Lead generation is the business process used to generate leads for a sales pipeline. It takes the form of a marketing campaign that gathers information from leads through various forms of marketing material, such as highly-targeted advertisements, and guides the prospects towards filling out lead generation forms. Once the prospective client completes the form, it falls into the hands of a marketing executive who then carries out further actions and nurtures the prospect to proceed further into the buyer journey workflow.
How Lead Generation Work Quora? What is lead generation quora? These are some of the questions that need to be answered before we can get to the bottom of how lead generation work quora. Most businesses will at one point in time wonder about how lead generation work quora especially if they have just gotten started and haven’t got the hang of it.
Business to business lead generation is a process of generating leads and following up with those leads in order to attract new clients. Lead generation is widely used by many professionals, especially consultants, sales and marketing professionals. It is also widely used in the lead generation software sector as a way of increasing sales conversion rates and also attracting new customers for each business.
There are many ways through which leads can be generated. Lead generation can be done through direct, indirect or mixed methods. Direct lead generation is simple, wherein a company reaches out to a person directly by having contact information or database of leads. Indirect lead generation is where one gets leads from the third party who already has them. Mixed lead generation is a mixture of direct and indirect tactics. But as you get deeper into b2b marketing and sales, you will find that the most efficient way of generating leads is through inbound marketing.
How Quora Serves as a Lead Generation Tool
Quora serves as a lead generation tool by allowing it’s experts to provide answers to benefit their followers and other users. This platform is basically a forum designed for knowledge – based sharing. What it is not however, is a sales funnel or what one would typically call a direct lead generation tool. But what it does do in terms of serving as a vehicle for lead generation is open up the lines of communication between experts and other users. This platform works best when you are genuinely engaging with others who sincerely want answers to the questions that they have.
So the way that it works is when experts take the time to build their profile that displays their position of authority on Quora, it then serves as a launching pad to lead generation. So it’s not designed to directly generate leads, but rather indirectly through the investment of building the proper profile that represents your best authoritative position.
The following are a few tips to get started using Quora for lead generation
- Create a profile of authority.
- Actively engage in topics within your niche in an authoritative manner.
- Interact with followers directly; particularly those who expressed an interest in your niche and who are following your questions. Use the opportunity to also establish relationships and determine whether there are any potential business opportunities.
- Share your responses on social media. This allows you to get even more exposure on multiple social media platforms. This further increases your brand authority which will generate even more leads.
- Seek out the most trending topics within your niche. Becoming aware of the type of questions and answered that are most popular allows you to use this as research to develop even better questions. This also lends itself to more followers and ultimately additional leads.
- Make connections with industry leaders and top influencers within your industry. Make note of the type of users who follow similar questions and reach out to them. Making connections with them allows you to become noticed by other key industry experts.
- Make use of Quora’s features and tools, such as TrackBacks for SEO. This tool works by sending you information each time any of your sources have been cited from your blog or website. This enhances your SEO rankings which further enhances your opportunity to obtain more leads.
Why is Lead Generation Important for Brands?
When a person shows interest in your brand’s products or services, the steps that person takes towards making their first purchase just seem natural. You just helped them to fulfill a need or solve a problem.
When a person has no interest in what you have to offer, yet you still try to convince them to make a purchase, they may feel like they are being pushed to spend their money. This can make the customer feel like they were forced to buy your product and it can hurt your brand’s reputation.
Attending to your target audience only through lead generation can ensure that your brand is ideally matched with the right customers. More benefits of lead generation include:
- Target the right customers – Companies can focus their resources on targeting specific markets, which in turn will save money and increases sales (improved ROI).
- Increased awareness – Lead generation can also build brand awareness and reputation. When people discover your brand, you will be able to supply them with more information regarding product features and benefits.
- Opportunity to collect valuable prospect information – Lead generation has the potential to gather important marketing information from prospects. Customer information such as needs wants, and preferences can assist you in tailoring your product or service to suit your customers’ needs. Eg. Companies can obtain this information through registration forms.
- Brand Loyalty – Companies can build larger communities of like-minded customers, which can, in turn, improve customer loyalty.
Most marketing departments measure lead quantity when determining a successful lead generation campaign. Sales teams, on the other hand, focus on lead quality. Leads with a clear intent to purchase your product, have the finances and means to do so, and meet the parameters set by you are considered as quality leads.
If a company focuses on lead quality, the chances of converting a lead into a customer drastically increase. Having higher conversion rates will allow you to confidently invest in your quality leads, increasing your return on investment (ROI).
Source: Ascend2
Focusing on quality leads can potentially increase the rate of new customer acquisition. Getting new customers at a high rate will allow you to quickly grow a loyal customer base. This can also improve your ROI in the long term, as the faster you build your customer base, the sooner you will be able to retarget new and existing customers.
As mentioned above, focusing on quality leads can drastically improve conversion rates and ROI. However, there are a few drawbacks to quality leads. For instance, a sales team that focuses solely on their quality leads can end up neglecting their other duties such as after sales calls or product deliveries.
Investing time and money into quality leads is still a risk that salespeople will have to take. A quality lead can still back out at the very last moment. You won’t just lose the deal, but you would have lost all that time and effort that went into convincing the lead to purchase your product.
Lead quality is usually determined after going through a list of leads that were acquired through a lead generation campaign. Most campaigns will focus on lead quantity. So marketers and sales teams will still have to go through all leads to determine their quality leads.
Lead Quality Pros
- Improved conversion rates
- Improved ROI
- Can be outsourced
- Higher customer satisfaction when matching your product with a target customer
Lead Quality Cons
- Can be time-consuming and distracting for the sales team
- If outsourced, the company generating the leads might not have sufficient product knowledge
- Quality leads are still considered a risk as they can back out of deals
How to Attract Quality Leads?
B2B marketers claim that they generate leads from the following social networks:
- 39% of B2B marketers say they generated leads from Facebook
- 30% of B2B marketers say they generated leads from Twitter
- 44% of B2B marketers say they generated leads from Linkedin
Finding quality leads on social media is a reality. However, it is important that you select the platform that best suits your industry. LinkedIn is the social network that generates the most B2B leads. It makes sense to start here as the platform is built for business owners and professionals who wish to connect with each other.
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Setup a Quiz on Your Website
Setting up a quiz on your website will allow visitors to answer the questions you need to qualify them as a good lead. At the end of the quiz, you can supply them with a free resource (e-book or PDF), which will bring value to your quiz.
Talk Directly to Potential Leads
With B2B marketing, it’s never easy to connect directly to company owners or executives. You usually have to go through other channels (PAs, employees, and receptionists) before you can get to the boss. Try to get in touch with company owners directly through platforms such as LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a business-centric platform, so if you do pitch something to an executive, it will be accepted. In some cases, other platforms such as Email, WhatsApp, or Facebook might work, but you run the risk of upsetting the person you contact. If you are going to use these platforms to communicate with potential leads, then its best you do your homework first by finding out more about the person you are contacting.
Once you have successfully reached out to an executive, you must ensure that you have a high-quality presentation, or sample ready.
Get Referrals
Referrals are a powerful source of quality leads. If someone used your product and saw great results from it, they would recommend it to their colleagues and friends. In most cases, they won’t spread the word to people with little to no interest in your product, as it will be a waste of their time. Instead, they will ask someone who they think will have the finances and the need for your product, which matches the description of a quality lead.
However, customers won’t automatically hand you quality leads. You will have to request referrals from your customers. You can incentivize this process by offering a discount on the next purchase.
Source: Airbnb
Airbnb issues a credit to the new user that is referred, as well as to the user that made the referral. They basically implemented a referral system that incentivizes customers who produce quality leads.
If you do get in touch with a company owner or executive, you could offer them your product for free in exchange for quality leads. High-level execs network with each other all the time. If you build a good relationship with one company owner, they could introduce you to other owners and executives that would be interested in your product.
Facebook is a Source for Quality Leads
Facebook offers many customization options for businesses on their pages and groups. However, most companies don’t make full use of these options and instead, they just post content related to their products.
Pay careful attention to the layout of your facebook page and treat it like a sales page or a landing page to your website. Constantly update the page with engaging content and make sure that there is a clear Call-To-Action for leads.
The Advantages Of Working With A Lead Generation Company
Working with a lead generation company will give you much more control over your campaign or future campaigns.
A lead generation company will have contacts lists which would be very hard for independent businesses to obtain in such a short time frame. This means they can quickly gain access to more potential clients.
They are able to advertise on a number of different media platforms. This allows you to spread your message across a wide variety of people.
They will also provide you with the benefits of data collecting, statistics tracking, and many other things that you would not be able to do yourself.
Lead Gen companies will also help you get the most out of your marketing campaign; All while saving you time and money.
They could even help refine your sales processes and improve them as it may not always work out if you do it yourself.
CONCLUSION
Quora is the place to go for informative answer on basically anything. You can find a bunch of already answered questions about how lead generation work, who will give you detailed step-by-step instructions about each and every process lead generation involves.
Generating leads is a common pain point for many marketers. Understanding how to generate leads can be tricky. Generating leads from the correct sources, and more importantly, understanding lead generation, is critical to your business’s success. I spend a lot of time on Quora answering these types of questions about lead generation where I learn new things every day and help others out in the process.