What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of generating enquiries based on consumer interest for a product or service ultimately leading to sales. In online marketing, lead typically involves collecting a visitor’s contact information via a web form. XL Marketing has become an effective major practitioner in lead generation, and what follows is our approach to this activity on behalf of our customers.

The evolution of lead generation, used to involve purchasing a list of names along with their contact details. In turn the salespeople will start cold calling these people. Today modern advances in technology have made it a lot easier to generate leads based on specific criteria and information. Companies gather information about the potential buyers and craft marketing messages and sales pitches as per the prospects’ needs. This is probably done using inbound and outbound marketing techniques. Being successful at lead generation can make your sales cycle much more efficient and lead to increased success rate in customer acquisition.

How does lead generation work?

Most commonly, a lead generation strategy for companies today begins with developing a website to promote their offerings. The consumer might search for a particular product/service, might as well come across these informational websites and sign up for an online request form. The information provided by them is verified and matched, and that lead is sent to the sales team.

We might add at least that’s the theory behind lead generation.

There are a variety of lead generation techniques available, and it may seem easy and simple, but in reality, it is kind of difficult to execute effectively. Businesses need to have a highly operation and a well-equipped strategy in hand for lead generation to provide favourable results. When lead generation is established successfully, it can pay off very well.

Importance of Lead Generation:

Today most businesses heavily rely on lead generation, as it is the only way to drive traffic to their website and turn those leads into potential customers, which in turn helps the business increase their revenue significantly. Without lead generation, it would become very difficult for the business teams to analyse what their audience want or what they are interested in.

Using lead generation, marketers can effectively target their audience and build an engaging website tailored to their needs and preferences. In addition, lead generation also enables businesses to:

• Choose the geographic location from where they want to generate leads.

• Tailor made pricing on per lead basis.

• Help control the number of leads they wish to receive.

• Pay only for the leads that have been successfully generated.

Lead generation is very much vital for businesses today unlike traditional calling, they allow a flowchart that structures a lead generation scheme and allows for maximum ROI. Businesses can shift their focus from finding customers to customers finding them.

Different Stages in lead generation:

“Outbound prospecting is a highly effective lead generation practice for B2B” This statement is quite true. Most of the lead generation processes are based on outbound prospecting.

1.Planning and analysis:

In this stage, you need to make a proper plan on how you are going to generate the leads. Start by researching the market and make a complete analysis on competitors. Based on that you need to create an ideal customer profile. This profile can be based on the customer demographics, geography, and technographics that defines your ideal customer. This profile will help you get the apt leads, and you will need a buyer persona which will indeed let you target those leads. The buyer persona might include the psychological traits, the buyer behaviour, their goals and pain points of the potential customer.

2.Doing some research:

You need to do some groundwork by refining the ideal customer profiles and buyer personas. Research based on the incoming leads, their contact information, their databases should be done. It is very important to keep track of incoming leads and report it to the sales team.

3.Pre-targeting:

Traditionally, the sales team used to email and call over and over again. It could either end up with winning or losing the lead. To get the utmost best out of cold outreach, we need to do pre-targeting. Pre-targeting is an advertising method that creates brand awareness among the target audience. With pre-targeting, you can boost brand identity, warm up the leads, boost the outbound marketing KPIs such as click through rate, response rate and conversion rate.

4.Landing pages:

Landing pages can be used in the lead generation process to create pre-targeting ads and an email copy. A landing page is a website page that facilitates desired action. It is always good to have a landing page instead of the website link because landing page focuses on one action and filters all the distracting elements. Also, it will help you segment the audience into micro groups to send a highly targeted message.

5.Reaching out to the leads:

There are two stages in the lead generation process where you can make your calls and send emails in sequence. A lead that shows more activity and involvement should be in the call priority compared to the one that hasn’t opened the email. After the calls and emails, you will know whether to qualify the lead down the sales funnel. Every lead response is recorded in CRM which helps track campaign performance.

6.Reporting:

Reporting should be done at each stage of the lead generation process. The reports should include, incoming leads, time spent on research, email templates, number of emails sent, bounced emails, auto-replies, opened rates, follow ups, number of qualified leads and conversion of those leads into closed deals. This process continues like a spiral and becomes wider or narrower. It is your efforts that rectifies if the process is going as planned or not.

Lead generation process:

In today’s era, it is very essential to have a proper lead generation process in place for a company to be successful.

1. Finding the lead:

The first and foremost important and crucial step is to find the right lead. You should figure out why this lead will be interested in your solution by understanding their needs and wants. When you are clear about who your leads are and what they care about, you can definitely attract them by offering the right content.

2. Attracting the leads through effective content:

According to a recent study, content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising.” In order to attract more leads, it is very important to share engaging content. You need to make sure your leads get attracted towards the content you produce. The content can take any form, say blogs, infographics, videos, images, case studies, webinar and whitepapers. The criteria are that the content you share reflects your brand identity and should be of interest to your leads.

3. Capturing the lead information:

Once you draw the attention of your leads through your engaging content, the next logical step is to capture their details so that you can use them as your business lead. But how do you capture this information? you can ask them to subscribe to your newsletter or people who land on your website through SEO can be asked to fill up a form. Also, you can engage the leads with live chat bots, video calls etc., As per a study,” Live chats can increase leads by an average of 40%.”

4. Lead nurturing:

Once you have their basic contact details, you can offer even more amazing content to make them consider your solution. One of the best ways is to nurture those leads by sending them mails often to stay connected. Maybe if someone likes your content and subscribes to your newsletter, you can send a couple of emails with attractive subject lines mentioning new product releases, sales vouchers, weekly tips and such. These mails will make them understand how your business solution will be of use to them.

5. Lead scoring:

You can give each lead a particular score based on their actions. You can give highest scores for leads who often visit your website, interact more often, download content, respond to mail and make free trial sign-ups. Lead scoring will help focus on the prospects who will likely become potential customers. With lead scoring, you can tell how ready the lead is to buy and also keeps you informed about the parts of your lead generation process that is not going well as planned.

6. Converting into customers:

The marketing team’s core job is to find the leads, nurture those leads and score them based on the interactions made. Now, turning those leads into customers is the prime focus of the sales team. In order to achieve this, the sales team will provide personal attention such as In-person demos, sales calls, free trials, on-site visits. The sales team will also make sure the customer experience is enriched and will extend support even after the purchase. This will turn one-time customers into loyal buyers.

For further information about what XL Marketing can do for you, please contact us.