As a business owner, you probably have your website. You might have noticed your booming traffic as many people are visiting your website!
However, you may have been wondering why earnings have been down recently. After all, those people entering your landing page must be interested in your products, right?
Well, this might want to know the benefits of lead generation marketing and how it can help your business.
What is Lead Generation Marketing?
We should discuss what a “lead” is first before we tackle how to generate it. A “lead” is an indicator that a person or company exhibited an interest in a product or service.
For example, people entering your company’s website can be considered as leads.
However, some companies stop creating more leads after potential customers enter their online page.
You should adopt a certain lead generation strategy that covers every stage of the sales funnel. This way, you’ll guide every step of your customer towards purchasing your brand’s products or services. You can check out blogs of some leading companies like Leadadvisors to learn more about lead generation.
Lead Generation Strategies
If a telemarketer called you during dinner, you’ve experienced an example of an outbound marketing strategy.
These involve approaching your customer to directly sell your goods. It’s also called “interruptive marketing” because it takes your customer’s time and attention.
You may have noticed that interest in the products comes from the surprise marketers. When they call you, they’re the ones gushing about how great their goods are.
Meanwhile, you probably just stand and nod unenthusiastically while listening to the promotions.
Since you weren’t interested in the first place, you probably won’t purchase their wares any time soon. Worse, their blunt marketing method may have ruined your first impression of the brand.
Inbound Marketing Strategy
On the other hand, it’s better to use an inbound marketing strategy for lead generation. This aims to spark your customer’s interest in every step of their purchasing decisions.
These can be divided into the four stages of the sales funnel:
- Awareness – Consumers are aware of a product, but they don’t necessarily like it yet.
- Interest – Consumers are curious about a product, but they show no interest in purchasing it.
- Decision – Consumers are about to buy a product.
- Action – Consumers finally buy a product.
The objective is to create qualified leads in the first three stages of the funnel.
This will make sure your potential customers become actual customers!
Types of Qualified Leads
The first kind of qualified lead is known as the information qualified leads (IQL). These are the people who have noticed your brand but don’t necessarily like it yet.
In other words, they are at the awareness stage of your sales funnel. For example, IQLs include people who have stumbled upon your brand’s landing page.
If they get a positive impression of your website, they’re likely to perceive your brand in the same light.
Next, your lead generation must focus on marketing qualified leads (MQL).
These are found at the sales funnel’s interest stage where people are becoming curious about your brand. Though, this doesn’t mean they would like to buy your goods just yet.
To explain MQLs, let’s use the website example from earlier. If people liked your landing page enough, they might just inquire about your products.
Those curious customers are now MQLs since they expressed interest in learning more about your brand. Customer queries can be an ideal segway into creating sales qualified leads (SQL).
Your marketing team can offer more assistance in exchange for contact information. Folks who shared their contact details are now considered SQLs.
Also, this is an example of lead capture, a method of gathering info that contributes to lead generation.
These pieces of lead information include mobile numbers and email addresses. This part of your lead generation deals with the decision stage, where your sales team takes over.
Once your marketing team has compiled the email addresses, your sales team may now proceed with email marketing.
The team will create promotional content and send it to consumers on the email list. Aside from informing your target audience, those emails will have a call-to-action usually at the end.
These must compel your potential customers into finally paying for your products or services. If you’re successful, your lead generation will yield sales at last.
Benefits of Lead Generation
This marketing strategy can provide your company with more than just sales. While we used online platforms in previous examples, lead generation covers several other forms of media.
Your target audience won’t be exclusively on the internet, so you must be present in all their preferred media.
Increased Market Presence
This way, your brand spreads its influence in the market. As consumers find you in various forms of media, they gain a better understanding of your brand.
According to LinkedIn:
“The more the people are aware of your brand the stronger is your reputation, the greater your profit potential and overall brand value is”
This establishes you as an industry authority, so they are more likely to use your brand.
Benefits of Qualified Leads
What’s more, qualified lead generation bolsters your relationship with consumers.
Particularly, an inbound marketing strategy helps you better understand the needs of your target audience.
As you track the performance of your leads, you learn how to improve your marketing strategy and your brand’s offerings.
This allows you to serve customers better, so they become more satisfied with your brand.
Increase in Sales and Profit Ratio
This feedback loop between your brand and the consumers allows you to convert more leads into sales.
In other words, qualified lead generation increases your conversion rate.
As you continue to learn about your customers and satisfy their needs, you gather more qualified leads.
It can help you sell more products to more customers, eventually boosting your profit margins.
Final Thoughts
Lead generation allows your brand to yield short-term earnings and foster long-term growth.
By adopting inbound marketing generation, your marketing and sales team can bring these benefits to your brand.
On the other hand, you could just outsource such an important task to the best in digital marketing.
From lead scoring to email marketing, a great digital marketing agency can bring the results your company needs!
