Start“Creating a list of email addresses of the consumers doesn’t mean Lead Generation.”
In marketing, lead generation is the generation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a business. It includes everything starting from bringing traffic to your landing pages to nurturing of leads and finally getting them converted to sales-ready leads or qualified leads.
Large organisations spend millions on advertising for customer acquisition and building their brands. However, small business have a limited budget and usually can’t spend millions on advertising although the need to attract customer remains same or even more. This is why SMBs need to reply on innovative & cost effective ways of lead generation on a shoe string budget.
By the way, what is a Lead?
Any person who shows interest in your products or services is lead. For instance, someone calling you to know more about your product or services or someone filling up a form on your website is a lead. Lead can also be someone visiting a very important page on your website.
Leads are categorised into two types:
- Micro Leads
- Macro Leads
Micro leads are those lead which although have been filled up by people however they are not interested in buying your product at that point of time. For example, a lot of people have downloaded your white paper or e-brochure or have subscribed for your blog or newsletter and you got some information, you got some activity going on your website by your target customer however they are, at this point of time, not interested in your product or services or rather not ready to buy them.
Macro leads are those leads in which the person is more interested in to buy and they have filled up an important lead. For example inbound call, someone subscribing for free trial or someone walking into your center. Macro leads are actually those leads in which chances of visitors getting converted into customers are higher.
Ways to generate leads…
The landing page is a web page that a visitor can arrive at or ‘lands’ on after clicking on an ad or a call-to-action button. It is a page that is specifically created to generate leads.
Types of landing page:
- Click Through Landing Pages
- Lead Generation Landing Pages
Some of the offers that you give in exchange for the visitor’s information are:
Ebook or white paper, webinar registration, consultation for professional services, discount coupon/voucher, contest entry, free trial, a physical gift (via direct mail), notification of a future product launch and so forth.
How to bring potential traffic to landing page?
Adwords, Email marketing, display advertising, Facebook page, SEO, twitter, Linkedin, Mobile Web marketing, SMS.
How to nurture leads into sales?
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is converting potential business leads into sales. It is about nurturing your relationship with your potential customer by sending targeted, relevant and useful messages to them from time to time.
How to nurture?
Lead nurturing is all about conveying the right message to the right people at the right time. Depending upon the stage of customer in the sales cycle, you send lead nurturing messages to the customers from time to time through various means such as: Call, Email marketing, and Re-marketing.
Measuring and Monitoring performance
Now you know what leads, landing pages are and how to bring traffic to your landing pages and how to nurture leads to sales but, that is not all. The best part is you can track returns on every single penny you spend and work accordingly. Through web analytics you get to monitor and measure the performance of your lead generation campaigns. You will be able to track how much conversion are you getting from various channels, which channel is bringing more leads, how many people are getting converted in the end how many sales are you getting from a particular channel and so on. So, this is how you would be able to do more efficient lead generation. writing here...