Lead Generation Marketing

Generating leads for your business is critical to success. Lead generation encompasses strategic activities to identify and cultivate potential customers who exhibit genuine interest in a company's products or services.

As you strive to expand your reach and capture market share, using lead generation strategically becomes even more important because it enables you to establish meaningful connections with your target audience and drive revenue.

In simple terms, lead generation is about initiating and nurturing relationships with potential customers. Effective lead generation strategies cut through the noise and capture the attention of potential buyers.

Businesses can attract and engage prospects across various touch points along their buying journey using diverse channels and tactics, such as content marketing, email campaigns, digital advertising, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Lead generation isn't just about getting contact information or driving website traffic; it's about building meaningful relationships and nurturing prospects through each sales funnel stage. With a comprehensive lead generation process, you can optimize your sales pipeline and drive sustainable growth.

Keep reading to learn more about how to generate leads.

What's a lead?

A lead is a person who has shown interest in your company's product or service. Leads can come from various sources, including traditional advertising methods, offline activities like customer referrals, and your digital marketing efforts. Regardless of where they come from, leads generally initiate contact with or indicate interest in your business first.

Leads represent potential customers in the initial stages of the buying process and need further nurturing and follow-up to convert them into paying customers.

It's important to note that you must determine whether a lead is "qualified." A qualified lead means they have taken a step that indicates they are considering a purchase as a prospective customer. Some leads may be ready to do so immediately, while others may be researching and considering their options.

Qualifying a lead before approaching them with your marketing materials is crucial. You must know your audience to market to them effectively and personalize your marketing campaigns to achieve conversions. Sending the wrong message to a lead at the wrong time can compromise the relationship entirely, and it can be a waste of your time and resources if the cost per lead is too high for a positive return on investment. Assuring lead quality is fundamental.

Lead generation involves drawing in potential customers (leads) and transforming them into prospects who have shown an interest in your company's offerings. The purpose of a lead generation campaign is to guide prospective customers into the sales funnel and through the sales pipeline until they are ready to make a purchase.

Lead generation involves strategic activities that capture the target audience's attention, engaging them through marketing channels and encouraging them to take desired actions, such as filling out a form, subscribing to a newsletter, or requesting more information.

Lead generation is a complex process that increases brand awareness, builds community relationships, generates high-quality leads, and completes a sale.

How is lead generation related to inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing encourages people to seek out and engage with your brand actively, drawing them in naturally rather than interrupting them with traditional advertising methods. This usually involves creating digital resources or content marketing materials (like blog posts, newsletters, and social media posts) that provide value to potential customers. It's all about creating awareness, building trust, and managing customer relationships with your brand.

Although closely related, inbound marketing and lead generation are not the same.

Lead generation is one part of a larger inbound marketing strategy. It helps bring more interested people to your company, while inbound marketing works to nurture those leads, convert them into paying customers, and keep them coming back for more.

Inbound marketing tactics like content marketing, video marketing, social media management, influencer marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and email marketing are commonly used to generate leads by providing informative, educational, or entertaining content.

By aligning lead generation efforts with inbound marketing principles, sales and marketing teams can attract high-quality leads interested in their products or services. Instead of relying solely on outbound marketing tactics like cold calling or mass advertising, inbound lead generation focuses on building trust and credibility with prospects, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Lead generation can hugely benefit your business, particularly your digital marketing efforts. Some of the biggest benefits of lead generation include:

• Increased awareness of your brand among customers
• Contact with qualified customers who are already interested in your business
• Reduced waste of valuable resources (including time, money, and labor)
• Positive impact on your business's bottom line

Many traditional lead generation tactics, like word-of-mouth referrals, simply aren't enough to get your business ahead. However, these tactics can be combined with online lead generation methods, like digital advertising, email marketing, and social media marketing, to nurture the leads and positively impact your business.

The challenges of lead generation marketing

Of course, lead generation isn't always easy. It's the biggest challenge facing so many marketers. Some of the biggest difficulties of lead generation include:

• Generating high-quality leads who are likely to patronize your business
• Generating a high volume of leads
• Measuring, tracking, and reporting the success of lead generation efforts
• Having adequate time and resources to dedicate to lead generation

Awareness of these challenges will help you overcome them and generate leads without unnecessarily expanding your resources.

The lead generation marketing funnel

The lead generation funnel plays a major role in how your business appeals to leads and ultimately converts them into customers. This concept illustrates the path people must follow as they become aware of your business, transition into a more qualified lead, and finally purchase from you. There are five main components of the lead generation funnel:

1. Awareness: At the top of the lead gen funnel, potential customers become aware of a company's products or services through marketing channels like social media, search engines, content marketing, or word-of-mouth referrals. This stage aims to attract a broad audience's attention and generate interest in the company's offerings.

2. Interest: In the middle of the funnel, leads demonstrate interest in the company by engaging with its content, visiting its website, or signing up for newsletters or email updates. At this stage, leads may seek more information about the company's products or solutions to their pain points.

3. Consideration: As leads move further down the funnel, they actively consider the company's offerings and evaluate their options. They may compare different products or services, read reviews, or request demos or consultations to learn more about the company's offerings and how they can address their needs.

4. Decision: At the bottom of the funnel, leads are ready to purchase. They're evaluating the best solution for their needs. This is when many leads request quotes, negotiate terms, or make final inquiries before converting into paying customers.

When developing and refining your lead generation marketing strategies, consider how the funnel fits into your own business, including what methods you can use at various stages, like optimizing your landing page to improve conversion.

Lead generation marketing channels

There is a lot of advice out there about which is the best marketing channel to use for generating leads. While some channels are certainly better than others, you should use them all. Choosing one marketing channel—even if it proves to be effective—is like saying you'll only drive on one highway. That is the kind of limitation you would choose only if there was no other choice.

What is more important is to focus on how to fill out your marketing presence on all of the following channels. If your time is limited, you might need to be more selective about which channels you use; in this case, we recommend the order in which they are listed below.

Email

Email campaigns are critical for outreach when leads are qualified. But email is also one of the best ways to keep in touch with loyal and previous customers. Email outreach is about establishing and curating customer loyalty, rewarding your most loyal customers, and delivering custom-built content for individual recipients.

Social media

One of the most effective ways to deliver quality marketing content to both new and established leads is still social media. That means Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more. People spend significant amounts of time on these platforms, and social media is the ideal place to interact with your audience directly, offering them custom content in real-time.

Company blog

When anyone has a question about your products, services, or industry, a blog is the best place to offer compelling and informative material intended not only to answer their questions but to dispel any reluctance to make a purchase. The most frugal and thoughtful customers will look to your blog for answers. Write a blog post that answers questions and arouses the attention of readers.

Digital ads

While this channel is challenging, it may be the farthest-reaching channel in some ways. Digital ads need to appeal to users at a glance. They should appear trustworthy and, most importantly, not feel intrusive. Create digital ads that get straight to the point and speak to your target audience.

Word-of-mouth

Perhaps the most compelling advertisement is the unscripted praise of your brand from one person to another. There are ways to incentivize this kind of promotion, but the best way is to deliver quality products and services.

There are several different types of leads that can affect your business's lead generation strategy. After all, how you market to your customers will depend entirely on where they are in their buyer's journey.

Marketing qualified leads (MQL)

Marketing-qualified leads discover your business through an inbound marketing channel, like social media profiles or digital marketing materials. A marketing-qualified lead has indicated an interest in your products and services or business as a whole but has not yet been nurtured as lead or interacted with your sales team. After some time, they may turn into sales-qualified leads.

Sales qualified leads (SQL)

Sales-qualified leads have been researched, screened, and assessed by sales teams. They have demonstrated sufficient interest in buying a product or service so that you can focus on moving them toward conversion. For example, a sales-qualified lead may complete a form on your website for more information or sign up for your company's email newsletter.

Product qualified leads (PQL)

Product-qualified leads have already used your product and found it valuable or useful. Typically, this involves customers using a freemium product or signing up for a free month of your product or service. PQLs are considered some of the most valuable and qualified leads since they have a first-hand appreciation for the value of your products.

Service qualified leads (also referred to as an SQL)

Service-qualified leads have spoken to a member of your customer service team and indicated that they would like to make a purchase—for example, if they were using a free version of your product and wanted to upgrade to the premium version. Upon learning this, the customer service representative would connect the customer with the appropriate sales team member.

Lead scoring

Lead scoring helps you evaluate and rank leads based on their likelihood of becoming customers. Each lead is given a numerical value (or "score") that represents where they are in their buyer's journey.

The purpose of lead scoring is to focus sales and marketing efforts on leads likely to convert into paying customers. For example, highly qualified leads can be connected to your sales team, and leads with a more casual interest can be engaged by your marketing department, saving everyone time and effort.

The lead-scoring process consists of the following:

• Scoring criteria: The criteria or factors used to assess the quality of leads. These criteria can vary depending on your goals but commonly include demographics (industry, company size), behavior (website visits, email opens, content downloads), and engagement level (interactions with sales teams).
• Scoring model: Once the criteria are established, you'll develop a lead scoring model that assigns numerical values to each criterion based on its importance or relevance to the likelihood of conversion. Leads are then given a total score based on their activity and behavior across the defined criteria.

How to qualify your leads

Qualifying leads helps you identify and prioritize prospects likely to convert into customers. So, how does a consumer get through the qualification process?

The first stage is information qualification. A lead qualifies for this level by sharing contact information. Information qualification casts a wide net, but it sets the minimum for a potential customer.

You may disqualify some leads at this stage. Age is a common example, especially if you sell products aimed at adults, like vitamins or wine.

The next stage, marketing information qualification, requires continued interest. This may be repeated trips to your blog, retweeting social media, or asking for more information. When your customers are ready to buy, they become sales leads. They may indicate this by initiating a chat session or making an appointment.

Your qualification process will be unique, but ideally, most of it will be automated. You will also find that it needs constant tweaking. Social media platforms change, new marketing tools become available, or your competition may release a campaign that blows you out of the water.

Tips for generating leads

Without quality lead generation, your marketing efforts will be made up of shots in the dark. Generating leads effectively is necessary for sparking up natural conversations and moving your audience down the sales funnel in a way that does not feel forced. Without them, your efforts will essentially be door-to-door sales. Here are a few tips to keep the leads flowing.

Create landing pages for special offers

Landing pages are a great place to house special offers. These dedicated pages capture visitors' attention and encourage them to take a specific action. By focusing on a single offer and eliminating distractions, landing pages can guide visitors through the funnel and increase the likelihood of them providing their contact information.

Establish a social media presence

Social media is where people can find and interact with your brand quickly and naturally. It's also a place where people spend a lot of time online. Establishing a social media presence and building a following can cast a wider net and generate more leads.

Leverage SEO to boost web traffic

People search for things they are interested in every day. Quality SEO is still one of the best ways to draw those searches in and give them what they want. Good website SEO can act as a magnet for quality leads.

Create compelling content

Quality content entertains, answers questions, dispels fears and holds attention. Give users a reason to navigate your website and engage with your brand; they will be more likely to buy. Create quality branded content that draws and holds their attention.

Launch targeted email marketing campaigns

Segmenting your email list based on demographics, interests, and past behavior can help you tailor your email marketing campaigns to resonate with each segment's needs and preferences.

Personalized emails that provide valuable content, offers, or incentives can capture your audience's attention and encourage them to take action, such as downloading a whitepaper or resource, signing up for a webinar, or requesting more information.

Generate high-quality leads with Mailchimp

Lead generation marketing is about drawing in those naturally interested in your product, service, or brand. Sure, there is a lot to sound lead generation, but when you get it right, the numbers will show it.

And, with an all-in-one marketing platform like Mailchimp, you can use our lead generation tools to identify your target audience, boost engagement, identify and nurture leads, and, ultimately, increase conversions.