What is Lead Generation in Digital Marketing?

As a business, it is crucial that Lead Generation be at the forefront of any digital marketing campaign you undertake and that you understand what lead generation is in terms of digital marketing.

The digital era has transformed the way we do business. Gone are the days where promoting your business means taking out a newspaper advertisement or launching a flyer campaign and knocking door to door.

These days, you are able to focus on your target audience and research their habits using various analytics software(s).

A bit like using an x-ray machine on your data. You can choose who to hit, when and how – and execute campaigns with extreme precision.

This allows you to reverse engineer your campaigns with your starting point being the end goal, the user.

Businesses must keep up and continually adapt to develop their digital marketing strategies.

Social media and search engine marketing are synonymous with lead generation.

Both play a huge and vital role in getting brands noticed and heard, and set the stage for most marketing campaigns you see online today.

What Is A Lead?

A ‘lead’ is usually someone who has shown interest in your company.

Potential customers are given opportunities to reach out to your business via email, phone calls, or social media channels to open up a communication with your business.

One way customers can get more information on your business is by signing up for a trial or offer that you are running, or could call to ask about it.

Direct response lead generation is a far cry from the old fashioned and predictable cold-calling methods that have fallen out of favor.

Let’s say you complete a survey for a brand that you’re passionate about, and in return they give you a promotional voucher for shops in your area.

In exchange for the discounted offers, however, they ask for your contact information—likely because they want to stay connected with you or perhaps sell their products to you.

In return for that promotional voucher, you’ve exchange your information with the company and given them an opportunity to sell their product to you.

Now they’ve got you a little warmed up to make for a better first conversation.

From the company’s viewpoint, the information you provide in exchange for your promotional voucher is collected and helps to inform more personalised and meaningful marketing communications with you as the potential customer moving forward.

This helps the company to limit wastage so they’re not spending much time on prospects that aren’t interested in your services.

Why Do You Need Leads?

The reason businesses need leads is because they allow you to refine and establish an understanding about who your potential customers are, what their needs and interests are, when they’re most receptive to hearing from you, and how best to reach out to them.

Lead Generation creates opportunities for businesses to attract qualified prospects with established interest in their products/services.

This allows marketers to effectively engage with people looking for more information on specific topics or have expressed explicit interest in buying a product/service like yours at some point in the future.

The Two Main Areas Of Focus For Lead Generation

B2B Lead Generation

B2B Lead Generation is an integral part of the sales process. It’s also known as Business-To-Business Lead Generation, which is defined as activities that bring in new leads (prospects) into your sales funnel that are potential buyers of your products or services.

B2B Lead Generation helps improve lead quality and quantity by helping you identify who’s looking to change suppliers, buy additional products, subscribe to a trial, etc.

B2C Lead Generation

B2C Lead Generation is the process of marketing to consumers. What businesses need for B2C Lead Generation is large volumes of high-quality leads across various channels (like search, social media, and referrals) that fit certain criteria or provide specific details.

The more leads you get, the faster you can act on them; this allows marketers to constantly move prospects through their sales funnel at a faster rate.

Businesses can achieve this through Lead Generation, which is often done via inbound marketing and then nurtured via automated lead nurturing and engagement tools.

Using Digital Marketing For Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing involves creating a more personalised experience for your leads as they move along the funnel. It shouldn’t be limited to just getting them to convert into a sale.

This can be done through blogging with a view to establishing yourself as an expert in your field, or by using social media marketing to maintain engagement

The power of digital is that it allows you to track customers’ behaviour. You can then use the data you collect to define your customers needs and target them better.

Digital tools also enable marketers to analyse their customers’ interactions, allowing them to gain a better understanding about their needs and interests.

It’s all about customer engagement. What you want your prospects to do is take the next step, which in turn makes it easier for you to convert them into actual sales.

What Are The Different Types of Leads?

Not all leads are equal. There are different types of leads that manifest themselves differently throughout your business, so its best to have a strategy for each type.

Marketing Qualified Leads

Marketing qualified leads are those contacts that have engaged with your marketing assets but aren’t quite ready to get on the phone for a sales call with you just yet.

A good example of a Marketing Qualified Lead is a contact who has filled out a form on your landing page to claim an offer, like 10% off or a 30 day free trial.

Sales Qualified Leads

Sales qualified leads are the contacts that have taken action.

This means the users who have indicated a firmer interest in becoming a paying customer to your business.

An example of a Sales Qualified Lead would be a contact that has filled out a form on your website to ask a specific question about your product(s) and/or service(s).

Service Qualified Leads

Service qualified leads can be categorised as the contacts or customers who have expressed an interest in becoming a paying customer to your customer service team.

A good example of this would be a prospect who tells your customer service department that they’d like to upgrade their current subscription with you.

In this moment, the customer service representative would connect this customer to the appropriate account manager or sales team representative.

Product Qualified Leads

Product Qualified Leads are the contacts who have physically used your product(s) and taken actions that show you a strong level of interest in becoming a paying customer.

These types of leads can be easily accessed by companies offering an experiential or digital product trial, such as a 14 day free trial of your software or a 10 day VIP pass to your discounts area on your website.

An example of a Product Qualified Lead could be a customer who uses the free version of your product but has frequently been asking about the features that are only available upon payment.

The Aims of Lead Generation in Digital Marketing

Lead Generation can be broken down into basic sets of marketing activities that correspond with the customer’s buying journey, with the aim to;

• Generate traffic to the business’s website
• Covert those website visitors into leads
• Convert the leads into customers.

You can generate leads from your digital marketing in many ways.

This might be through contact forms, someone seeing your logo, hearing you’ve done good business via referral feedback and social media mentions, or subscribing to your newsletter.

Different Types of Lead Generation Marketing

To get traffic and generate leads, you can use various channels to promote your landing page(s).

Lead generation marketing is the front-end of this process.

Let’s go into detail about this factors and also touch on a few other considerations.

Writing Content

Including CTAs in your content is a great way to lead users toward your landing page.

Typically, you create content that provides visitors with useful free information and include CTAs throughout the article.

Maximize your audience’s delight with your content to improve their likelihood of clicking on your call-to-action and moving onto the next part of your landing page.

Email Marketing

You can use email campaigns to contact your known contacts and offer them something of interest.

Sending email campaigns is a good way to contact people who already know you and are interested in what you have to offer.

You’ll want to use calls-to-action that hook your audience, so consider using compelling copy and eye-catching designs on your CTA buttons.

Paid Ads / Remarketing

The sole purpose of an ad is to get a desired action from the viewers.

The landing page and offer on the site must match what is advertised in the video, and it’s important that users know exactly what needs to be done.

Marketers often spend a ton of money on an ad and then forget to account for what happens next.

Ad copy is only useful if people actually take the desired action.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms offer a variety of options for marketers looking to guide customers to take action.

You have the choice between promoting your products through social shares and including a call-to-action in your posts, as well as by creating links that can be clicked on from either an Instagram story or a Facebook biography.

These are just some of the features available.

Social media platforms make it easy to guide followers to take action, which is why you should promote your offerings on social posts.

Here are some of the ways that can happen:

• in Instagram stories when a user swipes up
• in Facebook bios when using Bitly links
• or mentioning it upfront in Twitter captions by stating “follow us for deals.”

Why is Lead Generation in Digital Marketing So Important?

To grow your business, you’ll need customers. Customers come from marketing and advertising.

This occurs through the use of digital ads or word-of-mouth on social media.

Once a lead has been generated, it is usually passed to the sales team for them to nurture the relationship and hopefully convert it into a buying customer.

This can be done in many ways, though it’s best to have a robust and reliable system in place so that you can properly monitor things and see what works best in your sales funnel.

By using the latest developments in technology to identify trends and analyse customer habits, it is now feasible to reach a wider audience through social media advertising.

It has never been easier for businesses to target their potential customers with social media advertisement because of changes in data analysis software.

How Can You Get Started with Lead Generation for Your Business?

We don’t want you to miss out on anything, so here’s a quick checklist highlighting several ways you can get started today:

• Basic local SEO.
• Claim your free Google My Business directory listing and optimise it.
• Publish content frequently on your website/blog.
• Guest post on relevant websites to your industry.
• Get active on social media.
• Run paid search ads.
• Run social media ads.
• Run native advertising.
• Build a referral network.

Much has changed in the world of marketing over time.

Customers that come to a company’s website with access to a wealth of information on the internet know more than they did before.

Customers are more educated than they were in the past.

Now that you can find information about a company with the click of a button, customers are smarter and have plenty of competition for their money.

Frequent Content Is a Must

One of the best ways to generate leads with digital marketing is by consistently posting quality content.

It’s important to post content frequently to your website and social media channels, if you want potential customers or buyers to be able to engage with what you’re about.

Since people buy from people, it is important to start communicating your USP as early as possible.

What is the problem your product or service solves? How do you provide value?

And more importantly – how do you make that clear over the internet using words and visuals?

This gives a chance to demonstrate your abilities and expertise in this field.

To get the most from your social media, blog, and newsletters, start tracking who engages with your content.

From there, you can determine what topics people are interested in and more successfully connect with them online.

Organic Lead Generation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the best methods for promotion because it is an organic strategy that provides long-term benefits.

The more content you post, the higher your ranking will be in search engine results.

B2B marketers should be looking for different Leads Sources in order to be successful.

The top resource for capturing business leads is SEO, followed closely by email marketing and social media.

Having The Right Tools

Have your lead generation efforts stopped working? It might be time for new software or upgrades to an old one.

We have seen many companies like yours, and we know what it takes to improve a campaign’s success rate.

The process of capturing customer information is just as important as driving traffic to a website or social media page.

In this modern time, there are hundreds of lead generation tools to choose from.

Some of them are better built than others and no longer provide the same ROI as they once did historically due to overused strategies and a lack in innovation.

In one of our latest articles, we cover the best tools for establishing web-based lead generation, with you choosing what is right for your own company. Using these tools will allow you to generate more leads and make more sales in a shorter amount of time.

Read 30 Best Lead Generation Tools to Increase Lead Quality 

Conclusion

So, what is lead generation in digital marketing?

When you consider that more than half of your marketing budget should go towards Lead Generation, the most effective strategy is to have a good plan and make sure there are excellent returns.

Rather than using lead generation as a one-time tactic, approach it as part of your core business to create more customer-friendly experiences from the beginning.

Keeping up with all of the latest trends in lead generation can be a challenge, but it will help you advance your business and career.

Reach out to us anytime – if there’s something you’d like to discuss, we’re always here.