign a series of points based on how important certain action on your website is for you, for example downloading a piece of content can be 20 points or visiting your pricing page can mean for your company 40 points, etc.
You assign these points to implicit actions to your website and to explicit fit elements of your ideal buyer, for example, if a visitor downloaded a guide and its also a male between 35-40 years old, who happens to have owned a company of 11-50 employees and those qualities are within your ideal customer profile this person might now have a sum of points of 20+30.
With a lead management softwares such as HubSpot, when the lead gets a certain score (for example 65), you can get it automatically switched from MQL to SQL and assigned to one of your sales representatives.
Note: It is very important to create this scoring system with your sales team, so you can make sure the leads you are sending to them are really golden nuggets.
At the end of the day, you should have something similar to this example presented in Mark Growth blog article "This Is Why Your Lead Scoring Sucks"
Make sure to review your lead scoring system regularly (at least every 3 to 6 months) along with your Sales team. This way, you'll make sure that the results are analyzed efficiently and that your qualification is being correctly applied based on how many deals your Sales team closed from the leads Marketing provided. Plus, companies that have aligned marketing and sales generate way more revenue from marketing.
We’ve talked about what to do once you have a visitor on your site, how to qualify them to convert them into customers but, how can you get them there in the first place? Here’s when it comes to lead generation strategies.
Your strategies depend on the channels you’ll use to generate leads. So, let’s dive into some popular lead gen strategies you can use.
An online community is a group of people with common interests who use the Internet (web sites, email, instant messaging, etc) to share knowledge and experience about any topic, work together and pursue their interests over time.
Imagine being part of an online community where your business is the solution to many of their problems, it’s a great opportunity to get leads and convert them into leads.
The objective of these events is to give your prospects something valuable in exchange for their personal information like their name, email, telephone number, etc.
What kind of events? It could be a course, workshops or the presentation of a new product. One of the great things about this strategy is that you can interact face to face with your prospects and get some feedback from them about your business.
Hosting an event isn’t an easy job, it needs weeks or months to prepare everything and the investment may be greater than other strategies.
Business Networking is about establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with other business people and potential clients or customers. This can be an informal way to generate leads, the primary purpose of business networking is to tell others about your business.
According to a recent HubSpot Research report, 54% of customers prefer to see videos from a brand or business than other content formats.
Video Marketing Strategy refers to using videos to promote your business’ product or service, increase engagement on your digital and social channels and, educate your consumers and customers.
Actually, people are more visually customers, that’s why creating videos has a lot of benefits to your business, video marketing help you drive sales, raise awareness of your products or services and engage your customers.
We’ve talked about getting leads in an organically way, but to paid advertising is another effective way to generate leads and we guarantee that you’ll have results.
Paid social media advertising is very different from traditional outbound advertising.
Currently social media platforms allows you to find, target, and reach your audience with ease. Each platform is designed to facilitate the goals of your business, such as brand awareness, lead generation, drive traffic to your website, and more.
You can even access the native analytics for insights into how to enhance the performance of your social media advertising campaign. These are some social media platforms you can use:
Generating leads is less difficult as it seems. Keep creating helpful content and great offers to your clients, optimize your website and landing pages, don’t forget to add CTAs to your blogs and forms to your landing pages and above all, promote your content in multi-channel environments.
Remember, this is a continuous process, the more consistent you are the most leads you’ll generate. Now that you know more about the lead generation to grow your business we want to share with you our guide to lead generation. Enjoy!
You'd be surprised how effective it can be to just include a warm, smiling photograph of yourself. Or maybe you wouldn't be so surprised. Maybe you just don't surprise easily. Or maybe you're just incredibly wise. Yes. That must be it. Wise and warmly smiling. What a winning combination.
Shawn Bristow HubSpot, Inc.
You'd be surprised how effective it can be to just include a warm, smiling photograph of yourself. Or maybe you wouldn't be so surprised. Maybe you just don't surprise easily. Or maybe you're just incredibly wise. Yes. That must be it. Wise and warmly smiling. What a winning combination.
Shawn Bristow HubSpot, Inc.
