What is lead generation?
Lead generation is the construction of a base of consumers interested in the offer. These are the people suitable for the desired segment of the target audience through various marketing practices at the points of interaction with TA.
The most effective methods
The methods of generating leads online are numerous, but all of them can be grouped into three main categories:
Personal communication
This group includes telemarketing (calls), personal meetings, event marketing. With the first two points, everything is clear without any special explanation, but the last one can be deciphered in more detail. So: organizing and conducting various events is an excellent opportunity to gather contacts of potential clients. Seminars, workshops, exhibitions, conferences, presentations – choose and use a format that is most convenient for you and your audience. At the same time, the leads generated in this way will by default be of very high quality, since:
- even at the stage of registration for the event, there will be a “distillation” of the leads, that is, weeding out an invalid audience
- subsequent contacts with the leads will already make them “warm”.
The Internet
- creation of a corporate website;
- creation of an attractive landing page (you can make several landing pages and organize lead generation services or specific products);
- targeted media advertising;
- provision of unique, useful information (all kinds of research, white papers, exclusive articles) in exchange for contacts;
- webinars;
- online video;
- social networks, blogs, forums (some experts are extremely skeptical of social media, but we believe that it’s not a bad lead generator – you just need to know where and with what tools to look for potential clients).
Direct marketing
Direct marketing is a technique for maximum personalization and interaction with a potential client. This technique includes email, SMS, as well as traditional (paper) mail (we know the case when the latter method was very effectively used by our colleagues developing lead generation software for companies).
You can also add offline means of communication to the above methods (print/radio/ TV advertising, outdoor advertising, sponsorship), but this is more likely related to channels.
Lead generation ideas
Here is a straightforward lead generation campaign model, examples of which you can find everywhere. So, step by step:
- Clearly state your sales offer.
- Create a landing page (landing pages), which should perform two main tasks: tell about your product/service and encourage the visitor to perform a certain action: leave contacts, issue an application for consultation, create a task “write my paper“, purchase goods/services, etc. Carefully consider the form of gathering contacts and a call to action.
- Post a link to the landing page in social networks, previously “wrapping” it in an attractive wrapper.
- Create a product video. 65% of people are visual learners. So why not talk about what you offer, convenient for most? The high-quality video that favorably represents the product can generate up to 33% of new leads. The main thing is that it should not be long and complicated. Remember that your main goal is to engage users and inspire them to live action.
- Write a SEO-optimized article with a link to a landing page for your blog, as well as for guest blogging, that is, posting on third-party resources.
- Create and promote evergreen content. Evergreen content is the one with undying popularity. Writing deeply developed materials takes a lot of time, but efforts are ultimately justified. If you have a well formulated and structured your thoughts, the article will continue to attract traffic even many years after publication.
- Conduct a carefully targeted advertising campaign on social networks and AdWords in order to “put” users on your page.
- Give people less choice. Follow Hick’s law: less choice – less confusion – more customers. Do not confuse people: get limited to one call to action.
- You are most probably doing the newsletter on your own compiled or otherwise acquired database of “cold” contacts. So do not be limited to one letter – think over the entire chain of emails, depending on the actions of the client. For example, encourage those who have landed on a letter with interesting and useful information, and those who have ignored your first message “catch up” with a newsletter with special offers.
- Distill and segment the lead database collected through the landing page and “warm-up” each group with the most appropriate methods that allow converting leads into customers.
- Strategic partnership. Companies often create entire ecosystems from affiliates or integration partners that share contacts with each other. Following the principle of collaboration algorithm, you can find larger companies that need what you are doing and make your product a part of their product using the API. In return, you get advertising integration of your product on a large brand site.
- Analyze the results, make changes – and “run” the entire campaign first.
A sales funnel with a large number of interested users and customers confirms the value of your marketing efforts. With quality lead generation, all parties win in the long run.
Marketers have one task – supply quality leads to the sales department. Each of us must understand how to attract potential customers with the help of fresh, effective and sometimes cunning ideas.
About the Author
Josh Carlyle is a business developer and writing expert Write my essay today, who is experienced in content management and copywriting. Working at Writing Guru, Josh is aware of the latest trends in the digital marketing industry as well as online business. He is always willing to share his knowledge and ideas with entrepreneurs and write for the blogs from the insights of a professional businessperson.