In web marketing, leads are prospects who are interested in buying your products or services. This is obviously the main goal for most businesses out there: to generate quality leads. But what does that mean and how can you implement a lead generation strategy?
What is lead generation?
This is the strategy a business use in order to acquire new leads. Which, in turn, means people who are really on your website to make a purchase. All the people interested in your product or service are considered leads.
But quality leads are the ones who will effectively perform the action you want. That can be subscribing to a newsletter, participating in an event or, more often, actually buy something. Lead generation can be defined as the process of attracting these people and convert them into your customers.
Some ways to attract people
You can always attract new interested people through the more common tools:
- your personal or brand’s blog;
- social media pages;
- email marketing;
- live events;
- freebies.
All these are means to acquire leads. That’s because each one of these strategies are made for creating brand awareness and loyalty. A prospect who follows you on social media, love your storytelling strategy, trust your counsel and ideas, is more likely to buy your products. Thus, these people are your leads.
Acquiring leads: a strategy
Lead generation is a complex mix of strategies that, more or less, follow this path. You create an email marketing strategy, a good social media campaign, a perfect SEO-oriented blog. In each of these instances, your goal is to lead people to a landing page. There you will offer something in exchange for their personal info.
This way you can collect data about interesting leads such as their name, location, birthday, age group ect. Therefore, you will have a detailed and targeted list of potential customers and a lot of informations about them. You will subsequently use these infos to make them buy your products.
Either with a specific offer, through a birthday coupon, or a geo-localized event, you will have a lot of tools to acquire new customers.
How much do leads cost?
Of course, in order to create an organic lead generation campaign, you need time, money and specialized professional workers. But is there a way to acquire leads in a little time? Actually, there is. Through sponsored posts and adv on search engines, you can reach a high volume of leads in a little time.
The average cost per lead is between 30 and 200$ depending on your specific market field. A lead generation strategy for technology or healthcare is much more expensive than one for education or non-profit projects.
What you need to remember is that leads are a high ROI (return on investment) elements of a web marketing strategy. Which means, even if you pay for them, you will earn much more in the long-term. That’s because lead generation helps you:
- creating brand awareness;
- targeting the right customers;
- collecting valuable informations;
- finally, selling more.
