A lead-generation campaign is an online advertising campaign that drives traffic to your website and delivers signups with associates who are eager to hear from you. Amazon Advertising will work with you on a set budget to build and launch a campaign that meets your marketing goals.
For the previous 2-3 years, we’ve been focusing on B2C advertising and lead generation campaigns. And it’s time to focus on B2B lead generation. Key Takeaways: Lead generation campaigns are all about scale and impressions. Understand, how online lead generation campaigns work. There are three fundamental steps to creating a lead generation campaign: Targeting, creative, and analytics. Measure your engagement rate by device type & lookalike audiences.
The surge in the popularity of social media and digital marketing has helped many businesses gain more exposure to their targeted audience. Social media has also helped businesses build trust among their target audience, as well as develop stronger relationships with these customers. Social media can be a great opportunity for promoting a brand’s products and services, but it can be easier said than done, especially if you have no knowledge of how the field works. One of the most time-consuming tasks in business is generating leads.
In addition to being time consuming, generating leads can also be frustrating for many business owners who find it difficult to manage numerous lead generation campaigns. A lot of marketers spend too much money on purchasing the wrong traffic sources and channels, which do not convert into sales or leads. It is important that you choose a right way to generate B2B marketing leads with minimal efforts and maximum return on investment (ROI).
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.
Basic Terms of a Lead Generation Campaign
Lead: A prospect that has some level of potential in becoming a client. The individual usually shows interests and provides his/her information to your firm.
Qualified Lead: A prospect that meets all of your firm’s qualifications and criteria necessary to be considered more likely to become a client.
Lead Generation: The initiation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a your firm.
Lead Generation Campaign: The process of capturing and simulating interest in a service or product for the purpose of developing leads. This includes a strategy using a particular media source and an offer to create inbound leads.
Nurturing: Some leads qualify early on, while others may take more time. Many of your leads will need some nurturing through frequent communication until they are ready to be contacted by someone from your business development team.
Hard Offer: This is typically an offer for a service or product that usually requires the prospect to act immediately. Often times these offers are limited to a few people or may have an expiration date.
Soft Offer: This type of offer usually doesn’t require an immediate response. An example of a soft offer is an email newsletter subscription.
Lead Capture: The use of marketing automation systems, allowing marketers to gather contact information from web forms, landing pages and email campaigns.
Landing Pages: A page that a visitor can land at or arrive on in response to clicking on a link or offer.
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.
What is lead generation?
Lead generation is the process of attracting prospects to your business and increasing their interest through nurturing, all with the end goal of converting them into a customer. Some ways to generate leads are through job applications, blog posts, coupons, live events, and online content.
These lead generators are just a few examples of lead generation strategies you can use to attract potential customers and guide them towards your offers. (We talk about more strategies later.)
Whenever someone outside the marketing world asks me what I do, I can’t simply say, “I create content for lead generation.” It’d be totally lost on them, and I’d get some really confused looks.
So instead, I say, “I work on finding unique ways to attract people to my business. I want to provide them with enough goodies to get them naturally interested in my company so they eventually warm up to the brand enough to want to hear from us!”
That usually resonates better, and that’s exactly what lead generation is: It’s a way of warming up potential customers to your business and getting them on the path to eventually making a purchase.
Why do you need lead generation?
When a stranger initiates a relationship with you by showing an organic interest in your business, the transition from stranger to customer is much more natural.
Lead generation falls within the second stage of the inbound marketing methodology. It occurs after you’ve attracted an audience and are ready to convert those visitors into leads for your sales team (namely sales-qualified leads).
As you can see in the diagram below, generating leads is a fundamental point in an individual’s journey to becoming a delighted customer.
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.
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.
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.
Conclusion
Lead generation advertising campaigns are a way to grow your business and reach out to more leads. Businesses that know how to properly run a lead generation campaign can increase their bottom line.
One of the most effective lead generation advertising ideas presents an excellent opportunity to increase your sales. Lead generation advertising campaigns offer many benefits for both online and offline businesses, as well as for the marketing team. The main idea of these campaigns is to promote a product or service to a target audience and generate leads with which the company can pursue some further commercial activities.