With the online markets becoming more and more competitive by the day, marketers are finding new ways to capture the market segments. If a business, whether B2B or B2C, wants to grow, they need to understand the importance of lead generation.
Lead generation strategies will not only help you increase your brand awareness but will also help you develop a customer base to work on and convert into a sale in the future. Lead generation is also becoming a pivotal point when it comes to customer relationship management and how these relationships transform in the sales funnel.
Here we will explore the details of lead generation and how business owners can benefit from different strategies of lead generation in all forms of business ventures.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation refers to the steps and process of arousing a customer’s attention in your product or service. With different tactics and automation tools, you can generate leads by attracting a potential customer and then finally converting the interest into a purchase and maintaining the customer relationship to transform into a long-term profitable transaction for both parties involved.
What is a Lead Generation Strategy?
A lead generation strategy attracts intrigued prospects and converts them into leads. A lead is a potential client who has shown interest in your product by taking tangible action. They might have shared their contact number or an email address to communicate that they want to work with you.
Lead generation strategies have proven beneficial for both B2B and B2C businesses alike. This includes lead generation for technology companies, marketing agencies, realtors, and a lot of other businesses. These strategies are made up of four main building blocks. Let us look at those in detail.
Lead Capture
This refers to the methods a marketer will deploy to collect relevant data and information from a potential customer or lead. This information could range from contact number to business address or even the individual’s designation or post at his or her current place.
Lead Magnets
As the name implies, lead magnets includes anything and everything that will interest a lead further invest time in your product or service.
Lead Qualification
This refers to the process in which a marketer will vet a lead’s relevant details and actions to determine how likely are they to move from marketing to sales qualified leads.
Lead Segmentation
This refers to bifurcating your leads into distinct segments based on their demographics as well as the actions they have taken to date in their customer journey.
Top 5 Lead Generation Strategies
Now let us look at how we will leverage this four-pronged approach practically via the best strategies, demonstrated by real examples
- Creation of Gated Content
- Host an Event
- Offer a discount
- Paid Ads on Social Media
- Reward and Referral System
Creation of Gated Content
Gated content refers to information and relevant content that is only accessible to potential customers/leads when they fill out a form or provide certain information. The content is technically locked in the market or the audience put only be allowed to access the content once they fill out a form after which the content will become available.
This is a very strong lead generation strategy because not only does it provide potential customers with information that might be valuable to their business but also ensures that the leads generated are strong and have the potential of being converted into sales. Such content includes e-books, online tools, reports, etc.
Example
Look at how a website below is offering access to a free e-book in return for some information.
Source: bloominari
Host an Event
Lead generation strategies can take both an online and in-person form. When it comes to online events you can host webinars and digital seminars whereas when it comes to in-person interactions conferences and trade shows are some of the biggest and most effective examples.
These events help you connect with your potential customers and develop a two-way interaction that helps you in answering any potential questions a lead might have and ensuring that their concerns are valued. Workshops, seminars, and other such events also help as a business owner and marketer to learn about your potential market segment and then develop your marketing strategies accordingly.
Example
Several marketing agencies and consultancies working in you still in especially in network marketing offer webinars for free to generate leads and attract potential customers.
Source: Google Images
Offer a discount
You can offer discounts to potential customers to generate leads. This discount can work as a lead magnet. The benefit that discounts or price off coupons present to you as a business owner or marketer is that not only does it convert a potential lead into a customer right away but also attracts new customers towards your product or service due to the discount being offered.
Using discounts and coupons helps you in working on both ToFu (Top of the Funnel Ads) and BoFu (Bottom of the Funnel) customers.
Example
Tarte Cosmetics offers a certain percentage off a first-time customer in return for their email address.
Source: tartecosmetics
Paid Ads on Social Media
Leverage the power of social media to run sponsored ads on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Using these platforms, you can target your advertisements to the segment which has the highest number of potential customers according to your market research.
You can segment your target audience based on psychographics or even basic demographics depending on how broad or narrow you want your lead generation prospects to be.
Example
Looking at the example below of companies like iTunes, running paid ads on Instagram to generate potential leads.
Source: Google Images
Reward and Referral System
In our social circles, we have this inbuilt tendency of trusting the opinions of our comrades and friends. Using a reward and referral system you as a marketer or business owner can take the help of your current customers to bring in new customers and generate potential leads. This can be done by offering a certain amount of discount to the current customers on their next purchase or by even offering some amount off to the new customer that they bring in.
Example
Airlift, a ride-sharing service from Pakistan offers current customer discounts when their rereferrals sign up and use the service.
Source: Google Images
Top 10 Reasons to develop Lead Generation Strategies
We will look at the top 10 reasons for developing lead generation strategies and executing them from a marketer’s and business owner’s point of view.
- Helps you increase your following
- Increases your market share
- Impacts revenue positively
- Creates business opportunities
- Improves quality of generated leads
- Increases brand awareness
- Reduces time spent on cold calling
- Collects important customer information
- Helps build customer relationships
- Cost-Effectiveness
Conclusion
Any business whether established or growing, regardless of the industry now requires dedicated lead generation strategies in place not only to ensure survival but also for growth. With these strategies mentioned above and their e effectiveness demonstrated using examples, you as a business owner can not only attract new customer leads and convert them into long-term customers but also enhance the profitability of your current customers.
Use these strategies to get inspired and develop customized approaches in accordance with your business requirements and market research, to achieve the most out of your lead generation process. Do remember that in the world of marketing, no strategy or tool is a shortcut. All methods require your market inputs and dedicated execution to produce tangible results.
