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“Creating a list of email addresses of the consumers doesn’t mean Lead Generation.”
In marketing, lead generation is the generation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a business. It includes everything starting from bringing traffic to your landing pages to nurturing of leads and finally getting them converted to sales-ready leads or qualified leads.
Large organizations spend millions on advertising for customer acquisition and building their brands. However small businesses have a limited budget and usually can’t spend millions on advertising although the need to attract customer remains same or even more. This is why SMBs need to rely on innovative & cost effective ways of lead generation on a shoe string budget.
In this article we are going to talk about the basics of online lead generation and about how it is carried out effectively. Let me walk you through them step by step.
Lead
Any person who shows interest in your products or services is lead. For instance, someone calling you to know more about your product or services or someone filling up a form on your website is a lead. Lead can also be someone visiting a very important page on your website.
Leads are categorized in to two types:
1) Micro Leads
2) Macro leads
Micro Lead
Micro leads are those lead which although have been filled up by people however they are not interested in buying your product at that point of time. For example, a lot of people have downloaded your white paper or e brochure or have subscribed for your blog or newsletter and you got some information, you got some activity going on your website by your target customer however they are, at this point of time, not interested in your product or services or rather not ready to buy them.
Macro Lead
Macro leads are those leads in which the person is more interested to buy and they have filled up an important lead. For example inbound call, someone subscribing for free trial or someone walking in to your center. Macro leads are actually those leads in which chances of visitors getting converted into customers are higher.
Landing Page
The landing page is a web page that a visitor can arrive at or ‘lands’ on after clicking on an ad or a call-to action button. It is a page that is specifically created to generate leads. It has one objective to make people fill up the lead capture lead form present on it.
Types of landing page:
1) Click Through Landing Pages
2) Lead Generation Landing Pages
Click Through Landing Pages
These are the pages that have the goal of influencing the visitor to click through to another page. They are generally used in eCommerce funnel to describe the offer in detail with an intention to bring the visitor closer to purchasing decision.
Example click through landing pages
Lead Generation Landing Pages
Lead generation landing pages are those WebPages that are used to capture the visitor’s data, such as a name, email address in exchange for the offer that’s there. The page contains a lead capture form asking all relevant details that are crucial for your business as per your sales team.
Example lead gen landing pages
Some of the offers that you give in exchange for the visitor’s information are
Ebook or whitepaper
Webinar registration
Consultation for professional services
Discount coupon/voucher
Contest entry
Free trial
A physical gift (via direct mail)
Notification of a future product launch
How to bring Potential Traffic to Landing Page
You can bring potential traffic to your website through Google adwords by reaching people at the precise moment they are searching for what you offer. Your ad is displayed to people who are already searching for the kinds of products and services you offer. So those people are more likely to take action. You can choose where your ad appears for example on which specific websites and in which geographical areas (states, towns, or even neighborhoods).
Facebook allows you with a more specific targeting while you advertise your product and helps your bring potential traffic to your website. Here you can target your ads by the user’s age, gender, location, interest and much more.
Audience have opted in to receive emails from you and you can use it to your advantage by sending them links to your landing pages in your emails, which contain more information on what they were interested in making them to land on it.
Display Advertising
Your ads are displayed on various websites depending upon the kind of product users are searching for or the content of the page users are browsing through, which eventually results in to a more potential traffic to hit your landing page when they click on it.
Another good way to bring potential traffic to your website is through SEO tactics such as link building. You share your valuable content on other authoritative websites making people to come to your landing page. The more informative and valuable content you share, the more people visit your landing page.
You can advertise on twitter through promoted trends, promoted accounts and promoted tweets to bring potential traffic to your landing page. Besides, due to word of mouth and viral marketing chances of people following your customers to become your potential leads are higher.
You can drive prospects to various destinations such as your landing pages, LinkedIn groups and so on through LinkedIn direct ads, which is an advertising program by LinkedIn. It basically works the same way as Google paid search ads work.
With almost 130 million mobile internets users in India, mobile web marketing is for sure going to bring great business for you. You just have to make sure that your landing page(s) are mobile compatible and you will be overwhelmed by the response.
SMS
According to Techipedia, 98% of SMS messages sent are opened, and 83% of them are opened within 3 minutes. Sending links to your landing pages in the SMS that you send to your target audiences can for sure bring more business to you.
Nurture Leads to Sales
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is converting potential business leads into sales. It is about nurturing your relationship with your potential customer by sending targeted, relevant and useful messages to them from time to time.
So many surveys in the past have revealed that only 5 to 25 percent of your website traffic wants to do business with you and the rest are actually the researchers. It is lead nurturing process through which you make the customer feel the need for your product and incite their purchase decisions.
How to Nurture?
Lead nurturing is all about conveying the right message to the right people at the right time. Depending upon the stage of customer in the sales cycle, you send lead nurturing messages to the customers from time to time through various means such as:
Call
You can inform customers about the offer they were interested in by calling them at a suitable time. Ask them which time suits them and follow-up with them accordingly. Basically, lead nurturing by calling includes the following steps:
1) Creating the rapport with your lead
2) Knowing the needs of your potential customer
3) Giving the required information and clearing their doubts
4) Creating needs by sharing the benefits of the product
5) Informing them about the ongoing offers if any.
Through email marketing you send an automated series of emails to the leads at the starting phase and getting them converted to sales ready leads before you hand them over to your sales team.
Marketers need to have the unique qualities in their emails for clients to get plead with and become interested in their emails. Like in any other form of marketing, a good and valuable content plays important role in email marketing as well.
Remarketing
Remarketing lets you reach people who have previously visited your site, and show them relevant ads across the web or when they search on Google. When people leave your site without buying anything, for example, remarketing helps you connect with these potential customers again. You can even show them a tailored message or offer that will encourage them to return to your site and complete a purchase.
Depending on the site you have, your business goals and your campaign type , you can use remarketing in following three ways:
1) Remarketing for the display network
2) Remarketing lists for search ads
3) Dynamic remarketing
Monitoring and Measuring Performance
Now you know what leads, landing pages are and how to bring traffic to your landing pages and how to nurture leads to sales but, that’s not all. The best part is you can track returns on every single penny you spend and work accordingly. Through web analytics you get to monitor and measure the performance of your lead generation campaigns.
You have spent money on various channels like Facebook, adwords, display advertising and so on. Now you will be able to track so many things in order to optimize your campaign for best results in limited budget. You will be able to track how much conversion are you getting from various channels, which channel is bringing more leads, how many people are getting converted in the end, how many sales are you getting from a particular channel and so on. So, this is how you would be able to do more efficient lead generation.
Afterword
Lead generation is not a big deal if you have all your tools at the right place and have the courage to experiment new things based on marketing metrics. One more thing that’s important here is that experimenting is a wonderful idea but it should not be baseless. You should always take help from the marketing metrics to experiment and find best ways to conduct your campaigns.
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