Lead generation has become a fast-growing trend in digital marketing and web strategy for all the industries. From Saas, App to retailers and E-commerce brands.
What is lead generation?
According to Hubspot “Lead generation is the process of attracting prospects to your business and increasing their interest through nurturing, all with the end goal of converting them into a customer.
Some ways to generate leads are through job applications, blog posts, coupons, live events, and online content.” Hubspot.
Different types of leads are categorized based on their level of engagement and action issued towards your business.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
These are contacts that have shown interest in your marketing content but are not quite prepared to be contacted by a salesperson just yet. For instance, the potential customer has filled out a form or provided his email address to obtain a premium document, referred to as a lead magnet.
Qualified Sales Lead (SQL)
These contacts have taken some sort of activity that demonstrates an interest in becoming familiar with your company’s offerings and, as a result, buying your products, and they are referred to as warm leads. Now is the moment to give them a call, extend an invitation to attend a product presentation, or sign them up for the free version of your product.
Why do you need to generate leads?
Once a contact initiates a relationship with your brand by showing interest, the transition from contact to paying customer is much more natural and easier.
Lead generation also allows you to qualify contacts in your CRM and send them personalized emails or have a relevant call because you know which product the contact is interested in.
Getting quality leads will allow you to
- Focus marketing efforts and resources on quality targets
- Develop the prospect’s awareness of the brand with lead nurturing, having an educational role in the lead consideration phase.
- Allow leads to get to know you and your entire offer.
- Help sales to have the right approach.
How do I get started with lead generation?
The lead generation process
The number of leads generated through marketing, the efficiency of sales, and the cost of acquisition are the key performance indicators to track.
The lead generation funnel
The lead generation funnel is an inverted pyramid that describes the different stages of your lead in the sales cycle. There are generally 3 parts.
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The awareness phase represents the very beginning of the journey. In this stage, the potential customer investigates available options but is not yet prepared to buy. It is also a phase in which they may uncover both the nature of the problem and the availability of viable remedies.
The phase of consideration corresponds to the approximate location of the middle of the tunnel. The potential customer has realized the issue and is looking into potential solutions; he is interested in what you offer.
In the decision phase, the people who are eager to conduct business with you, to buy your goods or service, can be found at the bottom of the tunnel, which represents the “hot leads.”
The landing page
When beginning advertising campaigns with the goal of acquiring leads, the landing page is of the utmost importance. This page needs to reflect the offer that interests the leads and provide a more specific targeting than the homepage of your website does.
In an ideal scenario, you would personalize the landing page in accordance with the targeting, keywords for google ads, and audience for social media to address a specific message and offer in order to have a better conversion rate and higher quality leads.
1 ad set (keywords or social media feed) = 1 dedicated landing page.
Example:
You are an e-commerce website that sells luxury products for home, gardening, and cleaning.
Your persona is not the same for these 3 product categories.
When you launch a search campaign on Google ads with the keyword:
Garden tools, you want the visitor to land on a landing page offering all of your garden tools, not your cleaning products.
On social media, if you launch an ad with your new sofa cover, you want the visitor to be redirected directly to the product on the ad.
The call to action
It is important that the call to action be tailored to the stage that the prospect currently occupies in your lead generation funnel.
If the lead is in the awareness phase, it is interesting to add a soft call to action while offering the possibility to buy your product immediately because they may have been seduced by your copywriting. Both allow you to present a selection to the customer.
In the event that the prospective customer is in the consideration phase but is not yet prepared to make a purchase, the call to action may encourage them to “see more” or “know more” in order to encourage them to investigate your offer in greater depth.
When consumers have reached the decision phase and are prepared to make a purchase, they should not travel to your competitors; therefore, the phrase “buy now” or “book an appointment” is more acceptable.
The lead magnet
The lead magnet is very popular in the lead generation process. If you are in B2C, it often translates into a promo code in exchange for an email to receive a newsletter.
In B2B, it will be a free trial, a discount on the first order, or a premium document like an eBook.
The CRM
This lead magnet allows you to integrate the lead into a CRM in order to be able to follow the actions that are carried out on this lead (sending emails, contact with the sales department, meeting at a trade show or in a store…).
Lead generation strategies
Lead Generation blog content SEO article
According to Hubspot, “Approximately 96% of B2B customers want industry-leading content to help make a buying decision. Creating quality content is the key to establishing a leadership position in a market.”
Lead generation on social media
According to Hubspot, LinkedIn and Facebook are the go-to acquisition channels for B2B.
Facebook lead generation
- chatbot messenger
- Facebook native form
- Call to action on Facebook page
The lead generation form on Facebook may be an extremely effective tool for rapidly producing leads in order to test a marketing message. You do not need to construct a special landing page; rather, you can make the Facebook ad, personalize the form with the information you wish to collect, and specify the offer that you are proposing, also known as the lead magnet.
It is not necessary for the user to exit the application in order to become a lead; once the form has been submitted, you can direct the user to an external link, such as a premium document to download, in order to collect the information necessary for Google ads and other pixels located on your website.
Twitter lead generation
Because you have the option to use a conversion app, running Twitter advertising to generate leads can be interesting for you if you already have an app. If you merely have a website, you will have to settle with the Traffic goal, which is not as potent as the others. Depending on the nature of your product and the approach you use, targeting on Twitter may present fascinating opportunities.
LinkedIn lead generation
LinkedIn is the preferred social media of employees. They fill in their information to find new opportunities. LinkedIn is, therefore, very important for B2B lead generation.
Like Facebook, LinkedIn has launched a lead generation campaign with the possibility to submit a registration form without leaving social media.
LinkedIn is very powerful for B2B targeting, to target according to the industry and companies.
Google ads lead generation
Google has also launched the lead generation form in its campaigns. In the form of an extension or call to action, the google ads lead generation form allows visitors to subscribe without even entering your website.
Lead generation: A/B testing
Use A/B testing to see which CTAs perform best, which landing pages convert best and which copywriting captures your audience.
Experiment with different adjustments to the structure, design, user experience (UX), content, and advertising channels until you find what works, and then scale the verticals that you found success in.
Always keep in mind that the purpose of A/B testing is to identify what works and then improve upon it. It is possible to go on forever. There are some tests that will have a greater bearing on your overall scores than others.
For instance, if you alter the layout of a landing page, it will most likely have a greater impact than if you alter the color of a call-to-action button.
Lead generation tools
Lead generation tools are software that helps you attract leads or find and contact them on your own. Here are the 5 most popular categories
- Email search tools
- Email Prospecting Tools
- Marketing and sales automation tools/CRMs
- Advertising tools
Email search tools
Snov.io allows you to receive emails from any website, and social media page automatically checks them and allows you to create a list of targeted prospects.
You have other software that allows this as well. Such as Hunter.io, Aeroleads, Find That Lead, Lusha, Prospect.io (my favorite)
Email marketing tool
The email software is quite numerous on the market; among the most known, you have Mailchimp, Hubspot, snov, and Sendinblue.
Marketing automation and CRM
These tools allow you to automate the flow in which the lead is located. They are all-in-one platforms that combine several tools at once.
The best known are Salesforce (my favorite), Hubspot, Keap, and intercom.
Advertising tool
There are a lot of different platforms out there that will let you promote on either their platform or on the internet. Google Ads is the most well-known of these. However, there are also other competitors who provide advertising services with a variety of automated choices and integrated targeting.
The key is to know your lead with quantifiable data.
- Do you have his name, email, role in a company
- Do you know how many times he has visited your website
- How long they stay on your site on average
- Which pages he visited
Understanding what we call “lead flow” is essential to be relevant in your marketing efforts.
Track your visitors’ navigation on your website with Hotjar or Content Square.
It allows you to record your visitors’ sessions and create heat maps to highlight the areas where your visitor clicks.
This helps you understand the behavior of visitors on your website, and what they do most often.
B2B Lead Generation
You now want to develop your business by going after other business and not just consumers.
This will allow you to receive large orders at once, rather than just one order
For this, the strategy is different. But lead generation remains just as relevant.
The best practices of the capture form to generate leads
What information do you need when you want to capture your contact information?
- Full Name: Needed to personalize your communication with each lead.
- Email: This unique identifier will allow you to contact your lead.
- Company: This will tell you more about the lead industry.
- Role: This information allows you to know how to communicate with your contact and what he needs in your offer to make his life easier.
- Country: Locating your contacts is important to segment your database by region, so you can assign them to the right salesperson, for example.
- The state they are located in can also help, depending on your segmentation level.
Create an offer tailored to your lead in the buying process
There is no guarantee that every customer or contact that comes into contact with your company will be interested in speaking with a salesperson. For instance, Marketing Qualified Leads might still be in the contemplation phase, during which they are investigating both you and your competitors.
In order to accomplish this goal, you will need to ensure that the offer presented on the landing page is relevant to the lead. For instance, if the lead is in the discovery phase, you would offer them content that is informative during this time.
You deliver instructive content to them when they are in the deliberation phase of the buying process. And when they are in the phase where they are deciding, you can push for a sales call or a product demonstration.
You should also consider personalizing your call to action for these different offers.
This call to action, which can be found on a landing page or a blog post, has to link to a certain page.
Involve other departments
Marketers tend to go it alone. However, your sales, business development, and product team will be of great help; especially to qualify quality leads and improve your targeting with sales information (we know that they don’t always fill out CRMs).
Create a quality lead magnet
By creating premium content, therefore of quality, that you offer to the visitor in exchange for information about them. Usually, a full name and email.
The lead magnet must be clear, have value, which allows for immediate gratification.
It is interesting to add urgency (time), social proof (downloaded by more than 40k subscribers), authority (approved by Steven Spielberg) to encourage the visitor to download it.
Be careful, these marketing elements must be true and verifiable.
Quality leads or quantity leads?
Acquiring tons of leads is good, but you should not ignore the importance of the quality of a lead.
There is a lot of research to be done to determine your quality leads, but it is worth it in the long run. Nurture your quality leads by building relationships with them.
References
https://www.salesforce.com/products/guide/lead-gen/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/beginner-inbound-lead-generation-guide-ht
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/b2b-lead-generation
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/lead-generation-strategy
https://www.smartinsights.com/b2b-digital-marketing/b2b-strategy/b2b-marketing-trends/
