In the perfect world, your business would have a slew of eager prospects queuing up to take advantage of your products or services. But the business world isn’t perfect. It can be highly competitive, and with the range of digital marketing channels now available, only with the very sharpest and personalised strategies can you thrive in generating enough leads for continued business growth.
A lead can be any individual or business who has shown consideration for what you sell. This can come in a variation of forms, such as making directed phone calls and enquiries, selecting to subscribe to mailing lists, and following your business on social media. As opposed to other acquisition methods like cold calling, these leads are far more viable opportunities to convert, which is why successful businesses establish sound lead generation strategies to engage and attract these people.
How Lead Generation Feeds Your Business with Qualified Prospects & Higher Profit Margins
Costs of client acquisition are incredible influencers on final profit margins. Marketing efforts speaking to those who are not, nor ever will be, interested in your products or services, or sales teams creating proposals and engaging with people unqualified to become a viable customer, builds a large amount of wasted funds better spent elsewhere.
When first starting out with your marketing campaigns, this can help to build data around a target audience, but a lead generation strategy will always be a far more cost-efficient, high ROI tactic when implemented properly. Essentially, rather than having acquisitions forcing uninterested people into purchasing something they don’t want, why not find ways of prompting the right people to continue the paths they want to follow?
After all, interested parties will follow certain actions, like making enquiries and conducting further research. Matching your branded awareness and consideration marketing materials will help your business deliver authoritative, highly valued features on products and services, as well as build invested communities filled with prospects and loyal, returning customers.
What Does a Lead Generation Strategy Look Like?
Depending on your business, budget, and appetite for technological integration, a lead generation can take many forms. Most will need a combination of various mediums, including:
- Content marketing (eBooks, blogs, articles, whitepapers)
- Social media marketing
- Website landing pages
- Online events, courses, and seminars
- Email marketing
- Influencer and affiliate marketing
- And much more!
The process will always have to start with attracting strangers. If you are limited on data surrounding your target demographics, it helps to refine your marketing focus through a developed buyer persona (breakdown of your ideal customer). These personas are poised to find your marketing material in an organic way. This could be searching for the answer to a common query and finding a handy article you’ve written, or seeing a relatable, engaging social media post that causes them to follow you. It might not seem like much, but this is the brand awareness phase of the lead generation funnel and provides the first indication they might be a qualified lead.
Now it’s time to build on this engagement. You can continue to nurture these prospective leads with further social media posts, articles, and other clever pieces of content that provides free value, builds authority around your brand, and creates trust between you and your following. Ideally, the prospective lead will begin to interact with your website and landing pages, either downloading resources (eBooks, courses) or submitting enquiries (‘I would like more information regarding XYZ product’) to provide an email address or contact information.
With this information at hand, you can continue to send through personalised email marketing that gently nudges them to make the call. Your sales team are at hand to assist with closing the deal and signing the lead as a new client or customer.
Build Ongoing Promotion and Customer Advocacy
Lead generation is a process that needs to be ever-changing to adapt with shifting markets and user behaviours. Therefore, all these efforts within your lead generation strategy can be consistently refined and automated with the help of technology to better attract, nurture, and convert distinct customer segments, allowing you more free time to focus on the other areas of building your business.
After all, once you close a lead, it shouldn’t end there. Continue offering them value and promotions to ensure long-term retention and advocacy, locking in not only that client’s future business, but indirectly encouraging them to share your good name to their family and friends!
