Lead generation is that practice that businesses where they initiate a conversation with a stranger. These strangers aren’t random people who’ve been picked out of a random mailing list. These people are the ones who’ve shown some interest in your services and products. 

The difference between cold calling and generating leads is a big one. However, there are times when marketers can’t differentiate between the two. In cold calling, you’re getting in touch with a person who has never communicated with you. This is where the biggest difference lies between these two practices. When you’re generating leads, you don’t call people like that. 

In this process, you connect with those individuals who’ve taken the first step in communicating with you. They may have done that by filling out a survey form from your brand. 

It’s after this form of communication, you as a brand take the next step. This next step is of course taken towards lead generation. Getting these people on board may not be difficult for you if you know what problems they have. 

In this process of lead generation, people face multiple issues. They have the ability to bring these people on board, but they don’t know what to do next. Well, here again, you’ve to know what these potential customers are thinking. 

They may be thinking about why they should go with you? What if your product doesn’t really help them? At this point, they’d have done their whole research, but nothing’s wrong with reassuring them. Here, you should clear all their doubts and queries. 

Therefore, in this article, we’ve mentioned the best practices you’ll need to clear these doubts. You’ll also get to know how to generate leads in an effective way. 

What Is Lead Generation?

In general terms, generating leads refers to that process wherein the brands attract prospects and convert them into customers of their brand. To understand this process, you’d have to understand the meaning of a lead. Who is a lead? Why are they important? 

A lead is a person who shows a slight interest in a business’s products or services. The brands approach these leads when the lead has communicated with them by filling a survey or by subscribing to them. 

How this communication works is that the lead starts with the first contact. For instance, let’s say you filled out a survey form about losing weight. After you’ve submitted the form, the company will call or email you in a few days. During this process, they’ll try to address your existing problems. They’d offer you beneficial solutions which may be in their products and services. 

Lead generation as mentioned above is the process wherein you as a brand try to convert that lead into a customer. This means that you take this slight interest in a lead and change it into them buying your products and services. You do that by highlighting how the product would help them. 

Taking the weight loss survey example, the brand may recommend a particular lead to try taking their protein diet. Therefore, since an individual’s needs are different, the brand would provide solutions based on these needs. 

The process of generating leads is important and needed in many types of businesses. It is because this process helps in initiating a relationship with people who show interest in your products. Therefore, it is after this initial contact that the transition from a stranger to a customer becomes natural. 

How To Do Lead Generation? 

For a successful campaign that gets you those leads, you’ll have to follow these steps. 

• Define your objectives: It doesn’t matter if your campaign is big or small, you need to have some clear and definite objectives in your mind. In your objectives, you’d have to state how many leads you want to generate. You’ll have to define the revenues you’ll get per lead and also keep a track of your conversion rates. 

• Know your audience: After setting clear objectives, in this next step, you’ll focus on your audience. Here, you’d have to do some customer interviews, conduct surveys, and examine the demographics of your website. By doing all these, you’ll gather more information about your audiences. 

• Update your content: This step is crucial for the success of the campaign. You’ll have to check your website content, social media content, your articles, blogs, etc. All the content that’s out there about your brand must be up-to-date. It’s possible that people would look at your content before they decide to make a purchase. 

• Give them an offer: In this step of lead generation, you’ll have to offer something to your audience. This offer may make them more excited to buy your products. It may help them gain more knowledge about your brand. You may offer them a discount, or you can ask them to sign up for your newsletter. 

• Promote your brand: When you give them an offer, you should also promote your brand. You may do that by doing paid advertisement in the form of PPC advertisement, search advertising, or digital advertising. 

• Test your campaign: In the last step, you’ll have to test your campaign. Testing would help you know where you’re lacking and where you need to put more effort. 

Importance, Pros and Cons of Lead Generation 

This process of generating leads plays a crucial role for marketers. If you do this correctly, then your brand would avail yourself of many more benefits, which eventually would help it to grow. 

Here are a few reasons why this is an important step for marketers to take.

• To get the target customers: When you’re generating leads, your focus is on those people who are interested in your brand. So, when you’re communicating with them, you’re targeting exactly the right people. 

• To increase brand awareness: When you communicate with these potential customers, you make them aware of your brand. You talk about all your products and services. This helps them in gathering more information about you. 

• To have brand loyalty: If people like your brand, they’ll come to you again and again. You’ll build more communities with such people. This would help you in having a loyal customer base. 

Generating leads also comes with a list of pros and cons. These include:

Pros

• You receive feedback and information from people. This information helps you in improving your strategies. Therefore, with these improved strategies, you’ll have a more positive impact on people. 

• The online sales experience can also improve with this process. Therefore, the users get timely feedback from the business and that helps them in making quick decisions. 

Cons

• One of the cons of this process is that you may get a low ROI. If you’re unable to bring in many leads, then you’d have fewer returns than you’d have expected. Therefore, it basically depends on how much your products and your communication convince the people. 

• The person is fascinated by your products, but that can change soon. Therefore, they’re in that stage where they can easily be swayed and change their mind about buying products from you. 

The Best Lead Generation Strategies

If you want to convert your interested prospects into leads, you’ll need an effective strategy. You know all the steps required for creating a generation campaign, with them, you’ll need some strategies too. 

Here’s a list of strategies you may use in your campaign. 

• Chatbox conversations: You can’t always be available to look after the needs of your prospects. However, you may make use of the chatbox feature. Using the chatbox, you may provide these prospects with any information they need on your products and services. Therefore, set the chatbox in a way that it easily answers questions about anything. 

• Gated content: Gated content refers to those materials that are accessible to people only after they fill out a form. You can think of these content materials as something that is locked. Behind these locks, you may keep ebooks, reports, courses, online tools, etc. 

• Newsletter: You should use newsletters because they have various types of content in them. People can read all this content to stay in touch with the brand. You may talk about your upcoming events in your newsletter. You can also include new blog posts in it. 

• Do an event: Events are a great idea for lead generation. Events like webinars, seminars, conferences, and workshops allow you to interact with people in a close space. You may serve your target markets with these events. 

• Optimize your website: You need to optimize your website so that people can easily find the lead magnets. Lead magnets drive the prospects into becoming a lead. For this, you may use pop-ups, a homepage call to action, a resource library with your gated content. 

Top 5 Examples

Following are the best lead generation examples from brands that have generated leads. 

• The Bot Lab

The Bot Lab effectively used the strategy of chatbox for their lead generating the campaign. The prospects of The Bot Lab can chat in their chatbox. In this chatbox, they can get to know what exactly a chatbox does on websites. It’s only after completely understanding the chat box function, people talk further. This means that when the chat box is done explaining everything, the prospects can directly talk to the employee. 

• HubSpot

The content marketing software that many are familiar with, HubSpot did its campaign in this way. They utilized the strategy of gated content for generating more leads. In the gated content of HubSpot, people can find many useful contents and resources. 

Marie Forleo

Marie Forleo is a business coach and an influencer. For her lead generation campaign, she asked people to sign up for her email list. Upon signing up, people would become a part of MF Insider. When they become MF Insiders, they receive a newsletter from the influencer. 

Bed Bath & Beyond

Bed Bath & Beyond is American merchandise for domestic items. In their campaign, they gave an offer to their website visitors. In this offer, the first time subscribers of their email list would get 20% off on the products of Bed Bath & Beyond. 

Trello

Trello is an application that brands use for their project management. For generating more leads, Trello made a great offer to their prospects. In this offer, Trello had allowed people to use a free version of its tool. 

In Conclusion

Lead generation is that process that’s carried by marketers to convert prospects into leads. They do this by communicating with these prospects. Therefore, brands try to understand the problems that these prospects are facing. After that, they help these people in finding useful answers for them. 

When you’re making a campaign for generating leads, first you’ve to clearly define your campaign objectives. Once you’re clear on them, you may move on to the next steps. 

Therefore, for getting a good ROI on this campaign, you should make use of those strategies that will generate more leads for you. 

Did you like the strategies we suggested? How do you define the objective for your campaign? Tell us in the comments below!