What is Lead Generation and How Does it Work in Digital Marketing?
by Andrei Carada
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation refers to the process of relating and attracting implicit guests or” leads” for a business’s products or services. It involves various marketing strategies and tactics to capture the interest of individuals or organizations, prompting them to provide their contact information or engage with the business. The primary goal of lead generation is to build a pipeline of prospective customers who have shown interest in what the business offers, allowing companies to nurture and convert these leads into actual customers through targeted communication and sales efforts.
Effective lead generation is a critical aspect of your sales operations. How many times has your boss called you up and asked, “Why are we not getting any leads?” It’s one of those things that often crop up around marketing, inside sales, and business development teams meetings no matter what your industry.
But before we start, what is lead generation anyway? What you need to do is to separate a sale from a lead. A sale is when you have already agreed to exchange compensation for a service or goods. Meanwhile, a lead is a potential sale – a contact that you haven’t converted yet. In most cases, a lead is simply a person who you can contact.
The 10 – 5 – 3 – 1 sales formula
An old industry adage is the 10 – 5 – 3 – 1 sales formula. For every ten leads, you can contact five, set an appointment with three, and close one. The batting average will vary from industry to industry but the concept is still firmly rooted in one thing – the more leads you have, the more sales you can potentially get. That’s why any sales team must gather as many leads as possible.
The next question there is this – how do you gather leads?
Why Lead Generation is Important for Business?
Digital is The Future of Lead Generation. With more operations shifting towards digital, effective lead generation also goes online. There are many ways to harness the power of digital marketing to get more leads.
1. Everybody is Already Online
You will be hard-pressed to find anyone who has not interacted yet with the internet. You can almost always find your market via an online medium.
2. Target Specific Interests and Groups
the various digital ad platforms like Facebook and Google allow you to target specific interests and groups. This way, you don’t cast a wide net that can be hit or miss in your lead generation efforts and be more focused on your approach.
3. The Ability To Analyse Your Leads with Data Analysis
We can harness the power of data analytics to retarget and reacquire people who have interacted with you in one way or another. These interactions are signals that these users know about your brand and each subsequent interaction brings you closer to a lead and eventual sale.
Lastly, and most importantly, digital solutions allow you to easily capture the leads by allowing our users to leave their details which you can send to your sales teams for them to try to close.
Making Lead Generation Work for Your Business
The next step of course is to utilize digital in a lead generation machine. It starts with identifying who your target audience is.
Are you a car company looking to sell your newest release? Then you basically need to find what kind of person is looking for cars at this very moment. You take note of their behaviors and build a digital profile of your target audience of potential car buyers. What words are they using to search for cars to buy on Google and Bing? What social media platforms are they on? What content are they consuming?
When you’ve built that profile, you then create content that will be attractive to your target audience. Compelling content does three things: it attracts your target audience, informs and convinces them to the next step, and finally, it also tells them how to take the next step with a call to action.
After you’ve built that content, it’s time to push it out. Posting it on blogs and social media platforms is just one step. A coherent media plan allows you to target your audience and reach them when and where they are most receptive to engaging with your content.
Finally, it is just a matter of capturing the lead. You can build forms on your website to capture that lead. Or, you can use proprietary lead forms built into social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn where they can capture contact information for you.
Build Your Own Lead-Generation Campaign!
Want to learn more? As always, we are here to help. We’ve been building lead-generation campaigns for various brands and needs. We’ve used effective lead generation for recruitment, product sales, campaign sign-ups, and event registrations.
If you have not noticed yet, this article is an effective lead-generation tool. Below this article is a link where you can sign up and our marketing team will be in touch with you to build your campaign. We’re excited to hear from you. We can’t wait to build great things with you!
