How Does Lead Generation Work

Lead generation is a continuous process. It can be initiated by the fresh lead or its already established one. It means that users can generate leads by performing several actions on your website by themselves or with the help of other resources. There are a number of ways to make the conversion more effective, among which you can notice various forms of inbound marketing and online advertising, professional communication tools (chatbots, for instance) and lead generation apps that have become extremely popular recently.

A lead generation campaign is designed to generate leads, and it can do so in many ways. In fact, there are thousands of different strategies a business could use to get new customers. Even though there are numerous ways to generate leads, a business typically doesn’t need more than five or six different strategies. There are also four common lead generation types — inbound, outbound, referral and cold calling. Each type of lead generation has its own strengths and weaknesses that make it better for certain kinds of businesses.

One of the most common types of business-to-business marketing is lead generation. Companies have been using lead generation as a way to attract and generate new clients for quite some time now. This can be done through different strategies and methods, with the main goal being to help establish stronger relationships between your company and its leads. By identifying the right lead generation tools, you can easily optimize your success while helping boost your production levels.

Lead generation as a sales process has changed drastically over the years. It’s now common for multiple marketing/sales channels to be used to create/capture leads. The most popular channels for lead generation include telephone, direct e-mail, PPC and display advertising.

What is lead generation?

This simple definition will help you understand how lead generation works: Lead generation is the process of creating interest for your business and its products or services through the use of various strategies and techniques. There are many activities that can be performed to achieve lead generation. Essentially, it involves generating leads from certain sources so that a business can qualify and convert them into actual customers. Unlike other types of promotional services, such as direct mail advertising, it does not always involve direct selling.

Lead generation (also referred to colloquially as lead-gen) is the process of driving and capturing interest in a product or service with the purpose of driving sales. A lead by itself is a potential client who is qualified and interested in your product or service and is what we call sales ready, that is ready to start being sold into a product or service. Overall lead generation activities can be classed into two distinct groups, inbound and outbound.

Inbound

Generating inbound leads involves creating a range of information, assets, and incentives that prospects can follow towards a company, product or service. For example, this page you’re currently on would be classed as an inbound lead generation technique, the page uses detailed information around our service to draw in prospects (you) through Google search.

Outbound

The generation of outbound leads is all about directly contacting your target prospect group with a message promoting your company, service, or product through various channels. For example, direct email campaigns target and reach highly curated prospects with a custom message about a service or product.

Inbound vs Outbound

Inbound is a very tried and tested way of generating leads for your business but in recent years the results of this type of inbound activity have been diminishing whilst costs increase. With inbound there’s no extensive way to really qualify who is clicking your advert, content, or asset until they become a qualified lead.

This creates massive problems as the lead may not be right for the product or service, they may not have the necessary budget and they may not even be that interested so your sales team loses time on leads that will never close.

Outbound lead generation is the opposite of this when done well. It’s pinpoint in targeting and qualifying prospects before and after contact, ensuring your sales funnel is filled with highly closable prospects, the only problem is the data collection required to do great and personalised outbound activities is significant.

Overall lead generation is typically pursued across both inbound and outbound channels for most successful campaigns.

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.