Imagine yourself sitting on a couch on a Saturday evening with no worries to worry about. Before you can even turn up the volume on your TV to watch your favorite football team play, your phone rings on the other side of the room. “Hello, Sir; I’m calling from the bank.” “Do you need a loan?” asks the telemarketer. Most of the time, this is a frustrating interruption to your daily routine.
We are here today to show you how to create a lead-generation campaign that will not make people dislike your business. A good lead generation system could save your organization or business from being that annoying telemarketer who doesn’t know anything about the person before calling. Before you know it, a disruptive cold caller from your company can ruin your reputation in the marketplace.
How Does Lead Generation Work?
Now that you understand what lead generation is, let’s move to the part where we tell you how the process of acquiring lead generation works.
- First, a visitor will find out about your business, and it doesn’t matter how they find it, as it could be done by any of your marketing channels like your website, blog, YouTube channel, social media page, email, and more.
- Once the visitor is able to find out about you, they will click on the Call-to-Action (CTA) button. It could be in the form of an image, button, or message that encourages the customer to visit the website or makes them perform some action, such as giving them their phone number so you can contact them later.
- The CTA will take your customer to the website’s landing page. The landing page is designed to capture the lead’s information in exchange for an offer or free trial code.
- When the visitor reaches the landing page, they will fill out the form in exchange for the information or the offer you’re providing. Forms are generally present on the landing pages of websites, even though they can be embedded anywhere on the website as well.
To sum up all the above steps, in short, we start with a visitor clicking your CTA from one of the online marketing funnels created by you. The CTA will take the visitor to the landing page, where they have to fill out the form that asks for general information such as the phone number, the city they live in, email ID, and more. Once the form is filled out by the user, they will receive a special offer for filling out the form. At this point, you will get your lead, and the customer is also happy as they get a particular discount or an offer they can use later your website.
Difficulties in Lead Generation in 2023
When it comes to running a business, acquiring leads is one of the essential tasks to keep your business running. Companies love to dedicate many their profits to sourcing new lead generation. But the truth is that if your prospects are not ready to buy a product from you, You will have a hard time selling a product to them. no matter how helpful or great your product is in the first place.
There used to be a time when you could send an email blast to draw in a lot of customers. But in the age of the internet, everyone is doing it, and there is high competition even in email marketing. The increase in competition and abundance of information has led to difficult times for companies to track, reach and engage with customers. Lead generation is when companies stimulate and capture a customer’s interest for a specific product or service.
That will help in the creation of a sales pipeline. In addition to this, with the implementation of lead generation, a business could easily nurture a target audience until they are ready to purchase the product. You can see lead generation working for both large and small-scale companies, and even in B2C and B2B spaces as well. According to the latest research, more than 63% of the global marketers believe lead generation is the central pivotal point of their work.
Finding the correct lead for your company is not as easy as it seems. Your sales rep mustn’t be wasting time on cold calling unqualified leads when you can quickly narrow down the better leads from the pool.
Lead Generation in The Digital Age
Over the years, the buying journey of a user has changed a lot, and with the easy access to information, all thanks to the internet, we have seen customers change their opinions in mere seconds.
In the older times, before the internet became an everyday norm, it was common practice for a sales representative to reach out to uneducated potential buyers who didn’t know they needed the product or even if this type of product existed. The sales rep will introduce the product and the company’s services to the customer.
People now carry a library of information at their fingertips, with smartphones stored in everyone’s pockets. They can quickly search Google, social media, read blogs, and watch reviews on YouTube to find out whether the product they buy is worth the money. As a result, they will have all the required information even before they can talk to the company’s sales representative.
With the vast amount of information available to a customer, customers will not be interested in hearing the traditional sales pitch that doesn’t directly relate to their needs. It could even push them away if the sales representative isn’t careful enough. As a result, companies are now targeting online users and giving them everything they need regarding information on the internet. So they don’t have to look anywhere else. This technique also creates a strong presence for the company on the internet.
The Benefit of Digital Age on Lead Generation
With the digital age, even companies are getting much better analytics as to why, how, and when their products influence their customers. Now companies have a better understanding of their perspective leads. By finding out how a customer behaves, companies are creating content that explicitly curates the needs of new customers.
When you attend to your target audience only through lead generation, you can rest assured that the brand is connecting with the right customers. Some of the benefits that you should know about lead generation are listed below.
1. Target the Right Set of Customers
Companies must generate new leads and develop and nurture relationships with them over time. If you don’t nurture the lead, some other company will do it for you, and your potential customer will be forever gone. On the other hand, companies can now focus on targeting a specific market or audience based on their liking, age group, and other differentiation factors.
2. Better Customer Awareness
With the use of lead generation, a company can quickly build brand awareness and improve its reputation. When people discover your brand for the first time, you can provide them with more information about your products and services. This will leave a significant mark on customers as they won’t have to look for any other website to find more about the product. You have clarified everything on your website, blog, YouTube channel, and other social media platforms.
3. Lead Generation Gives you Opportunity to Collect Valuable Information
Before lead generation, there used to be guesswork about what users liked about the brand and what things they would like to see improved. With the implementation of lead generation, companies now have the potential to measure the success of their products and what people think about them after using them. You can also find out which part of your website is getting more views than the others and which marketing techniques are having a positive impact on your customers.
Different Types of Leads
Leads are a part of a much broader lifecycle that consumers tread when making a purchase and converting themselves from just a visitor to a customer. Remember that not all leads are created equal, nor are they qualified for the same positions. Below, we have written down the different lead forms and their importance. This will give you a better understanding of separating and using the leads accordingly.
1. Qualified Marketing Lead (QML)
The first one is the MQL. These are the leads who have already engaged with your marketing, but they are not ready to receive a phone call regarding the lock sales just yet. A great example of MQL could be a visitor who writes down the phone number and email ID on your landing page for an offer.
2. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
The sales-qualified leads are the ones who have already taken action that quite clearly indicates that they have an interest in your product and they are willing to make the payment to get it. An example of SQL could be the person who actually fills out the form and asks you questions about the product or the service you are offering.
3. Qualified Product Lead (QPL)
These contacts have already got your product and used it before. Their actions indicate that they want to become a paying customer. A typical PQL only exists for those companies that have been offering products on trial for some time. After that, the user needs to pay the annual fee or monthly subscription fee in order to use it. An example of PQL is a customer who is using Spotify Premium for one week on a trial basis. He didn’t receive a single ad throughout his usage, and now he is coming back and making the payment to use Spotify Premium to enjoy all the features that are only available to him once he makes the payment.
4. Service Qualified Lead
A service-qualified lead is nothing but a group of customers who have shown an interest in becoming paying customers of your service team. Let’s take an example to explain which customer falls under this category. For example, your company owns the software, and you provide a subscription-based service to users.
Then a group of users who have been using your software for a long time contact your sales team representatives to upgrade their subscription to a more advanced level. The reason for the update could be anything, but the result is the same; that is, they want to pay more and use more features of your software.
This time, the customer service representative needs to provide the users with the change in the amount they have to pay for the level-up subscriptions along with the other features they will be unlocking. After that, they should accept the payment and level up the customer to a new higher subscription.
Wrapping Up
In the end, finding the right lead for your business will pay off when you make sales. Leads can be obtained in a variety of ways. Identify the lead channel that meets your business needs and try to expand it as much as possible. We recommend you start the lead generation process by going out and looking for lead sourcing, as it will help you run lead generation marketing campaigns at zero to low cost.
Learn what your customers want from your business by creating your own lead-generation campaign today. Try out various methods of lead generation, and eventually, with precision and hard work, you will hit the jackpot.
People are also reading:
- What are Lead Conversion Strategies
- Best Email Marketing Lead Generation Tools
- What is Value Proposition
- Email Marketing Campaigns Explained
- What is the Average Email Open Rate?
- Best Email Marketing Lead Generation Tools
- What is a Sales Funnel
- What is a Customer Data Platform
- What is Flywheel Marketing
Simran works as a technical writer. The graduate in MS Computer Science from the well known CS hub, aka Silicon Valley, is also an editor of the website. She enjoys writing about any tech topic, including programming, algorithms, cloud, data science, and AI. Traveling, sketching, and gardening are the hobbies that interest her.
