Lead generation is the connecting link between Content & all the traffic generation & sales methods. In Digital marketing why do we Advertise? What is the sole reason for doing brand promotion? The core activity of any Marketing field is to generate leads. All businesses need leads. Leads are the biggest asset & if you have a lead today, They will be your customer forever.
What is a Lead? – The contact details of random people are not leads. There are plenty of sources like opt-in form, Landing page, etc to generate leads. Leads will have some relevance to your Business & your Products. Even if your product is made for everyone, Just the contact details cannot be the leads. Though in a modern term Leads are “The contact details of a potential customer who might become a paying customer to your business sooner or later”. Leads can have more information than Phone numbers & E-mail. More the information, Better it is for communicating with them, Nurturing them & converting them into a potential customer.
Leads can be Categorized into —
Cold Leads – These are the people who are just on-boarded. These are just generated.
Warm Leads – They are familiar with your Product/Service. ( When are interacting with them through various communication sources)
Hot Leads – The leads who are ready to take can action with your Brand. The leads are ready to buy your product/service.
What are not Leads?
Social media followers are not leads. But, if you have social media followers in any platform’s try making a database of them by getting their E-mail or phone number through Lead magnets & Lead forms. Creating your own tribe will help you in getting more leads through word of mouth.
Engage with your leads via E-mail, Webinars & Private groups. Facebook groups is one of the best platforms to build a Tribe. Use the platform of paid advertising to generate more leads. You can make use of E-mail to grow your social media followers by asking them to land on your social page through various promotions. Run Contest, Polls, surveys’s & Give away’s. Converting your social media followers into leads can be the best strategy.
Understanding B2B & B2C Lead Generation
Your Lead Generation strategy will depend on your target market. If your product is High end B2B product, Lead generation is important, Difficult & more direct. If your product is High-end B2C product you need marketing to generate leads & a sales team to convert the leads.
With low end B2B products you need marketing to generate the leads & Automation to nurture the leads & to close the leads. With low end B2C product you cannot afford to have a sales team to follow up with the leads. For example, You have a chocolate business & it costs RS10 per chocolate. Here, marketing for the product is enough, you dont need a sales team who can followup for the same. When the product cost is low you wont be having much expenditure to pay your sales team. If your selling a car or a house this is high end B2C product & here the sales team is required.
High End B2B Product Examples – IT Services for a Bank. Commercial computers for large company. Manufacturing for Factory.
High End B2C Product Examples – Car, Vacation package,Home Etc.
Low End B2C Product – SAS, CRM Tools, Help desk software etc.
Low End B2C Product – Apparel, Home appliances, FMCG etc.
The Ethics Of Lead Generation
With great power comes great Responsibility. It is very important for us to make sure we respect others data & use it in the right way.
For B2B Leads, Sending prospective E-mail’s via your personal Account will make a better impact. Do not use E-mail marketing services like Mailchimp, ConvertKit Etc.
For B2C Leads, you can always generate leads through advertising & SEO. Do not send E-mail to the leads once they have opted out from your subscription. Just like a Credit score, It is important to maintain E-mail sending reputation. Your domain name and E-mail id is sacred. It is important to make sure you have quality content in the E-mail & be very regular in communicating with your leads.
The B2B Lead generation is prospecting & Outreach. In the initial stage, Business leads can be gained Via manual work. The first step is to to identify the prospect via educated guess & Re-search. For example if your running a Digital Marketing agency, your educated guess for clients would be Brands, E-commerce, Educational institutes etc. You can reach out to the Marketing manager directly via E-mail etc. Contact us page, Linkedin are a good platforms to find Phone numbers & E-MAILS.
Low cost products & commodities do not require Lead generation because it is not worth spending time on sales. Most of the times people do not contact someone to buy. Eg- Amazon. For high end B2B products the lead can be found manually without the help of any tools and reach out to the leads manually.
Advertising will bring in the leads, Automation will convert the leads & based on the leads score, High quality leads can be engaged manually to buy. (Via meeting, Sales calls & Webinars)
The Law Of Large Numbers In Lead Generation
Events in small scale are not predictable. A single coin toss cannot be predicted at Once. However, When a large number of events happen, It can be predicted through past results. If a coin in tossed ten thousand times, the heads or tails outcome can be predicted with fair level of Accuracy. The probability is 50/50 percent, And almost 5 thousand time it will be heads & 5 thousand time it can be tails. There is no guaranteed results but, The predictability can happen with the past result outcome. The larger the numbers, The closer it is to the expected value.
The law of large numbers is in the heart of Digital marketing. Because we need to predict future conversion based on present traffic numbers.
The law of large number is very important for a Digital marketer who are running campaign. With my personal experience, The cost of acquisition will keep varying. If you start a new campaign, The cost of Acquisition will be very High & it will go low also. This will keep varying in the process. In the beginning week it was RS80 for one lead & the next week it RS30. When the campaign passes the learning period & after giving it a few weeks time it varied between RS30 to RS60 for one lead. In this case the law of large number in kicking in. It is very important to have a Campaign tracker for each campaign and all the Data are maintained properly. You can even refer the Conversion rate to get a better idea on the conversion’s happened in the past.
The future marketing metric’s can be predictable when you have a source to check it out. This is more like setting up a goal. If your aiming to get one thousand leads by this month or something like that. Leads to customer ratio will be predictable with a minimum of one thousand conversions. If you have 1000 leads and 20 lead convert, that is 2% of one thousand. With the law of large numbers you will able to predict more with more number of campaigns with more number of conversions. Never get emotional with the CPA in lead generation! You need to act like a wealthy stock investor, Wait for the results & slowly start scaling up.
Building The Lead Magnets For Lead Generation
CONTENT = LEAD MAGNETS
We need to create content first to attract people to you. People pay attention to the content. So, content comes first. Content is the root of all Attention. Your lead magnets should be having an Upgrade. With premium content and latest Landing page UI, You can attract quality Leads. You need to have an Optin in the landing page so people can fill their contact details. Drive traffic to the lead magnet via Paid advertising.
While running Paid advertising campaigns the lead magnet is usually delivered through a Landing page. Landing page should not only have a call to action button. You need to have an a mini form where people fill in their Personal details.
If your into the online education game, Webinars will be best to drive leads. Membership into a Premium group or club can also be a lead magnet.
A good converting landing page is an asset that can be used for a long term. The landing page can be customized according to the traffic source. The better the match between the Ad Copy and the landing page, The better conversion ratio on the landing page. Higher the number of lead magnets, more the leads you can generate from different sources.
Driving Attention For The Lead Magnets
Once the landing page is ready it will not become popular by itself. Drive attention to the lead magnets Via Paid Ads & Organic methods.
Organic methods include content publishing on the blog & driving traffic Via SEO. You can also publish content on social media channels and drive traffic to the landing page.
Paid methods include’s driving traffic via Facebook ads, Instagram Ads, Google Ads, Quora Ads Etc. Linkedin ads is a very good platform to get quality leads for B2B. Contest, Give Aways & Viral loops can become highly effective ways of generating leads.
Overview of Attraction Methods.
FACEBOOK ADS
GOOGLE ADS
SEO
LINKEDIN ADS & QUORA ADS
SOCIAL MEDIA GROUPS
WEBINARS / EVENTS & GIVE AWAYS
AFFILIATE MARKETING
Nurturing The Leads
When you generate the leads, The leads will be cold. You need to convert the cold leads into warm leads before they are ready to buy your product/service. The best way to engage with your leads is to build trust with them via Automation and E-mail marketing.
A drip marketing sequence with followup E-mails on a consistent basis is the best way to engage with your leads. CLICK HERE to read more on what is Drip marketing. Trust is developed over a series of conversation. In real life also you dont trust people whom you’ve met today. You become best friends with them when you know them for a long time. Personalized E-mails are a good way to build trust with your leads. When you know more about your leads and covey to them that this is what they want, They get a feel that you care for them and the amount of trust will go high.
If all the above mentioned point are followed and the funnel is implemented properly, The leads will be turned in to prospect customers.
Take your Newly generated leads in the above funnel journey. Make sure each phase has been properly implemented at the right time for the best Results.