Imagine you’re running a small bakery, and while your cakes are delicious, foot traffic alone isn’t filling your order book. That’s when you decide to generate leads for your business online. You offer a free recipe guide in exchange for email sign-ups, and suddenly, you’re flooded with potential customers eager to learn more about your cakes.
With each new contact, your business grows beyond the local community, turning leads into loyal, paying customers. This is the power of lead generation—opening doors to new opportunities, no matter the size of your business!
Accelerate Your Lead Generation
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports reveal a concerning trend. Roughly 20% of startups fail within the first two years. This number rises to 45% by the five-year mark.
That is a staggering rate of failure. Now a business can fail for any number of reasons, but the most important is faltering sales. On the other hand, healthy businesses are always generating leads, and converting a percentage of the leads to sales.
In fact, lead generation is so important that:
- 91% of marketers identify it as their most crucial objective.
- 53% of marketers dedicate at least half their marketing budget to lead generation.
This guide dives deep into marketing strategies that can help generate leads for your business. We shall touch upon every aspect of lead generation.
We shall cover:
What is a lead?
A lead is a potential customer who has shown some interest in your company’s product or service. They may in the future become a prospect or a paying customer.
A lead must have shown interest by sharing their information, like an email address or phone number. This could happen in various ways. They could have downloaded a whitepaper or signed up for a free trial and in the process handed over their phone number.
Leads are the starting point in a sales funnel. They require nurturing to convert them into paying customers.
How to qualify a lead?
Several criteria are in play to decide who can qualify as a lead. These criteria help determine the likelihood of a lead becoming a paying customer.
Here is how to qualify a lead:
Fit
The lead should be a good fit for your product or service. This means their demographics, interests, and needs should match what your business offers.
It’s no use marketing a new VR headset to a grandmother of four aged 66.
That does not mean that no middle-aged woman uses a VR headset, but that the possible leads will be young people between 18 and 30 who are willing to experiment with the latest technology.
Interest
Plain curiosity does not create a lead. Someone browsing through your website is not a lead. In fact, every day your site might draw in hundreds of visitors from across North America. But unless they sign up for a free trial or download a brochure (in short, complete some action) they are not a lead.
Budget
Only someone who has the power to buy a service is a lead. Someone who is plain curious or doing research about a product for writing an article is not a lead. A college student visiting a Ferrari showroom is probably not a lead – at least not today. But it is possible to sell him one at some point in the future. Asking him to become a Ferrari Instagram follower is a worthwhile idea.
Source Ferrari Instagram
Authority
This matters more in B2B sales. It’s important to identify leads who have the authority to make purchasing decisions. This involves asking about their role and involvement in the decision-making process. Someone with the title of senior manager or VP, CxO and other similar designations are better suited.
Types of leads
There are several types of leads based on their level of engagement and readiness to buy.
Here are the common types:
By Level of Interest
- Cold Leads: These are people who have had little to no prior contact with your business. Cold leads require more convincing to move them down the sales funnel.
- Warm Leads: Warm leads have shown some level of interest. In our example, it is signing up for a free trial. They are more likely to be receptive to sales outreach.
- Hot Leads: Hot leads are at the bottom of the sales funnel and considered sales-ready. They have a clear need for your product or service. These leads are passed on to the sales team for immediate follow-up.
By Qualification for Sales
- Information Qualified Leads (IQL): These leads have simply expressed some initial interest, like downloading a brochure. Beyond their phone number or email address they have not shared further information.
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): MQLs have taken action that indicates they are seriously considering a purchase. This could involve things like requesting a demo. MQLs are good candidates for nurturing by the marketing team before being passed on to sales.
- Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): SQLs meet the criteria set by the sales team to be sales-ready. They have a defined need, budget, and authority to make a purchase decision. These leads are handed off to the sales team for immediate attention.
What is the lead generation process?
By now, you understand what leads are and how they are qualified as leads.
Let’s now understand how to generate leads for your business.
These are the usual steps businesses take to identify, attract, and convert leads. Of course, this process is not set in stone. Steps may be merged or entirely skipped over depending on the industry and specific case.
1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
It all starts with understanding who your perfect customer is.
The ICP should be a detailed description that considers various factors such as industry, company size, budget, etc. By having a clear ICP, you can tailor your lead generation efforts to resonate with the most promising audience.
Take the case of Harley Davidson, the legendary motorcycle manufacturer from Wisconsin. The marketing team at Harley-Davidson wants to reach out to customers who are:
- Middle to upper-middle class men and women
- People passionate about motorcycling
- Riders who view riding as a lifestyle rather than a mode of transportation.
- Mature riders aged 40 to 60 but can also be a millennial.
- Individuals who identify with the non-conformist image of Harley Davidson.
2. Choose Your Lead Generation Channels
With a clear ICP in mind, identify the channels where your ideal customers spend their time.
There can be a mix of many different channels, both online and offline, such as:
- Content marketing (blogs, articles, white papers)
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Social media marketing
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Email marketing
- Trade shows and events
- Webinars
3. Create Compelling Content
You need to create high-quality content that captures your audience’s attention.
This content can come in various forms. The more popular formats are blog posts, infographics, e-books, or case studies.
It can also be in video format such as YouTube videos, and Instagram reels.
The type of content and the channel largely depend on the industry.
A plant-based hair detox shampoo is better marketed through Instagram while the latest data visualization software product is best presented to CEOs and CTOs at Data Expos and Data Science Conferences.
4. Capture Leads with Attractive Offers
People won’t just hand over their contact information for free.
You need to provide them with something valuable in exchange. It can be a downloadable guide or access to exclusive content.
This is where landing pages and lead capture forms come into play.
5. Nurture Your Leads
Not all leads are ready to buy immediately. Marketing automation tools can help you nurture your leads with targeted email campaigns, personalized content, and more.
This helps build trust, keep your brand top-of-mind, and move them further down the sales funnel.
6. Qualify Your Leads
As we have explained before, not every lead is the same.
You’ll need a system to assess which leads are most likely to convert into sales. This might involve lead scoring based on their behavior and the information they provide.
The marketing team can then prioritize nurturing efforts toward Marketing Qualified Leads or MQLs.
7. Handoff to Sales
Once a lead becomes a Sales Qualified Lead, they are passed on to the sales team for personalized outreach.
The sales team can then connect with them to understand their specific needs and close the deal.
8. Analyze and Refine
The lead generation process is never truly over. You have to learn from every conversion. Each conversion that went right also means a few that went the other way.
What could have been done better? It’s crucial to track your results, find which tactics are working best, and refine your approach.
How to generate leads?
Trying to generate leads for your business can often feel like a game of chance. It seems there is no control and the outcome is always less than what you wished for.
But lead generation does not have to be a daunting task. There are established strategies that will help you garner more than what you previously thought possible.
Here are the best lead generation strategies for your business:
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing is a vital element of many successful lead generation strategies.
It’s essentially a way of attracting and engaging your target audience by creating and sharing valuable, relevant content.
Here is how Hubspot has ranked the best social media channels on its site. Not surprisingly Facebook and Instagram are at the top because of their sway over the B2C market.
The focus is on providing information and education. The content must not push for a sale.
Klorane, which manufactures and sells plant-based shampoos, has a blog on its site dedicated to beauty and wellness.
There are articles such as:
- How to Make Hair Thicker
- Say Goodbye to Oily Hair & Scalp with this Breakthrough 2-in-1 Treatment
The aim of the blog post is to inform the audience and address their pain points rather than ask someone to buy a bottle of shampoo.
Source Klorane
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You have to optimize your website and content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords.
SEO will help potential customers find you organically and help generate leads for your business.
Usually, SEO includes the use of relevant keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and image alt text. Google and Bing also rank sites with a schema markup and sitemap higher.
You can use free tools such as SEOptimer to check what your site lacks and fix it.
We have analyzed the BMW USA site and surprisingly it did not do too well. But thanks to its fame it can do without a top notch SEO score. Not many brands can do the same.
Source SEOptimer
3. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a form of online marketing where you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
It’s a powerful tool for driving targeted traffic to your website and generating leads or sales.
PPC ads are displayed on various platforms.
These include:
- Search engines, such as Google Ads
- Social media platforms, like Facebook Ads
- Websites that offer advertising space for sale
You pay when someone clicks on your ad. There is no payment made for viewing of the ad.
The cost per click (CPC) amount can vary widely. It depends on the competitiveness of the keyword, the ad’s quality score, and other factors.
Here is a well executed Facebook PPC ad for a dog food store. Click and it leads to the landing page.
Source Wordstream
4. Email Marketing
Email marketing remains a powerful tool in the digital marketing landscape. It allows you to connect directly with your target audience and nurture leads.
The major factor in its favor is that it offers a very high ROI.
Unlike traditional marketing, email marketing allows you to segment your audience and send targeted messages. These can focus on groups of people based on their interests, demographics, or purchase history.
This increases the relevance of your emails and improves engagement rates.
This is a nicely crafted email from Grammarly seeking to convert free customers into paying ones. Short, and effective.
Source screenshot
Now, what you saw above is a decent email. But that’s not all. You can boost your conversions manifolds with the smart use of cutting-edge email marketing AI. Here’s an example. See how a simple AI intervention can change ordinary looking email designs to highly personalized and geared-for-conversion designs.
This AI-boost to your conversions is only one part of the email marketing magic you get when you partner with RetainIQ.
Here’s another example:
It’s surprising how many levers you can pull to make an email look like it was painstakingly put together for a contact on your email list. That’s how you boost conversions from mediocre single digits to industry benchmarks.
Don’t accept ordinary results from your email marketing. Book a demo with us and learn how we’ve boosted average revenues attributed to emails by 32% for 25+ brands.
5. Facebook Ads
When a platform has 2 billion monthly users, you know you can’t look away. Facebook Ads are an effective method of lead acquisition. The best part is that you can stretch every dollar you spend on Facebook Ads by making sure that:
- Your ads are shown to only the most relevant audience that match your ICP.
- You can find an ad format that suits your offer the best.
- You can use Facebook’s massive AI prowess to identify audiences that are hard to define in terms of traditional attributes like demographics.
No wonder, Facebook is both the most popular and the most effective social media channel for marketing.
Source Hubspot
Now, the best part. We can make it even better for you. Ask us exactly how we’ve been able to boost average Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for our clients by 37%. What matters even more is that we can make Facebook a never-drying spring of qualified leads for your business.
6. Lead Capture Forms
Lead capture forms are web forms placed strategically on your website’s landing pages.
They have input fields where visitors enter their contact information. The information usually includes name, email address, phone number, and even company name and job title.
Most sites offer some form of valuable content, like an e-book, webinar registration, or free trial, in exchange for the visitor’s information.
The information is collected and stored in your marketing database. Thereafter the lead can be nurtured with targeted email campaigns.
This is a lead capture form from Zoho CRM that offers a free trial in exchange of name and phone number.
7. Referral Programs
Referral programs encourage happy customers to spread the word about a business to their network.
The idea is to leverage a good relationship with existing customers to generate leads for your business.
Referral programs are a relatively inexpensive way to acquire new customers compared to traditional marketing methods.
Customers are given a unique referral code or link. They can share this code with their friends and family.
8. Direct Call
Direct engagement with a potential client involves reaching out directly. This is usually through phone calls and emails.
Getting phone numbers for potential clients requires an ethical approach. It’s important to be aware of the Do Not Call Registry and avoid violating consumer privacy.
Email is a far better and less intrusive option. It does not interrupt the prospect’s activities and is an excellent way to explain your value proposition through a few well-crafted paras.
These strategies can be adapted to create a comprehensive plan to generate leads for your business.
You don’t have to use all of these. Most businesses experiment with a few and stick to what works best for them.
It all depends on the industry, the size and scale of the business, and the product or service being offered for sale.
Amazon will not use the same strategy to reach its customers as a luxury brand such as LVMH.
Lead generation strategies – B2B and B2C compared
There are two principal types of sales models – B2B and B2C.
There are others such as C2C but they present a very different scenario and are not major models.
Let us first understand what B2B and B2C are, before diving into what lead generation strategies work best for them.
B2B stands for “business to business.” It refers to transactions between two businesses rather than between a business and end customers.
Take the case of Salesforce. It is a massive software company (market cap close to $240 billion) selling CRM solutions. Their two biggest clients are Amazon and Walmart. Others include IBM, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola.
An individual customer has no requirement of their products and all sales are made to businesses.
B2C is a “business to customer” model. It is almost any brand name you see around you – Nike, Coca-Cola, Ikea, and so on.
The corner mom-and-pop store is also a B2C business as are hotels, airlines, gas stations, and food products.
Of course, this vast difference in their nature also means they would use different ways to generate leads.
Source The Balance
B2B Lead Generation Strategies That Work
1. Publish more case studies
Focus on in-depth case studies that tell convincing stories. Don’t just list features but demonstrate how you solve specific problems.
There is a difference between “My product can do this” and “My product has already done this”. This nuance is often lost on CEOs who think spending resources to create case studies is a distraction and a waste of resources.
Also, quantify the impact on real businesses. Case studies can generate leads for your business quite effectively if customers know exactly what improvement they can expect.
2. Publish original research
Invest in original research that delves into industry trends and challenges.
This positions you as an authority and attracts leads looking for valuable insights.
Are you selling a data warehouse solution? Then how do you feel about data lakes versus data warehousing and if both can be combined in a solution? Will AI render ETL products obsolete?
Share your findings through reports, infographics, and interactive content to boost engagement.
3. Target leads through LinkedIn
Leverage the professional network on LinkedIn. For those who know how to use it, LinkedIn is worth its weight in gold.
Needless to say, you would need a premium subscription but that is a small price to pay for such access.
Connect with those in positions of authority and start a conversation. Offer them tailored content that would spark an interest in your products.
Actively participate in relevant groups to establish brand recognition.
4. Write guest posts
Partner with relevant industry blogs or publications. If you are selling a CRM solution a guest post in an industry blog such as CTO Vision and CIO Journal will fetch attention from the top managers who make the buying decision.
A guest post not only positions you as an expert but also drives traffic back to your website and expands your reach.
5. Organize webinars
Webinars are easy to organize with WebEx and similar platforms.
Invite speakers from across the industry and advertise widely through LinkedIn and emails.
The business landscape is changing so rapidly that no one passes up a chance to listen to sage advice from a genuine expert.
Record the webinar and place it on YouTube. It will continue to draw viewers for at least a couple of years.
This does not mean you cannot use lead generation strategies used by B2C businesses.
Content marketing, search engine optimization, paid advertising, and search engine marketing, are equally valid for B2B.
B2C Lead Generation Strategies That Work
We have already spoken at length about content marketing, SEO, referrals, lead capture forms, and email marketing.
It makes little sense to repeat the advice you read a moment ago.
We would like to add advice that we believe would help generate more sales.
1. Create Well-Designed Product and Landing Pages
A product or landing page is a web page on a website that provides detailed information about a specific product or service.
It is the digital storefront and usually the first interaction between a lead and your business.
It has to have:
- High aesthetic value
- Relevant information
- Call to action or CTA
and usually a suggestion for related products.
One cannot stress enough the importance of color scheme, design, fonts, and other elements.
If there is one place from where you start your hunt for new leads, this is it because without it nothing else will succeed.
What use is high-decibel social media marketing if the landing page is shoddy and pushes away a lead?
Wix has a sleek and well designed landing page.
Source Wix
2. Offer a Personal Touch, Not a Hard Sell
Too many businesses have come to believe a shoddy WhatsApp message or email is the epitome of CRM.
From Furry Fours
Susan, don’t let this pawsome opportunity go!!!!!
Start shopping and enjoy discounts of up to 60% off
Instead, try and write with a personal touch. It takes time, but it is absolutely worth it.
Hi Susan,
Hope you are doing well. I wanted to let you know that we are offering massive discounts for all our customers.
Please visit our website where we have some awesome treats for Simba, your cute Labrador.
Thank you,
Rachel Long (Proprietor)
In brief,
- Reach out to a friend as you would.
- Don’t push discounts into every conversation.
- Inform, but don’t persuade.
Final Word
We are at the end of a rather lengthy discussion about what a lead is and different ways to generate leads.
What should be your focus other than setting up a product and landing page that converts?
First, decide the channels you would want to employ.
Next, spend time crafting the brand’s narrative.
Only after you are satisfied that your effort is the best possible given your resources reach out to draw people into the sales funnel.
You might not succeed the first time or the second time. But keep on honing the message and the process and sooner or later you will be able to grow leads, prospects, and revenue.
If you’re eager to uncover the ideal lead generation strategies, there is no better time than now.
Reach out today for a personalized chat, and together, we’ll find out what works best to drive your business success.