I strongly believe in the saying that you will learn faster when you write what you learned. This post helped me to understand and remember in a better way.
It is a simplified version for all the digital marketers who want to learn everything and anything about Lead Generation.
You need leads if you want to have a sales call.
You need leads if you want people to invite for your webinar.
You need leads if you want to promote your service or product.
Prospects -> Leads ->Customers. You are out of business if you don’t have leads. Similarly, Sales -> Transactions -> Profits.
There is no doubt that the content is the fuel to the lead generation efforts.
But it is critical to understand the various techniques around lead generation.
This will help in curating content to the target audience.
Trust building is an important part of sales. Without trust, sales cannot happen. In an offline sales model, trust is usually built via personal relationships.
If you understand the principles, you will be able to come up with your own strategies and tactics.
You will learn about how to generate leads for your business, your partners, or your clients.
So, Let’s get started.
Put your seat belts as we are going to have a phenomenal ride learning about Lead Generation.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead is connecting link between you (your business) and your prospect. It is called a lead because it leads to sales.
Lead is usually Name, Email Id, and Phone Number.
Email Id / Phone Number is very critical out of these three elements.
Don’t focus on your social media followers. They are not leads. They are just users of the platform.
What is Lead Magnet?
Anything which you are trying to provide free, or sell is called a Lead Magnet.
It can be free courses, downloads, digital products, newsletter subscriptions, and so on.
Some examples of Lead Magnets:
- Ebook
- Mini-course
- Trial of a course
- Trial of a software product
- Checklist or cheatsheet
- Template
- A form to get people to express interest in a product or service
- Request for a test ride of a car
- Request for a site visit of a real estate property
- Request for a free demo of a product
- Book a consultation call
- Membership to a community
- Report generator
- Resume generator
- Calculators
- Spreadsheets
- Mindmaps
- Register for webinars
- Recording of a webinar
- Slidedeck
- Quiz
- Survey
- Coupons
- Case studies
- Waiting list
- Applications (Internship, Jobs, or Memberships)
How to select the lead magnets?
It all depends on your niche. A niche is not something you can select overnight.
It takes a lot of thought and some practice to find out what you like and what you are good at.
It takes time and introspection. Let’s understand the Blueprint for choosing your niche.
Why Lead magnet is important?
People are really picky when it comes to sharing their contact details.
It is because they know that continuous messages will start pouring in their inbox once they do.
In spite of this, Contact details are the backbone of your lead generation campaign and in turn for sales to happen.
a. How can you overcome this challenge and get their details? So that you can start a communication line with them, nurture, educate?
Then persuade them to become your customer eventually.
b. You need to step out of your marketing shoes and step into their customer shoes?
c. If your audience feels what they get from the lead magnet is good enough to risk sharing their details, you’ll get the leads.
How to decide “What to offer as Lead Magnet”?
When you sit down to answer the “what to offer” question, answer the following questions.
It will make people drool over and instantly share their details.
- What’s the problem your audience facing right now?
- How solving the problem can help your audience?
- Why should your audience care about the problem and the solution?
- What’s the smallest action or information that can help your audience immediately?
- How can you solve it with your content or lead magnet?
- Why should he listen to you?
What are Lead Pages?
Usually, you collect the lead details by asking the audience to fill out the form.
Most of the time it is advised to keep your lead pages separate from your blog post.
Use tools like Convertkit, Mailchimp for creating lead landing pages.
For example, a sample Lead page helps you to understand how the form is designed.
Lead Generation for B2C & B2B
Lead Generation for B2C
For B2C (Business to consumer) products that are low priced, say, Candy, Soap, Pen, Cookies, you don’t need leads.
You only need advertising for brand awareness, not marketing. All FMCG products do not need lead generation.
Imagine the last time you ordered something from Amazon. You just ordered it. You don’t want to talk to someone while deciding to buy.
Let’s talk about high-end B2C products like houses, cars, etc.
If you are interested in buying a home, you will look at an ad and will call the number on that ad. Or fill out a form with their contact information. This contact information becomes a lead for the seller.
Lead Generation for B2B
Absolutely you need Lead generation for B2B products.
The products are high priced and potential customers are low. Imagine, Wipro serving HDFC Bank.
Let’s take the example of Wipro having to sell its software development services to HDFC.
They will not be generating leads online nor will they advertise their services. They will get in contact with the right decision-makers.
What is Lead Profiling and Scoring
Why it is important? It’s like mining for diamonds. Imagine, when people fill the lead generation form answering about their interests say while buying a car.
- What car do you currently own?
- When are you planning to purchase the new car?
- Will you be buying it as an individual or as a company?
- When do you want to request a test ride?
- Do you need financing for the car, or will you pay the full amount upfront?
Imagine the salesperson calling each one for the test drive. Practically, it is not feasible right.
So this form helps him to differentiate the highly qualified buyers from the unqualified ones.
Many car enthusiasts who don’t have the money to buy cars would still request a test ride.
The information filled in the form will help the salesperson to prioritize the leads. That’s why lead profiling and scoring become important.
What is called Lead Generation funnels?
Say, you are generating 1000 leads in a day and you have 10 salespersons.
Each salesperson can call only 10 leads in a day. That means 100 leads in a day.
To filter the qualified first 100 leads from 1000 leads, you need a lead generation funnel to repeat the process to find the potential customer.
When you are generating leads via digital marketing, a good mix of untargeted and uninterested leads will come into your system.
To create a lead generation funnel, you need a lead magnet.
The lead magnet is the first part of the entire funnel.
Without a lead magnet, you will not be able to generate a lot of leads through inbound marketing.
Let’s understand the importance of the Lead generation funnel in a better way.
Firstly, as the price of the product increases, so does the marketing effort.
Secondly, when the price and complexity of the product increases, so does the lead generation effort.
You don’t need leads if indeed the price is low, so you don’t need lead generation funnels.
When the product’s price is really high, every lead you contact will be a very high-quality focused lead, and you won’t need a funnel.
We need a lead generation funnel when we are somewhere in the middle of the chart.
Outbound vs Inbound Marketing
Outbound marketing is proactively reaching out to customers to get them interested in the product.
By contrast, inbound marketing is creating and distributing content that draws people to your website.
Let’s take an online course which you are offering.
If you send an automated sequence of emails, it builds trust over a period of time. But without sales, the funnel is not going to sustain itself. Sales are the power source of the funnel.
The highly interesting lead will open all your emails and read through all the lessons. The less interested lead will hardly open any emails.
If you give 1 point for every email open and 3 points for every click inside the email, then you can find out who are the highly interested leads and who is not so warmed up to your offer.
Eventually, you would end up calling the highly interested leads and engaging them in a sales process.
Traffic sources for Lead generation
So we talked about lead, lead magnet, lead profiling, and scoring. What are the different ways to generate traffic?
Organic Search Traffic – Via search engines
i. The problem with organic traffic is that your landing page will not get ranked easily in the search engines.
ii. Landing pages convert better with 20-30% of the visitors converting into leads. This will be possible if f you drive traffic to your website by valuable SEO content.
iii. To drive traffic, you need to have good content, backlinks, and good on-page SEO.
Paid Traffic
i. Paid ads like Display ads, FB, and Google ads will help you to generate traffic to your lead pages.
ii. The only disadvantage is obviously, you must pay for it. And more chances if the right keywords are not bid for the ad.
iii. But if you get ROI from the traffic, you can scale it fast which is the biggest advantage.
iv. Paid search ads can scale fast. You can go from 1,000 visitors a day to 10,000 visitors a day overnight. You just need to increase your ad budget.
Referral / Affiliate Traffic
i. Alternately you can use Affiliate traffic. You can give a percentage commission on your sales to your affiliates and referrals and let them promote your products.
ii. You can create a referral campaign and get people to refer others to unlock offers. It is similar to affiliate campaigns but there is no monetary commission involved in this.
Which traffic source is better?
You should not be dependent on a single traffic source for your business.
a. Display ads are text and banner ads that you see on other websites.
Many of the display ads are controlled by the Google network itself (but they are not the only type of display ads).
b. Google AdSense program is not recommended for landing pages. This method of monetizing your traffic is difficult because the earnings per visitor will be quite low.
The Lead Generation Success Formula
Let’s understand the secret success formula for Lead generation.
(nCATT) – Wealth = n ^CATT n is your niche.
Whatever your niche is the CATT framework will help you multiply the power of your niche.
Let’s say your niche is lead generation.
Let’s look at how your niche is multiplied by the power of CATT.
- Content: You have first developed the content (this 100-day Lead Generation Course).
- Attention: You are driving high traffic to the landing page that sells this paid newsletter. You are driving attention. Without attention, you cannot get people to consume your content.
- Trust: You are giving value to the people who have subscribed to your paid newsletter. You are developing trust with your audience (that’s you).
- Transaction: Once you have developed enough trust with your audience, you will convert this into a transaction.
Conclusion
Right from understanding lead generation, we have learned a lot in this post. Lead Generation is critical to any business.
You should play the game carefully by moving the right magnets of visibility, interests, credibility, and trust. I’m sure you will eventually convert the leads to sales.
Stay tuned for more articles about Lead Generation here.