Lead generation and how to attract leads

Lead generation is a marketing process aimed at identifying and stimulating people's interest in a particular product in order to develop a sales system.

There is a lot of disagreement about the term "lead", especially between marketers and sales professionals. Let's decipher the term from all sides.

Simply put, a lead is a user who has shown interest in your product. For a sales manager, a lead is a user who has made a confident signal of intent to buy. This could be a request for a product demo or a request for a free trial. For marketers, a lead is a user who has clearly shown interest in a product or service, seen the value of the product, and provided an opportunity for feedback (e.g. subscribed to newsletters, left an email, filled out a registration form, etc.).

Classifying leads

Leads are traditionally categorised according to their "warmth", i.e. the degree of readiness to become a customer.

• Cold lead. A contact from a visitor who has visited your website and left details, but hasn't bought anything. He or she may have signed up to receive offers or news from your company or a social media group, or asked a question via a feedback form. These are the people whose interest was minimal. They either gave you their contact details by accident or acted impulsively - that is, without serious intentions. They are unlikely to become customers. When working with such leads, it is important to warm them up gradually: send them letters with interesting offers, catalogues of new products, etc. It is necessary to maintain contact so that they become real customers over time.

• Warm up the lead. Potential customers who are interested in a product but have not yet made up their minds. They are choosing between brands and models, weighing up the pros and cons. For example, if a person fills out a contact form and asks a question about a product in an online chat - this is a warm lead. Prove your value to them - and the customer is yours.

• Hot lead. This is contact from a visitor who has made up their mind to buy a product or order a service. For example, they may have completed and submitted an order form, added the product to their shopping basket and started the checkout process. But for some reason they didn't make the payment. This is a mature customer who has not completed the purchase. Maybe he needs more information about payment methods and delivery times. Your job is to complete what he has started. For example, offer a lower price for the product they are interested in.

Ways to attract leads

If you look at the process of attracting customers in detail, the first step is to eliminate uninterested users from the total traffic. The remaining ones form the basis of lead generation. Leads become real customers. However, the work does not end here, because it is important to retain the customer, to build trust in the brand so that they will recommend it to their friends.

Leads can be generated in two ways: online and offline. The choice depends on the product, target audience, budget and other factors. Keep in mind that there are many ways to generate leads, and new ones are being added all the time. Let's look at the most common ones.

Online lead generation techniques:

• Contextual advertising;

• Targeting;

• SEO;

• Content marketing;

• Webinars, online courses, etc;

• Mailings (email, SMS, push notifications, messengers);

• SMM;

• Lead magnet;

Offline lead generation methods:

• Exhibitions;

• Presentations;

• Promotions;

• Face-to-face meetings;

• Telemarketing ("telephone marketing": this includes cold and hot calling and hotlines for incoming calls);

For e-commerce, of course, online methods will be more effective. The specialists at Arabescosideral unipessoal lda have provided more details on some of these.

Contextual advertising allows you to get valid leads by fine-tuning different audience parameters. Ads are served for each keyword, so their relevance should be high. It is important to get the campaign right. Otherwise, the budget may be wasted.

Targeting. Your ads will only be shown to users whose data matches your requirements.

SEO. Organic display gives a lower lead generation rate. However, in the long run, SEO is more profitable than contextual advertising. However, this only applies to proper SEO with good copy without a huge number of keywords and with lots of useful information.

Content marketing. Placing informational content that is directly or indirectly related to your business on your own and other web resources. These are tutorials, tips, research, flyhacks, case studies, etc. Their purpose is to create an expert image for you, to provide useful information to a potential customer, to help them make a choice. To get good traffic and leads, you need a professional approach to choosing topics and formats, developing the content itself and integrating links.

SMM. The mechanisms of this type of advertising are subscriptions, reposts, viral videos/memes, vlogs, etc. If your product is interesting and unique, SMM will help to promote it.

Lead magnet. This tool offers your target audience some kind of benefit in exchange for an email subscription. Lead magnets can be webinars, trial versions of services, e-books, white papers, expert interviews, training videos.

The best choice

The coolest way to get leads is through referrals, both online and offline. A customer who comes by referral is a business owner's dream. It is the ultimate recognition of your hard work. These leads are virtually free, but to get them you need to earn the trust of existing customers. Then they will want to recommend you. By the way, seeking advice from Arabesco Sideral can be a step towards building a great reputation for your business.

Leads are the very first stage of sales. It is impossible to imagine any business activity without them. The profit of any company directly depends on the quality of work with leads, how actively they are acquired and how well each one is handled.