As a business, it is crucial that Lead Generation be at the forefront of any digital marketing campaign you undertake and that you understand what lead generation is in terms of digital marketing.
The digital era has transformed the way we do business. Gone are the days where promoting your business means taking out a newspaper advertisement or launching a flyer campaign and knocking door to door.
These days, you are able to focus on your target audience and research their habits using various analytics software(s).
A bit like using an x-ray machine on your data. You can choose who to hit, when and how – and execute campaigns with extreme precision.
This allows you to reverse engineer your campaigns with your starting point being the end goal, the user.
Businesses must keep up and continually adapt to develop their digital marketing strategies.
Social media and search engine marketing are synonymous with lead generation.
Both play a huge and vital role in getting brands noticed and heard, and set the stage for most marketing campaigns you see online today.
What Is A Lead?
A ‘lead’ is usually someone who has shown interest in your company.
Potential customers are given opportunities to reach out to your business via email, phone calls, or social media channels to open up a communication with your business.
One way customers can get more information on your business is by signing up for a trial or offer that you are running, or could call to ask about it.
Direct response lead generation is a far cry from the old fashioned and predictable cold-calling methods that have fallen out of favor.
Let’s say you complete a survey for a brand that you’re passionate about, and in return they give you a promotional voucher for shops in your area.
In exchange for the discounted offers, however, they ask for your contact information—likely because they want to stay connected with you or perhaps sell their products to you.
In return for that promotional voucher, you’ve exchange your information with the company and given them an opportunity to sell their product to you.
Now they’ve got you a little warmed up to make for a better first conversation.
From the company’s viewpoint, the information you provide in exchange for your promotional voucher is collected and helps to inform more personalized and meaningful marketing communications with you as the potential customer moving forward.
This helps the company to limit wastage so they’re not spending much time on prospects that aren’t interested in your services.
Why Do You Need Leads?
The reason businesses need leads is because they allow you to refine and establish an understanding about who your potential customers are, what their needs and interests are, when they’re most receptive to hearing from you, and how best to reach out to them.
Lead Generation creates opportunities for businesses to attract qualified prospects with established interest in their products/services.
This allows marketers to effectively engage with people looking for more information on specific topics or have expressed explicit interest in buying a product/service like yours at some point in the future.
What Are The Different Types of Leads?
Not all leads are equal. There are different types of leads that manifest themselves differently throughout your business, so its best to have a strategy for each type.
Marketing Qualified Leads
Marketing qualified leads are those contacts that have engaged with your marketing assets but aren’t quite ready to get on the phone for a sales call with you just yet.
A good example of a Marketing Qualified Lead is a contact who has filled out a form on your landing page to claim an offer, like 10% off or a 30 day free trial.
Sales Qualified Leads
Sales qualified leads are the contacts that have taken action.
This means the users who have indicated a firmer interest in becoming a paying customer to your business.
An example of a Sales Qualified Lead would be a contact that has filled out a form on your website to ask a specific question about your product(s) and/or service(s).
Service Qualified Leads
Service qualified leads can be categorized as the contacts or customers who have expressed an interest in becoming a paying customer to your customer service team.
A good example of this would be a prospect who tells your customer service department that they’d like to upgrade their current subscription with you.
In this moment, the customer service representative would connect this customer to the appropriate account manager or sales team representative.
Product Qualified Leads
Product Qualified Leads are the contacts who have physically used your product(s) and taken actions that show you a strong level of interest in becoming a paying customer.
These types of leads can be easily accessed by companies offering an experiential or digital product trial, such as a 14 day free trial of your software or a 10 day VIP pass to your discounts area on your website.
An example of a Product Qualified Lead could be a customer who uses the free version of your product but has frequently been asking about the features that are only available upon payment.
Tips for Lead Generation Campaigns
In any given lead generation campaign, there can be a lot of moving parts. It can be difficult to tell which parts of your campaign are working and which need some fine-tuning.
What exactly goes into a best-in-class lead generation engine? Here are a few tips when building lead gen campaigns.
Follow your data.
If you’re looking to build a lead generation engine, start with the bevy of data already at your fingertips. Begin by archiving which posts consistently rank well, bring in traffic, and have a clear connection to your product.
Once you know what performs well, you can determine where to place CTAs.
“For these posts, ask yourself what the missing middle piece is between what someone is reading about and what you can offer them,” suggests AJ Beltis, a senior marketing manager focused on media conversion at HubSpot. “Perhaps it’s an actionable template, a more in-depth guide, or even a demo if the content is intended for those further along in the buying cycle.
Remember, your CTA should not be a reach from the topic in the post.
“Keep it straightforward and logical and the leads will come flowing in,” Beltis says.
Use the right lead generation tools.
As you saw in our data, the most successful marketing teams use a formal system to organize and store their leads. That’s where lead generation tools and lead generation software come into play.
How much do you know about the people visiting your website? Do you know their names or their email addresses? How about which pages they visited, how they’re navigating around, and what they do before and after filling out a lead conversion form?
If you don’t know the answers to these questions, chances are you’re having a hard time connecting with the people who are visiting your site. These are questions you should be able to answer — and you can with the right lead-generation tools.
There are a few different tools and templates out there that’ll help you create different lead gen assets to use on your site:
- CTA Templates: 50+ free, customizable call-to-action (CTA) templates in PowerPoint that you can use to create clickable CTA buttons to use on your blog, landing pages, and elsewhere on your site.
- Lead Generation Software Tools: This free tool from HubSpot includes lead capture and contact insights features, which will scrape any pre-existing forms you have on your website and add those contacts to your existing contact database. It also lets you create pop-ups, hello bars, or slide-ins — called “lead flows” — that’ll help you turn website visitors into leads immediately.
- Visitor Tracking: Hotjar has a heatmap tool that creates a color-coded representation of how a user navigates your site. This information helps you understand what users do on your site.
- Form-Scraping Tool: A form-scraping tool collects submissions on your website’s existing forms and helps you automatically consolidate all your leads into your contact database. HubSpot customers can create and embed forms, which automatically populate into your CRM.
Create amazing offers for all different stages of the buying cycle.
Not all of your site visitors are ready to talk to your sales team.
Someone at the beginning of the buyer’s journey might be interested in an informational piece like an ebook or a guide, whereas someone who’s more familiar with your company and near the bottom of the journey might be more interested in a free trial or demo.
Make sure you’re creating offers for each phase and offering CTAs for these offers throughout your site.
Yes, it takes time to create valuable content that teaches and nurtures your leads down the funnel, but if you don’t offer anything for visitors who aren’t ready to buy, then they may never come back to your website. From checklists to templates to free tools, here are 23 ideas for lead-generation content to get you started.
If you want to take personalization a step further — which will help boost your conversion rate — try using smart CTAs. Smart CTAs detect where a person is in the buyer’s journey, whether they’re a new visitor, a lead, or a customer, and display CTAs accordingly.
Keep your messaging consistent and deliver on your promise.
The highest-converting lead-gen campaigns are the ones that deliver what they promise.
Make sure that you’re presenting a consistent message throughout the process and providing value to everyone who engages with your lead capture. The aspects of your campaign should mirror everything else on your website, on your blog, and within the product that you’ll eventually try to sell. If not, you’ll have a difficult time getting your lead to the next lifecycle stage.
Your campaign should be about more than just obtaining an email address. You should seek to develop a new customer.
Link your CTA to a dedicated landing page.
This may seem obvious to you, but you’d be surprised how many marketers don’t create dedicated landing pages for their offers. CTAs are meant to send visitors to a landing page where they can receive a specific offer.
Don’t use CTAs to drive people to your homepage, for instance. Even if your CTA is about your brand or product (and perhaps not an offer like a download), you should still be sending them to a targeted landing page that’s relevant to what they are looking for.
If you have the opportunity to use a CTA, send them to a page that will convert them into a lead.
Get your sales team involved.
Remember when we talked about lead scoring? Well, it isn’t doable without your sales team’s input.
Your marketing and sales teams need to be aligned on the definitions and the process of moving a lead from MQL to SQL to opportunity.
Be open to evolving your relationship with sales and how you guide leads along your funnel. Your definitions will likely need to be refined over time. Just make sure to keep everyone involved up-to-date.
Use social media strategically.
While marketers typically think of social media as best for top-of-the-funnel marketing, it can still be a helpful and low-cost source for lead generation as shared in the lead gen strategies above.
Start by adding links directly to the landing pages of high-performing offers within your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media posts.
Tell visitors that you’re sending them to a landing page. That way, you’re setting expectations.
Leverage your partnerships.
When it comes to lead generation, co-marketing can be powerful. If your team works with partner companies, put your heads together and create some mutually beneficial offers. “On the Content Offers team at HubSpot, we run campaigns with partner companies that have a similar target audience and brand values to create and promote gated content like ebooks, reports, and templates,” says Jasmine Fleming, a marketing manager at HubSpot. Fleming says both HubSpot and our partners generate leads with the offer. “We can share those leads with each other,” she says. “Co-marketing offers have the potential to generate significantly more leads than a content piece created by one company alone.”
Remain flexible and constantly iterate.
Your lead generation strategy needs to be as dynamic as the people you’re targeting. Trends change, behaviors shift, and opinions morph. So should your lead gen marketing.
Use A/B split testing to see what CTAs perform best, which landing pages convert better, and which copy captures your target audience.
Experiment with layout changes, design, UX, content, and advertising channels until you find what works.
Conclusion
So, what is lead generation in digital marketing?
When you consider that more than half of your marketing budget should go towards Lead Generation, the most effective strategy is to have a good plan and make sure there are excellent returns.
Rather than using lead generation as a one-time tactic, approach it as part of your core business to create more customer-friendly experiences from the beginning.
Keeping up with all of the latest trends in lead generation can be a challenge, but it will help you advance your business and career.
Reach out to us anytime – if there’s something you’d like to discuss, we’re always here.
