Lead generation companies can make your sales team’s life a lot easier. By providing fresh, hot leads to a sales team, you are ensuring that they have constant supply of qualified prospects that are ready to make a purchase. If you work for a company that offers lead generation services, then you know the value of providing information about products and services to the customer and making sales in return. You also have some knowledge about whether or not lead generation companies work or not since you’ve had to deal with customers yourself.
It’s safe to say that most people will have heard of lead generation companies by now. For those who haven’t, they are essentially marketing agencies who specialize in lead generation; they work with businesses to generate leads and increase sales. Lead generation is essential in the modern business world, but it can be difficult to know whether these companies are effective or not. There’s a lot of jargon and technical terms used, so the topic can be confusing. We’re going to clear this up for you in this article on lead generation services.
Do lead generation companies work? Do they generate leads to business owners? Generally speaking, if you want to be successful selling online, and you don’t have a huge following, you need leads. Leads are the people that are most likely interested in buying your product. Because of this, it is typical for businesses to use lead generation companies.
Lead generation is the foundation of any sales process. It has become a broad term used to describe generating leads and providing information to your potential clients in hopes that they will purchase your product or service. While many businesses have been successful with lead generation, it is important to assess if lead generation services are right for you and your business. This post will help you understand the process of lead generation so you can determine if it is ideal for your business.
What Does A Lead Generation Company Do?
Lead generation companies help businesses become more efficient by delivering warmed up and qualified leads directly to them. Such companies will normally work in partnership with a number of businesses or websites in which they advertise your service.
In the digital age we live in today we only have to enter a few keywords into a search engine to bring up a whole wealth of businesses advertising that yes, they hold the solution to our needs.
We may find these sites by using a search engine or we may see an online ad on a social media platform.
We click for more information and land on a site where we more than likely enter our information into it such as an email address.
This contact form is then forwarded to someone who will then verify this information. The leads are then sent onto the relevant company ready for their sales force to close.
Lead generation needs a multiple pronged attack. It does require you to nurture lots of lead sources and with many channels they each need their own individual strategy.
Having a successful small business now a days is even harder with the digital era. Many will experience a shortcoming in obtaining a continuous flow of new leads. So it isn’t any wonder why many are now turning to lead generation companies to help them.
How Do The Lead Generation Companies Actually Work?
A lead generation company aggregates consumer and business information that it can then sell on to a business wishing to purchase new leads.
It uses different categories to organise the data so it is relevant to the target market, and some may even organise leads depending on levels of ‘warmth’.
A lead gen company will normally offer a number of services such as;
- Database marketing
- In house marketing teams
- Databases of businesses and professional information
They tend to gather leads by building a website and optimising and maintaining that site to attract visitors and obtain their information normally via a contact form.
Lead generation companies have the means to target and personalise campaigns for your business. They have the reach you probably wouldn’t have had on your own.
A lead generation company will come up with precise targeting campaigns. It will also have inbound programs that will help and produce more opportunities.
They will go on to nurture the leads and use other marketing techniques to obtain the information they need to identify the right leads who fit your businesses buyers persona.
The databases they have will expediate this information. Which means they can quickly and easily identify the leads who have buying intent.
There is a number of sources they gather information, such as public records, trade references, print, digital and trade publications.
How Do Lead Generation Companies Get Leads?
One way a lead generation company gets leads is by content syndication.
This is where they will push your content to other channels to increase your brand awareness and drive traffic to your site.
This could be via blogs that are relevant to your business or by using RSS feeds.
Email is also used to push content through a large network audience. Each email is then hyper targeted as many will argue this is one of the most effective ways of generating new leads.
Despite it having a somewhat bad reputation; cold calling and emailing may also be used but in B2B marketing they will also use firmographic data to better target leads.
The goal of the companies is to generally set up appointments for potential clients to have conversations with your sales team.
They will use a variety of tactics to gather new leads such as;
- Social media marketing
- Online advertising
- Optimization of landing pages
- Boosting traffic to your site and help gather your own leads.
Lead generation companies will have lead nurturing programs. These are inbound programs set up to nurture leads from the top of the sales funnel down towards the bottom ‘buying’ stages.
What Should You Look For In A Lead Generation Company?
We all know that the best person that knows your business is you; but it can be hard to generate new leads in the digital age that we live in.
You may be considering outsourcing some of your sales process such as lead generation to reputable lead gen companies; but what do you need to look for?
You need to have a strong lead generation strategy in place and use someone that can quickly understand your business aims and target audience to create this.
A good lead generation company will have the right tools in place to help you achieve the maximum impact.
They are known for adding value to businesses through generating sales leads.
Lead generation is the term used when a lead is generated from digital marketing purposes and then sold to a company, agency or individual.
It plays an important role in your digital marketing strategy as it establishes demand for your products/services.
You may wonder why you would spend more money on hiring a lead generation company when you can just buy data.
The problem with this is that you may not get quality data. It could be that you have these details already. They may already be a customer and it could be heavily worked through too.
You need to look for a lead generation company that focuses on quality and not just quantity of leads.
As long as the lead generation company understand and shares the common goal, aims and needs of your business then partnering with a lead generation company could transform the way your business obtains new 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.
Outsource So You Can Keep Focused
Working with a lead generation company means you can take your time to refine what you want each campaign to achieve. It will also give you the freedom to concentrate on running your business.
If one of your staff is going on holiday it gives you the opportunity to keep important leads warm. Which makes it easier for them when they return from their break as appointments have already been set up.
The key to success in business is having new clients/customers finding you at the right time. They could be at any stage of the sales process or possibly even just first hear about your products.
How this happens depends on many different factors such as; how current clients find out about you is the high quality content that is on your website.
Despite what you may have read from best practice pundits, lead generation is not easy. In fact, if we examine some statistics, we’ll see that generating leads is the biggest challenge for 63 percent of companies.
Consider the undertaking required to build and cultivate multiple lead sources: each channel requires its own strategy and continued optimization. While it’s more or less the ultimate goal for the demand generation department, it can be a painstaking, slow, and expensive process.
Consequently, building a holistic lead generation engine leaves many companies with fewer opportunities—at least in the short term. As evidence, BrightTALK found that supplying more leads was the top concern for 55 percent of B2B professionals—topped only by increasing the quality of leads.
via BrightTALK’s B2B Lead Generation Trend Report
When a majority of enterprises and nearly half of small businesses are turning to a particular service, it’s natural to ask: how does that actually work?
Although the amount of detail lead generation services give away in their branding varies, there are a few common denominators that most quality companies offer their clients. Here’s a breakdown.
1. Database marketing
Sheer reach is the primary value proposition that lead gen agencies offer to in-house marketing teams. Any agency worth your time will have massive databases of business and professional information. These information resources arm lead generation vendors with the means to target and personalize marketing campaigns on a level that’s simply out of reach for most in-house marketers.
As a result, lead gen agencies can customize campaigns they run for their clients using a relatively vast range of criteria, which translates into precise targeting.
Traditional inbound programs produce an amalgamation of opportunities and then use lead nurturing and other marketing techniques to obtain the information needed to identify leads who fit the right buyer personas. The databases lead gen providers have at their disposal expedite much of this information gathering and jump right to identifying which leads have buying intent.
How did these agencies obtain all of this information?
According to John Fedrick on Quora, lead generation services build their databases from a variety of sources, including social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and list acquisition.
2. Content syndication
So if the database does the targeting, then what actually makes people convert? This is where content syndication comes in.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, content syndication is essentially pushing your content to other channels in order to increase brand awareness and drive traffic back to your own site.
Traditionally, this has been accomplished by taking posts that have already been published on your site and partnering with other blogs to get them to post the piece. RSS feeds are another common medium for syndication, but these are done with the hope that larger sites will find the content interesting and pick it up.
But even if you do get your content published on a partner site, there are still several degrees of separation between the blog post you’ve syndicated and the action you want visitors to take.
Also, you may be able to broadly ascertain the readership of the blog, but you’ll still need to put up sorting mechanisms (such as progressive profiling) to separate leads who will never meet your criteria from those that do.
Lead generation services may use some of the previously mentioned syndication techniques, but they’ll likely use email to disseminate your content throughout their gargantuan network. And each email campaign will be hyper-targeted—thanks to the powerful data infrastructure these organizations bring to bear.
Why do they use email? Because it’s still one of the most effective mediums for generating leads.
Via The 2020 Chief Marketer B2B Marketing Outlook Survey
3. Telemarketing
Yes, telemarketing. It may have a less than sterling reputation in the consumer market, but B2B telemarketing is usually viewed in a different light.
While consumer telemarketing is usually predicated on regional and demographic data, B2B telemarketing uses firmographic data to better target leads. In fact, an SCI survey of 200 department managers found that only four percent found sales calls at work to be annoying, compared to 35 percent who found telemarketing annoying outside of the work environment:
The difference in setting heavily influences the respondents’ perspectives. At work, department managers expect to field sales calls, and in some cases these calls may provide new product or industry information the manager wasn’t aware of.
This willingness to participate in sales calls is one of the reasons Marketing Charts ranked phone calls as the second-best way for B2B salespeople to reach prospects besides referrals.
The goal of telemarketing campaigns can vary, but the most common goal is to set appointments for conversations with your sales team. The scripts and processes associated with telemarketing programs are typically proprietary, so you’ll need to talk through the details of this strategy with your service provider.
What Qualities Should You Look for in a Lead Generation Company?
Carrying out the whole process of lead generation on your own can be challenging. Therefore, outsourcing it to a dedicated lead generation company can be beneficial and time-saving in the long run. But you need to find a reputed firm to handle this department with care.
Here are a few things to look for in a good lead generation company:
- The company should use the right strategies to help you with lead generation.
- They should have the right skills, good market knowledge, and a lot of connections to identify the right target audience according to your business.
- Digital marketing also plays a significant role in lead generation. Therefore, your selected company should be willing to work with your digital marketing and sales department to crack the maximum number of leads in the minimum time.
- An important point to consider while picking a lead generation company is that they should pay attention to quality instead of quantity.
- You can also check the lead generation company’s portfolio if it’s available. This would give you a clear idea of how they work and what benefits they have brought to their other previous clients.
- Your chosen lead generation company must be transparent in its conduct. Any hidden issues can bring problems to your company in the long run.
- Overall, as long as the lead generation firm concentrates on the goal and shares valuable results, they can be worth partnering with. This would also help your company with a lot of sales development.
Conclusion
When you are unfamiliar with the world of business, it can be difficult to get yourself out there. The first step to improving your business is understanding key terms and courtesies, like leads. Lead generation is a term used in business that describes the process of finding potential buyers who want to buy from you and your company. However, lead generation is just one way of targeting potential clients. There are many ways that you can begin to improve your business’s success without making as much work for yourself.
Lead generation does not always come easy. There may be times when you find that there is a certain job that just won’t do it. It seems like you are wasting time, money, and energy putting out one thing after another, but it just won’t work. Sometimes you need some help to get the job done. If this has ever happened to you or if you have been in the same situation, then lead generation services might be the answer you have been looking for