Lead generation is one of the most important tasks that any sales person must complete. But here is a definition,
Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers to your product or service. This can be done through various forms of advertising, public relations, social media, or direct marketing.
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Every company uses some form of lead generation, whether it’s an advertising campaign, public relations, direct marketing or social media posts in order to generate interest in their products or services.
While everyone has heard of the importance of lead generation, very few people understand what actually goes into a lead generation campaign. So, this article will go over some basic principles and strategies to help you better understand the process behind generating leads.
Why is lead generation important
It’s a common cause of frustration for consumer-facing companies. It’s what they try to do and how they try to do it that makes the difference between a company that gets traction and one that doesn’t.
In this post I’ll try to explain why lead generation is so important, and share some tips for implementing lead generation in your business model.
How to generate leads
In our world, the term “lead generation” is often used interchangeably with “lead capture”, though there is some confusion on this point.
Let’s define a lead as any person who has expressed interest in your product or service. There are two basic types of leads: customers and prospects.
A customer is a person who wants to buy something from you. They can be buyers, users, prospects or even non-buyers (i.e., people who never normally make purchasing decisions).
A prospect is someone who knows someone else who would like to buy from you. A prospecting strategy can include everything from direct mail to online advertising and public relations. Prospects may be referred to by number or by name (i.e., “John”). A prospecting campaign may be focused on an existing customer (i.e., “John Smith”) or it may target new customers (i.e., “John Smith Customer Planner”).
A lead capture campaign will typically involve more than just lead generation: it will also include sales support and marketing activities such as direct mail, phone calls and emails along with periodic follow-up visits by sales representatives and/or managers to ensure that the customer remains interested in your product/service/business and that they continue to purchase further products/services/support offered in the future.
The term “lead” can have several meanings in different industries including a buyer, a purchaser or plain ol’ breadwinner of the family who buys products and services at school or work each week but never comes home with anything tangible for Christmas presents because they don’t have time for shopping on Christmas Day…
Examples of how your company can generate leads
What does a lead generation strategy look like?
The traditional approach to lead generation is to advertise your product in print, radio, TV, etc. But as we have seen with traditional marketing strategies, there are inherent problems with this approach:
- People still do not know what you do
- They don’t know how it works (not unless you tell them)
- They don’t care about it
- They don’t care enough to buy from you (and even if they did they probably wouldn’t have bought anyway)
So if we are going to be honest with ourselves and with our customers, we need a new strategy. We need a new approach that focuses on the people who do care about our product and will buy it if we make it available. The problem is that almost all companies who offer a service or product to the public ignore the latter half of this equation — which is the most important part: people who actually want the service or product. They only care about getting something or making their life easier — not doing whatever they can to help someone else achieve their goals. And that’s where lead generation comes in. It’s how we can get more people buying from us so that we can help them achieve theirs. Here are some good practices for generating leads:
- Use a combination of paid and free methods (mailing lists, social media shares, etc.)
- Put your focus on your target audience (your target market)
- Make it easy for potential customers to find your contact information (contact forms)
- Have plenty of information at ready for prospects
- Use proven methods Like any other marketing strategy you can use, there are two ways of advancing lead generation efforts: through paid advertising and through social media campaigns .
Paid advertising – This is known as PPC Advertising, where you pay an ad agency/business to run ads on various channels such as search engines like Google or Yahoo! Answers, as well as display ads on websites like Facebook and Twitter. The goal is essentially to get people looking at what you have advertised on these channels. The downside is that PPC Advertising works only when people actually see your ad when they search using keywords related to what the ad says or what you offer (that’s why it’s often referred to as “canned” advertising). This also means that things like organic search rankings may be affected by these types of advertisements since they help position your company/product among others competing for users’ interest.
