Lead Generation Explained: What It Means And Why It Is Important

Let’s face it, lead generation is rapidly and smartly out-pacing cold advertising and promotion as the preferred marketing strategy among businesses.

No? Quick question…

Do you not hate it when you’re about to dig into that aroma savoring and deliciously prepared pasta dinner and just as you twist your fork to lift a full dig, your phone rings and the next thing you hear is:

“Hello, my name is ABC and I’m calling you from XYZ company. Would you be interested in our blah blah blah product?”

Frustrating, right? And the next thing you do is hang up angrily. That’s one potential sales lead gone for that salesperson.

Unfortunately, this is the fate of many companies and businesses in Nigeria and beyond. These days, inbound marketing methodologies and strategies are quickly replacing cold calling tactics. Hence, the rapid adoption of lead generation techniques among businesses in Nigeria.

[bctt tweet=”Today, 77% of online customers prefer permission-based promotions, which is inbound marketing centered, to cold-calling tactics which they consider disruptive.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

Converting strangers to leads, and leads to sales is hard work. It takes times, money and energy. In fact, lead generation and sales are the two most challenging aspects of any business and this is the reason many businesses are looking out for digital marketers who can leverage effective inbound marketing strategies like lead generation.

This is where we come in.

Many newbies digital marketers like yourself have taken our digital marketing course and have gone on to develop and demonstrate lead generation strategies that earned them high paying jobs, quadrupled sales in their businesses or earned higher ROI for their current employers.

You can be like them too. (Click here to secure a space in our next class.) Limited seats available.

Now that you’ve booked a seat, in this post, we’ll help you learn how you can begin your journey to increased sales and profit, using the best lead generation strategies. Basically, you’ll learn what lead generation is, why everyone’s talking about it, and tips on how to get started.

Before we get into all of that, though, you can still join the lead generation class in our digital marketing course. (Click here to sign up now)

Now, let’s get into the meat of this. First, the basics.

What Is A Lead In Lead Generation?

[bctt tweet=”Put simply, a lead is an individual (B2C) or organization (B2B) that could potentially become one of your customers. The lead generation process involves a sales target indicating interest in your company’s product or service.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

Interest is at the centre of the lead generation process, because it suggests that a digital marketer must have developed and deployed strategies that convince a website visitor to take a sales pre-qualification action like filling a survey, subscribing to your email marketing list to learn more about your products or service or even calling your salesperson to learn more about your offerings.

Unlike in traditional marketing, where a lead can be anyone on the street who might not be interested in your offering, in digital marketing, a lead is a pre-qualified potential customer because online marketing strategies allow you to permit your first sales communication with a potential client and nurture them permissively into customers.

What A Lead Is Not

Now, this isn’t to say that just anyone can be considered a lead.

In other words, just because a person has visited your website doesn’t mean you can define them as a lead. In fact, you shouldn’t do this, for reasons which you will learn from this guide.

[bctt tweet=”Typically, for an individual to be considered a lead, they’ll need to have revealed a need and demonstrated some level of confidence in your brand to meet that need and further engage with your brand on that basis.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

Remember, a lead is not a lead unless they have demonstrated confidence in your brand to meet their needs.

The Importance of Lead Generation: Why Everyone Is Talking About It

Lead generation is probably the single most important marketing and sales action. This is because it is the engine room for any business that is serious about making a profit.

[bctt tweet=”Why is lead generation important for you to learn? The ultimate answer to that question is very obvious. Lead generation leads to making sales. Sales bring in money. Money is good. Simple!” username=”dmsinstitute”]

Perhaps, the proper question should be why go through the process of attracting, acquiring and converting leads at all?

With an increasing consumer need in a personalized experience, lead generation has become more detailed than ever before. The modern-day consumer doesn’t want to be advertised to: they want to purchase a solution to their problem.

This is where lead generation comes in.

It attracts qualified sales targets that meet your target demography to your sales engine allowing you to devise strategies to convert them into raving customers.

With lead generation,  it’s those strangers initiating an organic interest in your business by searching for you online, filling your form, signing up to your email list, requesting a quote, or even following your social media handles, as against you and your business initiating the relationship.

This makes it easier and more natural for them to want to buy from you somewhere down the line and more likely to permit your promotions and request your offering.

Lead Generation Brings Quality From Quantity

Having understood the reason many businesses now invest heavily in lead generation methods, Nigerian businesses must also join the chariot so as to scale up their sales engine.

In this section, we’ll walk you through bits of the winning formula that we show in more comprehensive and practical terms to our students at our digital marketing course. You should click here to join them in the journey of leads generation optimization

To start with lead generation, you need to focus on the following:

• Lead Attraction
• Lead Conversion
• Lead Generation Measurement

LEAD ATTRACTION

This basically involves developing and deploying strategies that would ensure that your website or offer is placed visibly before your target customers, well enough that it attracts their attention and presence on your website.

[bctt tweet=”Without traffic to your website, lead generation might seem like an impossible task, and without the ideas below, lead attraction might seem even more impossible.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

1. Start A Blog

If you have not already started a blog, start it today.

If you have one, write for it consistently. If you do not have an idea of how often you should blog, take a keen look at your competitors. If they blog once or three times a week, outdo them and blog 3-4 times a week.

Caution, ensure that you are not winning the quantity game by sacrificing the quality of your content.

2. Update Your Web pages

The frequency at which you post and update your content matters a lot in the search engines and to people.

[bctt tweet=”Blogging will help you to achieve this, but it does not mean you neglect the rest of your website. Update your news pages, event pages, product and service pages as well as the about us pages regularly. This enables you to stay up to date with the pace at which your industry moves.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

You do not have to update your website as much as you update your blog but make sure that it has fresh content all the time.

3. Optimize Your Content For Organic Reach

Make sure that you create content around keywords people are searching for. You can do this by performing keyword research with a tool like [eafl id=”8981″ name=”KWFinder” text=”KWFinder”] to determine which topics would attract readers the most.

After doing the keyword research, optimize the content you publish so that you get found in the search engines. Remember, long-tail keywords will contain about seventy percent of organic searches and drive extremely qualified traffic.

4. Content Promotion Is Key

Being found in the search engine is your main goal but the strategy that will help you to get there and generate more traffic to convert into leads is through content promotions and there are many channels but you should mostly leverage social media and email marketing.

For social media, this platform will help people to know you and the products or services you are offering. Make sure you include social sharing buttons on your content and post the content to Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn to grow followers and get a broader audience for your website content.

If you have people who have opted to receive emails from you, make sure you send them daily or weekly digest of the content you are producing.

LEAD CONVERSION AS A LEAD GENERATION STRATEGY

[bctt tweet=”Now that you have those leads coming in, you don’t want to leave them cold and lukewarm. Don’t be like the hunter whose trap catches an antelope but fails to take the game home.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

You need to warm your leads up with content and strategies that’ll aid their decision process of opting for your offering or not.

This is what lead conversion does for your business.

Here’s how…

1. Create Downloadable Lead Magnets

[bctt tweet=”The main aim of having a blog is to drive traffic to your business. You need to convert that traffic into leads. One way of doing this is by offering downloadable contents like whitepapers, webinars, slideshows, ebooks, and other offers like free trials, production demos.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

This can be acquired free by completing a form.

This lead magnet strategy, as the name implies, would endear your brand to your potential customers even before they pay for your offering so that they either make the decision for you or have you in mind when they need to, having seen you as a thought leader.

2. Create Targeted Calls-To-Action (CTA)

Another way of generating leads is by strategically inserting calls to action throughout your site. This will drive the visitors to landing pages with forms to convert into a lead.

[bctt tweet=”For more effectiveness, the call to action should be targeted to the visitor. For instance, if there is a visitor on the product page, they might be interested in a free trial for a product or a service.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

If the visitor is in the how-to blog post, they might enjoy a free eBook that continues with the discussion at hand.

3. Create An Optimized Landing Page

It is very important to create a landing page that converts your visitors into leads. However, it is important to lay the landing page well to avoid abandonment or gaining a dismal number of leads.

You can improve the landing pages with A/B testing. Once you have already laid out a customized landing page by following the best practices, you can generate even more leads if you A/B test. There are many tools that offer advanced landing pages such as A/B testing but none comes close as Instapage.

LEAD GENERATION MEASUREMENT

Measuring the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts will assist you in putting in place measures for you to maximize your potential. You can analyze the effectiveness of the lead generation process by getting to know where your traffic is coming from.

Is your traffic coming from social media? Or is it coming from paid search? Also, how much traffic can you attribute to referrals? If you know where the traffic comes from and the quantity month by month, you will be able to gauge the effectiveness of your lead generation strategies.

You can also analyze where on your site traffic lands and know which assets drive the most traffic. This will not only help you to know what people are interested in but also helps you to know where you should focus your time to generate your leads.

Lastly, you should measure the amount of quality your leads are. Remember, all these efforts will bring you more leads, but do you know if it was worth it?

[bctt tweet=”Analyzing the quality of the leads by tracking how long leads are in the sales funnels and how many leads turn into customers and how much it cost to acquire the lead and customers will greatly profit your lead generation efforts.” username=”dmsinstitute”]

You will find out that some lead generation strategies will perform better than others and discover some lead behaviors that indicate that they are more worthwhile to target.

Final Words

Lead generation is a key element in the sales process that has changed in recent years. Alongside shifts in sales and marketing landscape. Generated leads are no longer an indiscriminate list of names that marketing hands to sales. It’s way beyond the quantity now, but on the quality.

Leads are generated today by drawing in potential customers using a variety of methods, offering them useful information, building and nurturing relationships, and evaluating which leads are ready to move forward in their buying journey.

All of these and more you’d learn when you join our lead generation class.

(Click here to get started)

Further Reading

1. Lead Generation | A Complete Beginner Guide to Generating Leads
2. Lead Generation and Customer Acquisition Strategies
3. Lead Generation: Nigerian Businesses Must Focus On Lead Generation
4. Ultimate Lead Generation Tips To Increase Your ROI In 2020
5. The Importance Of Lead Generation (Advantages and Pros)