Marketers all over the world are always in a quest for a great lead generation strategy. You, along with hundreds of other marketers are also looking for effective and affordable ways of generating leads? You have landed on the right page. In this article, we will discuss lead generators and how do they work.
Every day, tons of people are searching for the perfect lead generation website. The problem is that there is simply no such a thing. You’ll always need to put in a lot of effort and resources if you want it to succeed. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to success. As brilliant as some products may seem on the surface, they will hardly work well if your list is poorly targeted or you fail to leverage the most essential element behind it: the email address.
Lead generation services for real estate agents are everywhere. Most of them provide you with a list of leads or phone numbers, but not much else. Sure, they make it easy for you to contact them and can even help you qualify the lead. They do the mundane tasks of pre-qualifying while you get to do the fun stuff.
Are you curious about how lead generation tools work? Or are you seeking information on how to create a lead generation website yourself? While the two types of questions sound similar, there is actually a lot of difference between them. A lot of people, especially small business owners, are either curious about those or confused about what is best for their business. Lead generation services have been around for many years, but the rise in popularity may be due to the growing list of small businesses that need help with marketing and advertisement online.
What is a lead?
A lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form.
Leads typically hear from a business or organization after opening communication (by submitting personal information for an offer, trial, or subscription) … instead of getting a random cold call from someone who purchased their contact information.
Let’s say you take an online survey to learn more about how to take care of your car. A day or so later, you receive an email from the auto company that created the survey about how they could help you take care of your car. This process would be far less intrusive than if they’d just called you out of the blue with no knowledge of whether you even care about car maintenance, right? This is what it’s like to be a lead.
And from a business perspective, the information the auto company collects about you from your survey responses helps them personalize that opening communication to address your existing problems — and not waste time calling leads who aren’t at all interested in auto services.
Leads are part of the broader lifecycle that consumers follow when they transition from visitor to customer. Not all leads are created equal (nor are they qualified the same). There are different types of leads based on how they are qualified and what lifecycle stage they’re in. Featured Resource
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.
How to Identify Quality Leads
The definition of a quality lead will vary according to a company’s product or service. The best place to start when identifying quality leads is by tracking all inbound leads. An example of tracking lead information is through website forms and marketing campaign software like Mailshake.
When a prospective lead fills out a form on a website to gain access to free downloadable content like a PDF or e-book, they will have to provide their information. Just by providing their name, email, and contact number, you will be able to sort the data into leads, existing customers, and spam.
If your company sells multiple products like software, apps, and technical hardware, then you could add more fields to your forms to gather more info on leads. This can further categorize your leads by department, product, interests, etc.
If you plan on acquiring leads through social media or email, then you could simply keep track of your lead interactions on a spreadsheet. Make sure to include all interactions with potential customers and leads. The more information you have, the better you will be able to asses the quality of your leads.
Manually inputting your findings into a sheet can become time-consuming and difficult to manage at times, which is why it is recommended to use lead management software.
How Do You Improve Lead Quality?
Use Lead Scoring
Lead scoring allows you to rank your leads by their interest levels and readiness to buy. You assign points to leads based on their actions and behavior on your website. There is no exclusive method for scoring leads, which is why companies define their own scoring systems to suit their needs.
Points can be awarded for:
- Visiting your website
- Opening your mails
- Clicking through to a promotion
- Downloading free resources (e-book or PDF)
- Watching a webinar
- Started a free trial
Source: Proof
Once you have totaled up the scores of all your leads, you can then rank your leads according to the scores they received. Leads with high scores are considered good leads and can be labeled as ‘hot’, ‘100%’, or ‘A’.
Leads with above-average scores are ‘warm’ leads. You can consider warming up these leads when you plan your next marketing campaign.
B2B marketers tend to further distinguish leads by their explicit data such as industry, title, and company.
Marketing-Sales Feedback Loop
The data you collect from your leads do not end when the marketer hands over the lead to the sales team. Especially during complex sales cycles. The sales team must provide feedback on every interaction with the lead to the marketing team.
If marketers wait too long, they run the risk of having to analyze old data which becomes irrelevant because the sale has already been made or lost. If all marketing does is send out leads to the sales team without feedback, they will assume that sales are being made and continue generating leads.
If marketing receives feedback from sales (weekly or monthly), they will be able to adjust future lead generation campaigns to improve the quality of the leads that are submitted to sales.
Example Strategies on How to Attract Quality Leads
Blogging
Blogging is a no brainer if you run an online business. Your company website should have a blog section that posts articles regularly. If leads find these articles useful, they will visit your website frequently.
If you write on topics centered around your product or service, then your readers will be considered as good leads, as they have an interest in your blog, which is related to your product or service.
You can effectively navigate visitors of your blog to other product landing pages by inserting links into your blog posts.
Cold Outreach
Send out a cold email to a prospective client is still an effective strategy for generating good leads. Companies don’t use cold outreach because of the fear of being labeled a spammer, but if done correctly, cold outreach will land you some quality handpicked leads.
With cold outreach, you research the companies that would benefit the most from using your product. If you sell commercial ovens, then you should research restaurants that will be most suited to use your product, then, reach out to them via email.
The same goes for an online business. If you sell an app for Shopify stores, then do your homework and create a list of Shopify stores that you can target.
Don’t send out the same email to every single Shopify or eCommerce store out there. That’s just spamming. Narrow down your list to Shopify stores only that require your software.
When you have your list of emails ready, you can then send out customized cold emails. Customization is key and can only be achieved by getting as much information on the prospect as possible.
Contests and Giveaways
Running contests and giveaways is an excellent way of generating leads. Contestants exchange emails for a chance to win a prize. If you select a prize that your ideal leads are interested in, then they would possibly enter your contest.
Contests and giveaways are viral in nature and are held over a short period. This means that you can generate large amounts of leads within a short space of time. You can then work on analyzing and ranking your newly acquired leads.
People love free stuff, even in the B2B marketplace. You could offer discounts on SaaS software if you wish to attract B2B leads. An example would be to offer a marketing tool bundle that includes your product, and other products that complement yours.
Free Ebook on Lead Gen Best Practices
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Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
Marketing qualified leads are contacts who’ve engaged with your marketing team’s efforts but aren’t ready to receive a sales call. An example of an MQL is a contact who fills out a landing page form for an offer (like in our lead generation process scenario below).
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
Sales qualified leads are contacts who’ve taken actions that expressly indicate their interest in becoming a paying customer. An example of an SQL is a contact who fills out a form to ask a question about your product or service.
Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
Product qualified leads are contacts who’ve used your product and taken actions that indicate interest in becoming a paying customer. PQLs typically exist for companies who offer a product trial or a free or limited version of their product (like HubSpot!) with options to upgrade, which is where your sales team comes in. An example of a PQL is a customer who uses your free version but engages or asks about features that are only available upon payment.
Service Qualified Lead
Service qualified leads are contacts or customers who’ve indicated to your service team that they’re interested in becoming a paying customer. An example of an service qualified lead is a customer who tells their customer service representative that they’d like to upgrade their product subscription; at this time, the customer service representative would up-level this customer to the appropriate sales team or representative.
Lead Generation Process
Now that we understand how lead generation fits into the inbound marketing methodology, let’s walk through the steps of the lead generation process.
- First, a visitor discovers your business through one of your marketing channels, such as your website, blog, or social media page.
- That visitor then clicks on your call-to-action (CTA) — an image, button, or message that encourages website visitors to take some sort of action.
- That CTA takes your visitor to a landing page, which is a web page that is designed to capture lead information in exchange for an offer.
Note: An offer is the content or something of value that’s being “offered” on the landing page, like an ebook, a course, or a template. The offer must have enough perceived value to a visitor for them to provide their personal information in exchange for access to it.) - Once on the landing page, your visitor fills out a form in exchange for the offer. (Forms are typically hosted on landing pages, although they can technically be embedded anywhere on your site.) Voila! You have a new lead. That is, as long as you’re following lead-capture form best practices.
See how everything fits together?
To sum it up: Visitor clicks a CTA that takes them to a landing page where they fill out a form to get an offer, at which point they become a lead.
By the way, you should check out our free lead generation tool. It helps you create lead capture forms directly on your website. Plus, it’s really easy to set up.
Lead Generation Marketing
Once you put all of these elements together, you can use your various promotional channels to drive traffic to your landing page to start generating leads.
But what channels should you use to promote your landing page? Let’s talk about the front-end of lead generation — lead gen marketing. https://www.youtube.com/embed/P5e62_x3Qng?feature=oembed
If you’re a visual learner, this chart shows the flow from promotional marketing channels to a generated lead.
There are even more channels you can use to get visitors to become leads. Let’s go into depth on these and talk about a few others.
Content
Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content — inline, bottom-of-post, in the hero, or even on the side panel. The more delighted a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your call-to-action and move onto your landing page.
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Email is a great place to reach the people who already know your brand and product or service. It’s much easier to ask them to take an action since they’ve previously subscribed to your list. Emails tend to be a bit cluttered, so use CTAs that have compelling copy and an eye-catching design to grab your subscriber’s attention.
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Ads and Retargeting
The sole purpose of an ad is to get people to take an action. Otherwise, why spend the money? If you want people to convert, be sure that your landing page and offer match exactly what is promised in the ad, and that the action you want users to take is crystal clear.
Blog
The great thing about using your blog posts to promote an offer is that you can tailor the entire piece to the end goal. So, if your offer is an instructional video on setting up Google Search Console, then you can write a blog post about how to select your marketing metrics … which would make your CTA highly relevant and easy to click.
For a quick video overview on the HubSpot Blog’s expert lead generation tips, check out our video guide. https://www.youtube.com/embed/qK_EQ-3BifM?feature=oembed
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Social Media
Social media platforms make it easy to guide your followers to take action, from the swipe up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links to bitly URLs on Twitter. You can also promote your offerings on your social posts and include a call-to-action in your caption. Learn more about social media campaigns in this post.
Product Trials
You can break down a lot of barriers to a sale by offering trials of your product or service. Once a prospect is using your product, you can entice them with additional offers or resources to encourage them to buy. Another good practice is to include your branding in your free versions so you can capture other potential customers, too.
Referral Marketing
Referral, or word-of-mouth, marketing is useful for lead generation in a different way. That is, it gets your brand in front of more people, which, in turn, increases your chances of generating more leads.
Whatever channel you use to generate leads, you’ll want to guide users to your landing page. As long as you’ve built a landing page that converts, the rest will handle itself.
Why not just buy leads?
Marketers and salespeople alike want to fill their sales funnel — and they want to fill it quickly. Enter: The temptation to buy leads.
Buying leads, as opposed to organically generating them, is much easier and takes far less time and effort, despite being more expensive. But, you might be paying for advertising anyway … so, why not just buy leads?
First and foremost, any leads you’ve purchased don’t actually know you. Typically, they’ve “opted in” at some other site when signing up for something, and didn’t actually opt into receiving anything from your company.
The messages you send them are therefore unwanted messages, and sending unwanted messages is intrusive. (Remember that disruptive call I got when I was trying to eat my spaghetti? That’s how people feel when they receive emails and other messages from people they didn’t ask to hear from.)
If the prospect has never been to your website and indicated an interest in your products or services, then you’re interrupting them … plain and simple.
If they never opted in to receive messages specifically from you, then there’s a high chance they could flag your messages as spam, which is quite dangerous for you. Not only does this train to filter out emails from you, but it also indicates to their email provider which emails to filter out.
Once enough people flag your messages as spam, you go on a “blacklist,” which is then shared with other email providers. Once you get on the blacklist, it’s really, really hard to get back off of it. In addition, your email deliverability and IP reputation will likely be harmed.
It’s always, always, always better to generate leads organically rather than buy them. Read this blog post to learn how to grow an opt-in email list instead of buying one.
How to Qualify a Lead
As we covered in the first section, a lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service. Now, let’s talk about the ways in which someone can actually show that interest.
Essentially, a sales lead is generated through information collection. That information collection could come as the result of a job seeker showing interest in a position by completing an application, a shopper sharing contact information in exchange for a coupon, or a person filling out a form to download an educational piece of content.
Gauging a Lead’s Level of Interest
Below are just a few of the many ways in which you could qualify someone as a lead. Each of these examples shows that the amount of collected information used to qualify a lead, as well as their level of interest, can vary.
Let’s assess each scenario:
- Job Application: An individual that fills out an application form is willing to share a lot of personal information because he/she wants to be considered for a position. Filling out that application shows their true interest in the job, therefore qualifying the person as a lead for the company’s recruiting team — not marketing or sales teams.
- Coupon: Unlike the job application, you probably know very little about someone who has stumbled upon one of your online coupons. But if they find the coupon valuable enough, they may be willing to provide their name and email address in exchange for it. Although it’s not a lot of information, it’s enough for a business to know that someone has interest in their company.
- Content: While the download of a coupon shows an individual has a direct interest in your product or service, content (like an educational ebook or webinar) does not. Therefore, to truly understand the nature of the person’s interest in your business, you’ll probably need to collect more information to determine whether the person is interested in your product or service and whether they’re a good fit.
These three general examples highlight how lead generation differs from company to company, and from person to person. You’ll need to collect enough information to gauge whether someone has a true, valid interest in your product or service — how much information is enough information will vary depending on your business.
Let’s look at Episerver, for example. They use web content reports for lead generation, collecting six pieces of information from prospective leads.
Episerver provides a great example for what to ask for in a lead gen form:
- Full Name: The most fundamental information needed to personalize your communication with each lead.
- Email: This serves as a unique identifier and is how you will contact your lead.
- Company: This will give you the ability to research your lead’s industry and company and how the lead might benefit from your product or service (mainly for B2B).
- Role: Understanding an individual’s role will help you understand how to communicate with them. Every brand stakeholder will have a different take and perspective on your offering (mainly for B2B).
- Country: Location information can help you segment your contact by region and time zone, and help you qualify the lead depending on your service.
- State: The more detailed information you can obtain without sacrificing conversions, the better. Knowing your leads state can help you further qualify them.
If you’d like to learn more intermediate-level tips on information collection and what you should ask for on your lead gen forms, read our post about it here.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a way to qualify leads quantitatively. Using this technique, leads are assigned a numerical value (or score) to determine where they fall on the scale from “interested” to “ready for a sale”. The criteria for these actions is completely up to you, but it must be uniform across your marketing and sales department so that everyone is working on the same scale. https://www.youtube.com/embed/8S6yoZyzEzk
A lead’s score can be based on actions they’ve taken, information they’ve provided, their level of engagement with your brand, or other criteria that your sales team determines. For instance, you may score someone higher if they regularly engage with you on social media or if their demographic information matches your target audience.
Borrowing from the examples above, you might give a lead a higher score if they used one of your coupons — an action that would signify this person is interested in your product.
The higher a lead’s score, the closer they are to becoming a sales-qualified lead (SQL), which is only a step away from becoming a customer. The score and criteria is something you may need to tweak along the way until you find the formula that works, but once you do, you’ll transform your lead generation into customer generation.
Lead Generation Strategies
Online lead generation encompasses a wide range of tactics, campaigns, and strategies depending on the platform on which you wish to capture leads. We talked about lead capture best practices once you have a visitor on your site … but how can you get them there in the first place?
Let’s dive into lead generation strategies for a few popular platforms.
Facebook Lead Generation
Facebook has been a method for lead generation since its inception. Originally, companies could use outbound links in their posts and information in their bios to attract strangers to their websites. However, when Facebook Ads was launched in 2007, and its algorithm began to favor accounts that used paid advertising, there was a major shift in how businesses used the platform to capture leads. Facebook created Lead Ads for this purpose. Facebook also has a feature that lets you put a simple call-to-action button at the top of your Facebook Page, helping you send Facebook followers directly to your website.
Get some lead generation tips for Facebook.
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Twitter Lead Generation
Twitter has Twitter Lead Gen Cards, which let you generate leads directly within a tweet without having to leave the site. A user’s name, email address, and Twitter username are automatically pulled into the card, and all they have to do is click “Submit” to become a lead. (Hint for HubSpot users: You can connect Twitter Lead Gen Cards to your HubSpot Forms. Learn how to do that here).
Learn some lead generation tips for Twitter.
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LinkedIn Lead Generation
LinkedIn has been increasing its stake in the advertising space since its early days. When it comes to lead generation, LinkedIn created Lead Gen Forms, which auto-populate with a users profile data when they click a CTA, making it easy to capture information.
Get tips from our experience using LinkedIn ads.
PPC Lead Generation
When we say pay-per-click (PPC), we’re referring to ads on search engine result pages (SERPs). Google gets 3.5 billion searches a day, making it prime real estate for any ad campaign, especially lead gen. The effectiveness of your PPC campaign relies heavily on a seamless user flow, as well as your budget, target keywords, and a few other factors.
Learn more about how to setup successful PPC ads.
B2B Lead Generation
B2B is a particular business model that requires a particular approach to lead generation.SmartInsights found that referrals are the top source for capturing business leads. Not to mention, effectiveness varies by channel.
What kind of lead generation tools are we looking at in this article?
Modern businesses need to generate leads from more channels than ever, which means there’s a plethora of tools in different categories – e.g.: inbound, outbound, email marketing, etc. Which is why I’m breaking this article down into the following categories:
- On-page lead generation tools: To help you capture leads on your website.
- Inbound lead generation tools: To help you bring more leads to your website and other channels.
- Outbound lead generation tools: To help you identify leads and send messages via outbound channels (email, calls, etc.)
- CRO tools to maximise leads: So you can increase the percentage of users who convert into more valuable leads.
- Email marketing tools: To help you generate and nurture leads along the customer journey.
- Search marketing tools: To increase traffic from organic and paid search and generate more on-site leads.
- Marketing management tools: To measure performance, maximise lead generation and improve the quality of leads.
In each of these categories, I’ll be recommending the best lead generation tools we’ve used over the years and explaining why they’re worth trying out. All of the tools in this list have helped us scale our own lead generation strategy and, while none of them are perfect, they can all make things happen if you know how to use them.
Conclusion
Many people wonder how lead generation platforms work, especially if they’re unfamiliar with the practice. In simple terms, a lead generation platform refers to any software that enables you to generate leads and engage them in an automated fashion. These platforms are particularly useful for B2B companies, which need to create a steady flow of new leads in order to keep their sales pipeline active. The teams behind lead generation platforms understand that generating leads is not the same thing as closing them. That’s why they offer a wide range of features, depending on your needs and the goals you have set for your business.
Everybody is familiar with lead generation companies, also referred to as LEAD generation companies. They are in many forms like print ads or direct mailers or even on the internet who present you with a product, service or concept and ask you for a response. A response might be to fill out a contact form or to give them your email address so that your name can be added to a list for future use by another business.