Introduction
Over the past few years, the online world has gone through many changes, specifically for businesses. Marketing your business online is now the new normal. There are various new ways that can help businesses with the growth they need. Gone are the days when you needed to use newspapers and flyers to show your brand presence, the new era requires updated business and marketing strategies that can help you reach the exact target audience and achieve business goals.
With the help of an online customer database, reaching relevant customers has never been easier! With the help of this data, companies can run personalized and targeted campaigns for prospects who are looking to buy. Customers nowadays are constantly being bombarded with new offers/discounts to keep them interested. However, this doesn’t just happen. In order to run a successful marketing campaign in the B2B space, marketers are prioritizing lead generation, which would help them attract interested customers and accompany them throughout their buyer journey.
What is lead generation?
A “Lead” is a person or business that has shown interest in your product or service. The lead generation process is generating these leads with the help of communication and various strategies. Basically, attracting potential clients using different techniques and good communication skills is what lead generation is all about.
Lead generation in digital marketing
In digital marketing, lead generation means identifying, attracting, and transforming online users into potential buyers for business purposes. With the help of lead generation in digital marketing, businesses can use online channels, strategies, and multiple tactics such as email campaigns, social media advertisements, and/or downloadable content through a landing page in order to grasp the attention of your potential buyer.
Importance of lead generation in digital marketing
For any successful business, loyal customers are extremely important. This is why lead generation is a top priority for marketers. The digital lead generation strategies typically involve the usage of the content in different forms in order to increase brand awareness. B2B marketers focus on the quality of a lead through understanding the buyer behavior and making sure that their content resonates with the ideal customer. Having the right resources for generating content is also important here. With the right content, you can navigate the right audience to your service/product.
Types of lead generation in digital marketing
Not all leads are the same. The lead generation process in sales might be different from the lead generation process in marketing or b2b lead generation process. There are different types of leads that present themselves differently throughout your business. Let’s dig in to find out about them:
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
MQL are those leads who have shown interest in what the brand has to offer based on marketing assets. These leads are often unintentionally engaging to your platform as a response to a marketing campaign such as filling out a contact form, signing in for a program, adding things to the cart of an eCommerce platform, downloading website material, or visiting the website repeatedly. These leads are just curious so there is no need to make sales calls to them immediately. An MQL is the first step to becoming a customer/potential buyer.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
SQL is a well-researched customer by the sales and marketing team who is approached solely for sales purposes. An SQL is fully intended to buy from the organization and a salesperson of any organization is responsible to sell their product/service to that person. An SQL has normally shown interest in buying from your organization. With the help of SQL, digital marketers can gather customer data to understand customer behavior so they can generate relevant marketing campaigns in the future.
Service Qualified Lead
Service qualified leads are provided with additional value by helping them see more success as they evolve using a company’s product/service. These customers show interest in becoming paying customers for your organization so you provide them with additional value such as a subscription from them into your database. With the help of a service-qualified lead, the company’s cost of customer acquisition can also be lower and customer lifetime value can increase.
Product Qualified Leads (PQL)
PQLs are customers who have had physical contact with your product and have also shown interest in becoming paying customers. These leads can easily be accessed by companies to offer trials such as a 14-day free trial or a 10 day VIP pass to your discounts etc. With the help of PQLs, you can get better customer satisfaction results, which in return, can help you retain your customers for a longer period of time.
An effective lead generation process:
When it comes to lead generation, it’s important to understand that inbound and outbound leads both hold significance when it comes to generating leads. If you’re talking about Sales lead generation in particular, cold calling is probably the most effective way to reach out to potential customers. However, that’s just one thing. There is a defined process when it comes to sales lead generation that includes;
- Careful analysis of potential customers, customized planning on approaching customers, and setting a budget beforehand to avoid mishaps.
- Research on how to attract customers via good communication
- Choosing a target audience before approaching people. Understand your niche, jot down people belonging to it and then reach out to them
- Preparing a detailed report on customers you’ve reached out to for further improvement and a better understanding of the target audience.
The outbound lead generation process includes knowing the customer and reaching out to them feels more impersonal to the customer and you can talk them into buying your product. However, with the increase in the online presence of many businesses, it is being said that people prefer reaching out to your business on their own which fits the inbound marketing methodology perfectly. Let’s further discuss
Lead generation through digital marketing:
For starters, let’s discuss how inbound marketing works; visitors discover your business through marketing channels; social media, or blogs. If the visitor is interested, they click on Call To Action (CTA) which redirects the visitor to the landing page where they fill out a form including all the details and after submission of that form, a lead is generated. For this, having lead generation strategies for digital marketing goes a long way! Of course, these are just the basics, let’s discuss a little more on how to get digital leads;
Good Content:
Most marketers focus on writing attractive content with good keyword optimization to be more approachable to their exact target audience.
Running Ads:
Spending a little money on advertisements can go a long way! Add CTA’s on the ads you run so it’s easier for potential clients to reach out to you.
Social Media Campaigns:
Running singular ads is not enough, you need to have socials where you can directly engage with your customers. Running effective social media campaigns can provide you with many leads!
Product Trials:
Another way to turn visitors into customers is through providing them with product trials including additional features.
Referral Marketing:
Word of mouth is another effective marketing strategy. Nowadays, the influencer trend is going off the charts. Reach out to relevant influencers and have them share your product.
B2B lead generation process:
B2B lead generation process includes an understanding of tried and tested channels and finding the most effective communication or techniques to achieve your goals. A disciplined B2B digital lead generation marketer understands the different dynamics, budgets, and expectations of each lead generation channel.
You can generate B2B leads through various strategies including:
- Social Media Marketing: With the help of Linkedin and Facebook Lead Ads, you can gather potential clients through social media.
- Pay Per Click Lead Generation: With PPC campaigns you can focus on a wide range of advertisement platforms such as Google Adwords and display network.
- Blogging Lead Generation: With the help of good content marketing, you can gather more audience than you think of.
- Email Marketing Lead Generation: Through email marketing, you can approach a wide variety of marketers.
ROI of successful lead generation process:
Having the right lead generation strategy is important for any company’s long-term growth. Without lead generation, it’s harder to meet your sale goals even if you have the best product/service in the market. The ultimate goal of any company is to generate a profitable return on investment and it also signifies that your strategy is working. Here are some points that might help you in generating ROI of a successful lead generation process:
- Set a plan with clear company goals.
- Increase rank on search engines to generate organic traffic.
- Keep the content interesting for viewers
- Have active social media interactions
- Get online reviews to analyze/improve your data.
Organize your strategy in a way that generates high-quality leads and a beneficial return on investment. The quality of your leads will influence your ROI which is why it’s important to attract relevant people who are interested in what your company is selling.
Conclusion
Generating relevant, high-quality leads is important for any company but in order to get to that point, every business has to undergo a process. Luckily, digital marketing has been super active for the past few years and has helped many businesses in generating effective leads. Having the right strategy and following it with the right mindset can help you in turning many viewers into potential customers/clients.
