If lead generation terminology is the Greek alphabet to you, don’t worry. If you’re reading this, chances are you have a passing familiarity with lead generation. But no matter how vague your understanding, with a little brushing up, you can have a very solid basic understanding of the word “lead.”
Businesses of all sizes use a variety of methods to generate demand for their products or services. Whether they are hiring a marketing agency or an in-house team, demand generation is an important part of the industry. But where did lead generation come from and what does it mean?
In this guide I clarify common lead generation terms, and explain the true definition behind each. So you can better communicate with your digital marketer, or hiring manager when determining what kind of lead generation tactics you need & want in your campaign.
One big problem with the lead generation field is the amount of jargon and unfamiliar terms. This guideis an attempt to explain several popular lead generation terms in a simple way that can be easily understood. Not everyone in your organization needs to understand this content, but they should know enough to know what’s important with regard to lead gen, and how to talk about it.
How does lead generation work?
Within the inbound marketing methodology, lead generation comes in at the second stage. It happens like so:
- Discovery of a business: A visitor learns about a company via the various marketing channels a brand employs, such as blogs, social media, pages, or business websites.
- A customer clicks on a call to action (CTA): A CTA is a button, message, or image that prompts a potential customer to take action.
- The customer visits a landing page: By clicking on the CTA, the visitor is redirected to a landing page that captures useful information about the lead in exchange for a delightful offer.
- Budget, Authority, Need, and Time (BANT): A method for qualifying likely sales prospects. You want to talk to people who have the budget, authority, need, and time for your product or service.
- B2B: Business-to-business.
- B2C: Business-to-consumer.
- Call-to-Action (CTA): Asking a lead to take an action. A CTA often takes the form of a digital image that encourages a lead to move closer towards making a purchase.
- Click-through rate (CTR): A percentage of how many users actually click a link; a way of measuring the success of online or email sales campaigns.
- CMS (content management system): A computer system that allows users to publish and edit content from a single interface.
- Inbound marketing: A marketing strategy that earns the attention of customers, drawing them in to attract new business through content marketing, search engine optimization, social media, and more.
- Lead generation: The marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing a sales pipeline.
- Lead nurturing: The process of building relationships with qualified prospects, regardless of their readiness to buy.
- Lead scoring: The technique of assigning leads a score based on points given to a lead’s demographic attributes, behaviors, and web activity for the purpose of sending warm leads to sales.
- Middle-of-funnel (MOFU): Prospects in the middle stages of the sales funnel.
- Outbound marketing: The process of pushing your message out to customers through general advertising and other paid programs.
- Pay-per-click (PPC): An Internet advertising model where advertisers pay every time their ad is clicked by a user.
- Return on investment (ROI): The results gained for your dollars spent.
- Sales and marketing alignment: Collaboration between the sales and marketing team for common definitions of what constitutes a good lead and closed-loop lead lifecycles.
- Sales funnel: The progression that your company tracks while generating, qualifying, and closing leads throughout the sales and marketing lifecycle.
- Service-level agreement: A part of a contract where a service is defined.
- Top-of-funnel (TOFU): Prospects in the top or beginning stages of the sales funnel.
#1 A/B testing:
A/B testing is done to test two or more versions of the same webpage to determine which version performs better. As a matter of fact, it helps to understand the effectiveness of changes in design or content of web pages by comparing the performance of multiple versions.
#2 AIDA:
Next up in the lead generation glossary is AIDA – an acronym for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. The AIDA model represents the cognitive stages an individual goes through in the buying process.
- Awareness: It is to do with creating brand awareness and drawing the attention of people.
- Interest: The next stage requires you to keep them interested in your products and services.
- Desire: Herein you influence them from just liking you to wanting to buy from you.
- Action: This phase is when the interested prospect after evaluating their affinity to your brand decides to buy a product.
#3 Application Programming Interface (API):
API stands for a software-to-software interface that allows information to be passed from one system to another. By and large, in the context of lead generation, APIs can help you a lot if you want to transfer lead info between two tools or platforms.
#4 Assessment:
It is a type of interactive content that uses the Q&A format to gather relevant information about a prospect. On the basis of user’s inputs, a tailored result is created. Furthermore, the data collected can help marketers profile their leads and send content that matches their buyer’s persona.
#5 Asset:
It includes any kind of material aligned to a buyer’s journey and used to educate and engage the user. For instance, brochures, interactive content, webinars, videos, tutorials, guides, e-books, reports, infographics etc.
#6 Authority:
Authority means how much influence you have on other people that they buy from you. For that matter, this authority can stem from how trustworthy and credible your brand is. Some ways you can make your authority visible is by publishing original research, testimonials, certifications, badges on your website.
#7 Awareness stage:
In a buying cycle, this stage is where people identify their challenge or an opportunity they want to pursue. Furthermore, they also decide whether or not the goal or challenge should be a priority. In this regard, marketers aim to generate leads through lead magnets that are educational and create awareness.
B
#8 Blogging:
It means maintaining a blog where one can post about a wide range of topics related to the industry they are a part of. It is a core component of inbound marketing strategy as it bumps up SEO, website traffic and also aids in lead generation.
#9 BOFU:
Next up in the lead generation glossary is Bottom of the funnel – the final stage in a buyer’s journey where they are evaluating who to buy the solution from. Usually, they need a gentle nudge through offers like free trials, free consultation, demo, discount to finally close the deal.
#10Bounce rate:
The percentage of visitors who land on a page of your website or a landing page without navigating further or clicking on anything. A high bounce rate generally results in poor conversion and is a reminder that you must rework your web pages. Conversely, a high bounce rate for your emails means that your list quality is getting low and it’s time to look into your list management practices.
#11 Buyer’s persona:
A buyer persona is a representation of the type of person who buys your products and services. When defining a buyer persona, you’ll identify job titles, demographic factors and lifestyle attributes of your typical buyer. By creating good content targeted to your buyer persona, you’ll attract website traffic that has a higher probability to buy your products and services.
C
#12 Cost of customer acquisition (CAC):
It is the total amount of money spent on sales and marketing in order to convince a potential customer into buying a company’s products and services. It can be calculated by dividing all the sales and marketing expenses by the number of customers acquired.
#13 Calculator:
A calculator presents complex data in a simple, basic format and is user-driven. Owing to its simplicity it is highly engaging and can be used to generate leads by asking users to exchange their contact information in order to see the results. Some examples are: EMI calculator, ROI calculator, risk calculator and cost calculator.
#14 Commitment and consistency:
According to this principle of persuasion, once people commit to something they will honor it. Marketers use this principle to create content and copy that creates a commitment in the user’s mind and moves them towards conversion.
#15 Content management system:
It is a tool that can be used to design, manage and publish a website. It allows multiples users to collaborate and create digital content which can be optimised for search engine too. Popular example of CMS are WordPress, Magento, Drupal and Joomla.
#16 Case study:
Case study is a customer’s story that explains the details of a problem they were facing, how they tackled this problem and finally, the results they got. It is a popular content format as it allows marketers to showcase their products and services through a real-life problem.
#17 Chat:
Next up in the lead generation glossary is live chat – a feature that provides a real-time, faster resolution of queries which results in better user experience and also helps in lead generation. Besides, it helps understand the behavior of a visitor and pain points, if any, instantaneously.
#18 Cheat sheet:
A cheat sheet is similar to a checklist except it gives guidelines to users to perform a task. These are usually very actionable and high-value and so make for an excellent lead generation and engagement tool.
#19 Checklist:
A checklist is an extremely easy-to-make lead magnet wherein the steps required to perform a complex task is presented in a condensed format. Companies like HubSpot use lots of checklists to engage and convert their traffic into leads.
#20 Consultation (free):
A consultation is whereby you give a session to prospects to understand their pain points and then propose how your product/service can fix them. It also serves as a great way to push your prospects into the final buying stage.
#21 Conversion rate:
It is the percentage of people who complete a desired action. For example, if 100 people arrive on a landing page and 10 people fill out the form, the landing page has a 10% conversion rate.
#22 Conversion rate optimization:
Next up in the lead generation glossary is CRO – a process of improving conversions on website or landing pages by conducting A/B tests or deploying optimizing techniques.
#23 Conversion path:
A conversion path a description of the steps taken by a user of a website towards a conversion. It starts from when the user arrives on the website and ends at conversion.
#24 Cost per lead:
CPL is the amount it costs to acquire a lead.
#25 Cross-platform marketing automation:
It’s the ability of emails to display properly across multiple platforms like mobile devices, tablets and desktops.
#26 CTA:
Call-to-action or CTA refers to a button or a link that literally ‘calls out’ or prompts the user to take an ‘action’. In fact, a good CTA is one that clearly states the value proposition so that users know what’s in it for them. For example, “Download this ebook to know the secret formula!”
#27 CTR:
Click-through rate is that percentage of people that have clicked on your ad or your post. The formula is total number of clicks divided by total number of times the link was viewed. For example: 1click/100 views = .01% CTR
#28 Customer:
Next up in the lead generation glossary is customer – a prospect who finally converts and buys your product.
10 Key Lead Generation Terms
Lifecycle Stage
Lifecycle stages help you organize your contacts based on the stage they are at in your sales cycle. In HubSpot’s CRM, lifecycle stages include: subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, opportunity, customer, or evangelist.
Subscriber
Think of subscribers as those folks who know about you and have opted in to hear from you periodically. In many cases your subscriber base is the segment of your contacts database that has only signed up for your blog or newsletter and nothing else.
Lead
Leads have shown more interest in what you offer than subscribers have. Typically a lead has filled out a form with more than just an email address, often for some sort of content-based offer on your website.
Marketing Qualified Lead
Marketing qualified leads, commonly known as MQLs, are those people who have raised their hands online (so to speak) and identified themselves as more deeply engaged contacts than your usual leads, but who have not yet become fully fledged opportunities.
Sales Qualified Lead
Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are those that your sales team has accepted as worthy of a direct sales follow up. Using this stage will help your sales and marketing teams stay firmly on the same page in terms of the quality and volume of leads that you are handing over to your sales team.
Landing Page
A landing page is a website page containing a form that is used for lead generation. This page revolves around a marketing offer, such as an ebook or a webinar, and serves to capture visitor information in exchange for the valuable offer.
Conversion Rate
The number of people who complete a form on a landing page divided by the total number of people who visited the page. A low conversion rate on a landing page may indicate that the page needs to be optimized.
Offer
The content that is provided once a lead has filled out a landing page form. Examples of premium content offers include ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, videos, and templates.
Lead to Customer Rate
This is a percentage calculated by dividing the total number of customers for a given marketing channel by the total number of leads generated in that same period of time.
Call to Action
A call to action (CTA) is a text link, button, image, or some type of web link that encourages a website visitor to visit a landing page and become of lead. Some examples of CTAs are “Subscribe Now” or “Get Your Whitepaper Today.”
Inbound marketing has a lot of moving parts; we get that. Once you learn a bit of the jargon, however, you’re more apt to understand how the parts work together to generate leads.
How to Do Lead Generation using Email Marketing
- Create emails that convert
- Implement the opt-in strategy
- Send out meaningful content
- Nurture the leads
- Include a call to action in the email
- Provide tools to share
Conclusion
The marketing companies and lead generation companies generate thousands of leads every month for the entrepreneurs. But, you have to be an expert to decode the jargon. In the complex world of lead generation tactics, being aware of your different options and how they fit into a larger strategy can be a tremendous asset. But without a good grasp on industry or company specific terminology, it’s often difficult to see the big picture. You may have seen terms like inbound marketing, outbound marketing and telemarketing thrown around before in interchangeable ways.
On an intro level of marketing, lead generation is a way to increase quality contact information for existing and potential customers/clients/partners. Demand generation is all about acquiring new clients. As your business grows you will most likely make the purchase of myriad marketing solutions (from email automation to conversion optimization solutions) that help you capture quality contacts that would potentially turn into paying clients or partners (generating demand).