30October 2023
Lead generation involves attracting customers with a natural interest in your product or service. You can use a variety of strategies to generate leads and boost your sales closing rates.
Consider ways to meet your potential clients where they are online. For example, webinars provide rich content that can be informative and educational. They also allow you to collect emails using Wistia’s Turnstile email collector.
1. Identifying Your Target Audience
A common mistake that marketers make is trying to reach everyone with their marketing efforts. But the problem is that not everyone is a good fit for your products and services.
This is why targeted lead generation is so important. It allows you to focus on a smaller subset of the total addressable market that is more likely to buy from you, which in turn increases your conversions and reduces churn.
To do this, you need to define your goals and work backwards from them. This includes setting your sales quotas, identifying KPIs, and creating your ideal customer profile (ICP).
The ICP is comprised of demographic, firmographic, and technographic characteristics that can help you identify leads with the right potential to become customers. These include things like gender, age, income level, location, and professional experience. You can also use data about your customers’ current state to further qualify them as a good fit. This information can be collected through contact forms, social media, and email campaigns.
2. Collecting Information
The goal of lead generation is to capture a potential customer’s contact information and interest in your products or services. This process is usually conducted through digital marketing channels, like content marketing, website forms, and search engine optimization.
Companies collect this data in order to better tailor their marketing messaging and sales pitches to each prospect’s needs, wants, and desires. This allows them to improve their return on investment and fosters brand loyalty.
To capture a lead, a potential customer must first discover your business online through one of your marketing channels and click on a call-to-action (an image or button that encourages visitors to take an action). This could be a link to a landing page where a free resource is offered in exchange for the visitor’s contact information. From there, the business may initiate a nurture sequence of valuable content to guide the prospect toward making a purchase. Often, businesses define leads by the number of qualified leads they receive and the speed at which these leads are converted to customers.
3. Tracking Your Leads
Today’s customers have almost limitless information about products and services at their fingertips. This makes it hard for marketers to attract and nurture leads. But attracting and nurturing high-quality leads is crucial to the success of your business.
When you track your sales lead generation, you can collect valuable data that helps you improve your marketing and communication strategies. For example, you can learn how your leads became aware of your company, what type of marketing material engages them the most, and what their needs and wants are.
Another way to track your sales lead generation is by using call tracking software. This technology allows you to track your leads’ contact information and their responses to your marketing materials, making it easier for you to analyze the results of your campaigns. It also makes it easy for your sales team to follow up with potential leads. You can even remarket to your existing customers to increase brand loyalty.
4. Nurturing Your Leads
The final step in the lead generation process is nurturing your leads to convert them into paying customers and keep them coming back for more. This is often called “inbound marketing,” and it’s a key component of any effective digital marketing strategy.
Whether it’s through email, social media, phone calls or live chats, you can use marketing automation tools to schedule a sequence of messages that communicate with your contacts at the right time and in the right way. This keeps you from missing follow-ups and ensures that no lead is left unattended.
Nurturing your leads also gives you a chance to collect a treasure trove of data about how your contacts became aware of your company and its products or services, what content engages them the most, what their specific needs are and much more. This information can help you improve your marketing and communication strategies, and increase sales in the long term. Using nurtured leads also lowers your customer acquisition costs and fosters brand loyalty for the long haul.