What Is Lead Generation and How Does It Work

When it comes to digital marketing, we’ve seen our fair share of various different lead generation tactics online. Some can be perceived to be quite ‘spammy’ in nature but some have been very clever! In this blog we’ll discuss why lead generation is important for your business, especially in the current economic climate. Let’s dive in!

What is lead generation?

Our definition of lead generation is that it is the process of generating demand for your product and services based on your customer’s interests. To understand who your lead is, you’ll need to be able to capture their personal information via an optin form.

In other words, have you ever been on a website where you’re asked to download a whitepaper? Or when you’re busy shopping online, a friendly pop-up shows up just in time with a discount?

That’s lead generation in action.

A lead can find your website from anywhere in the world. Your brand might be active on social media or you may have connected with them via your social media, so there is familiarity and trust.

Any type of digital marketing activities such as regular social media content marketing activities, SEO, or paid advertising are all examples of lead generation processes that many businesses employ to bring leads to their websites.

Lead generation does go further than that. Our focus shifts from attracting leads to generating leads. To generate leads, you’ll need a way to capture them first which is where an optin form with the right incentive is great to have.

But you might be thinking that these lead generation tactics come across as spammy?

We’ve had clients tell us they feel uneasy about pop-ups. Just remember, that popups are just one of the ways you can collect leads from your website.

After testing different options over a number of years, we find that this thinking is more of a personal mindset barrier as opposed to a conversion barrier. Many visitors who visit your website are there because they liked what they saw. But, unlike a physical shop where you have an entrance and a sales assistant to help you, the website is not very easy to navigate for your visitors who may be distracted by other things – either online or in their personal life.

Having a lead generation form that offers them a nice incentive to sign up with your company, is one of the easiest ways to collect leads for your business.

If you’re still feeling uneasy about using pop-ups, you’re welcome to try an embedded form – hopefully placed in areas where your website visitors can easily find it. The key is to test which option works best from a conversion point of view – if the pop-up can generate more leads for you, why would you stop using it?

Once a lead is captured, how do you identify that they are a good lead?

We all know that not every lead is created equally.

Sometimes you will get leads who are not the right fit for your business. Sometimes, you will lose leads who are ready to buy from you right away, especially if there are no clear calls to actions visible on the website, such as a Shop Button or Book a Quick Call button, as is the case on our website.

To have this process working well, this all depends on who your ideal lead is. Find out what their biggest frustration is and how you could instantly help them. Then, create a set of questions around this, which you can use in a quiz format, to guide your lead to self-select their options, and then pass this information to your CRM. If you’re not sure what a CRM is, you can check out our FAQ section to learn more.

What happens when a lead is captured?

This is where marketing automation can help you save valuable time. Each lead can be nurtured and they can be placed in the right buckets based on their qualification criteria.

For example if you’re a B2B consultancy, you will want to quickly identify if this lead is cold, warm or hot. If they are a hot lead (i.e. they have a budget and are ready to buy from you now), then you can set up an internal trigger via your CRM platform to have a sales person follow up by phone. However, if they are considered to be a warm lead, meaning they are a good fit, but are not ready to buy right away, you can add them to an automated email nurture sequence where a marketing automation platform can help keep your brand front of mind. If you’re using Pipedrive CRM or ActiveCampaign CRM, we can help you set it up correctly once, so that this runs over and over again each time a new lead is captured. Just send us an enquiry here if you’re needing some help in setting up a lead nurture strategy and sales lead automations.

You might be asking yourself, why is a good lead generation process important to have?

Afterall, you’ve invested in a website and you have a phone number clearly displayed. That should be enough to help you capture all your website visitors, right?

Well the answer is easy.

Have a look at your Google Analytics traffic and ask yourself the following questions:

• What does it tell you about your website visitors?
• How many visitors don’t call you?
• How many visit and abandon your website?
• How much is a lead worth to your business?
• How much is it costing you to acquire a lead? (this is very important to know if you’re investing in paid advertising)
• How many calls did you receive in one week?
• Is there a clear pattern of ebbs and flows? Some weeks/months are busier than others?
• Do you know who these website visitors are?

I’m sure we could brainstorm many more questions here, but the point I’m trying to make here is that if you’re looking to grow your business, then you really must have a working lead generation framework to help you capture more prospects and convert them into customers. Your website alone is not capable of doing this.

You’ll need to create a marketing growth system that helps you automate your sales and marketing processes in order to capture more prospects easily. This will also save you time and money as you can leverage technology to help you scale fast.

We’re here if you need help in getting started – contact us today.