Lead generation is a critical component of the success of any business. Every company needs new customers.
However, generating new leads is not an easy task. Many guides and resources on the internet make it seem like it is.
They usually point marketers down the path of spending a few hundred dollars running Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Lead generation is more complex than that.
There is a lot more to lead generation than budget and platform.
Your product or service, the offer, and the technology behind your program are things you should also consider.
In this article, we will attempt to scratch the surface of the considerations you need to make when starting a lead generation program.
What is a lead?
To understand what a lead is, you need to identify the difference between a prospect and a lead.
Many of the guides you see online get this part wrong.
Defining a Prospect
A prospect is someone unfamiliar with your business that clicks on your website or brand property. They have not entered your marketing funnel yet.
It is your job to make them become a lead.
It is a safe assumption that all brands will have more prospects than leads. Not everyone that visits your website becomes a lead.
A group of prospects is called an audience.
Defining a Lead
A lead is a prospect that passes their contact information to your business in exchange for value (or an offer).
Leads are more likely to convert to a product or service than a prospect.
However, you cannot have leads without having prospects first (aka an audience).
You can get even more granular on the definition of leads because there are two types of lead.
Marketing Qualified Leads
Once a lead is in your funnel, it needs to be nurtured by your marketing team.
Nurturing is when the lead is prepped with information to become more educated about the product, service, and brand.
Once the lead is nurtured, it is considered a marketing-qualified lead and then passed to the sales team.
Sales Qualified Leads
A sales-qualified lead is when the marketing-qualified lead is contacted by the sales team and is a good fit and likely to purchase a product or service.
What is lead generation?
Lead generation is the process of getting prospects and capturing their information for your marketing funnel.
Typically, lead generation can be accomplished organically by a prospect landing on your site from social media, using a search engine, or a customer referral.
Lead generation can also occur through paid methods, which guarantees proper traffic to your website at a cost.
How to start lead generation?
Starting a lead generation program can be a daunting task.
However, if you follow what we have outlined below, you will have a chance for success.
Establish a Product or Service, then Offer
An offer is the piece of promotion that you want to share with the prospect in exchange for their information.
You will need a compelling offer that people are willing to take action.
But the first step for creating an offer is having a product or service that solves a problem.
Identify Your Product or Service – Define The Solution
You need to have a product that solves a problem.
If you have a product solution that nobody wants, no one is going to want to take any offer you provide for that product.
How to come up with an offer?
Useful tools and exclusive content are great offers that people will want to take.
A thing to keep in mind when creating an offer is that people want to do the following:
- Make their lives easier
- Save time
- Save money
If you create an offer that saves time, and money or provides a resource to make your prospects’ lives easier, you will generate leads.
Examples of offers or tools
- Infographics
- Pricing Tables
- Gated Content
- Exclusive Discounts
- Free Trials
- Free Estimates
- Courses
- Brochures or Guides
- One-Pagers
WebMD uses a symptom checker tool for lead generation.
Find the Audience
The offer and audience go hand in hand. The offer has to be tailored to your audience.
If you create an offer for the wrong audience, you will not generate any sustainable results.
A huge mistake is targeting too small or too large of an audience.
If your audience is too broad, for example – trying to target every person on the internet. A small percentage of the audience will interact with your content but a large majority will not. Marketing to a broad audience is a colossal waste of time and resources.
Too small of an audience, you will not see enough volume to give your lead generation program a chance to succeed.
The best practice would be to find a broad audience within your niche.
You should identify a perfect audience size that will find your product or offer useful. The goal is to collect data on them initially.
Your data will tell you who to spend your time on. Once you start generating leads and conversions, you will then be able to narrow your audience size based on people likely to convert to your offer.
Have the Right Lead Generation Technology, Creatives, and Platforms
Landing Pages for Offers
The landing page is the first technology component of a successful lead generation program.
Landing pages should clearly and concisely communicate the offer you are trying to promote in exchange for the prospect’s information.
Learn more about landing pages here.
Ad Creative & Copywriting
Ad Creative needs to display the offer and feature copy exciting enough for the prospect to take action.
We recommend that you find professional help in this category if you do not have an in-house creative team.
You can find quality copywriters and ad designers on Fiverr and Upwork.
Content and Search Engine Optimization
To get leads from content and search engine optimization, you need to generate large amounts of quality content.
Having a content management system is very crucial. The most popular CMS is WordPress.
Also, a team of writers in-house would make your life much easier.
You can also find writers on freelance networks like Fiverr and Upwork.
At first, you need to scale very slowly. You need to identify keywords your website will be able to rank.
You need to write quality content that matches those keywords. Also, the information presented needs to be engaging and useful to the audience.
You will then generate backlinks which will make ranking for difficult keywords easier.
Once you establish an audience, start sprinkling in some calls to action that link to your landing page.
Media Platforms
Paid media campaigns are great because you can get results quickly as opposed to organic techniques that could take months.
It is important to understand that not all paid media platforms offer the same type of traffic, and some require more work than others.
Find out what media platform might be best suited for you to test with first.
There are three tiers of paid media.
- Tier 1 – expert media buyers only, very high minimum starting budgets, programmatic advertising recommended. Examples include most DSPs like Yahoo, The Tradedesk, Amazon,
- Tier 2 – boom or bust platforms. Experts do very well but beginners might struggle to gain success. Examples are Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.
- Tier 3 – Low budget, low-quality platforms. These are great for beginners or brands trying to establish an audience because it’s inexpensive traffic. Examples are co-registration publishers or platforms like Quora or TikTok.
You can learn more about the three tiers of paid media here.
Testing and Optimization to Maximize Lead Generation Results
An often overlooked aspect of lead generation is testing. You cannot assume that the first time you implement a campaign that it’s going to strike pay dirt. You most likely need a few tries to get the leads you want at the price you want.
There are two levels of testing within lead generation concerning the user experience.
The first level is ad creative and the second is the landing page.
The method you should use to optimize your campaigns is a practice called conversion rate optimization.
Conversion rate optimization is when you make slight tweaks on the creative or landing page to get more people to sign up to become a lead or take action on your ad.
AB Testing is a powerful method to test hypotheses on the user experience without sacrificing all your success. The idea is to have control and variable, and test both of them to see which version wins. If the variable version wins it becomes the control in the next test. If the control wins, you create a new hypothesis.
Check out our in-depth article about conversion rate optimization and AB testing.
How Not to Do Lead Generation?
61% of marketers claim to have issues with lead generation.
Their troubles with lead generation can be broken down into three factors:
- Quality – how leads respond to marketer messages or ultimately convert.
- Cost – how much are you paying to acquire these leads?
- Quantity – how many leads can you generate?
Sometimes companies put pressure on their marketing team to generate the most leads they possibly can at the lowest price. Unfortunately, that will create lots of low-quality leads because you have to resort to using low-quality platforms to achieve that.
The goal of a lead generation program is to generate quality leads at a cost that makes sense for the business. Not to make money off a freshly acquired lead.
If your executive team wants to save money on lead generation, the results will not be favorable.
Learn more about why marketers struggle with lead generation.
Why is Lead Generation Important for Businesses?
Generating new business is the lifeblood of almost all companies. You need to be able to generate interest in a product or service and generating leads is a part of that.
To be able to establish a lead generation program is supercritical.
It is not good enough to say that you are generating 1,000 leads a day if they do not convert. Lead quantity is a vanity metric.
Your goal as a marketer for your company is to create a lead pipeline of individuals that want to interact and learn more about your brand.
Those customers are the ones that are most likely to convert to your product or service but also refer your brand to new customers.
More importantly, a lead generation program needs to be justified based on the budgetary expense to generate those leads.
There is no reason to spend $90 per lead on Google when your product creates $10 in revenue. It will not be financially worth it to continue running your Lead Generation ads on Google.
In that example, you should probably look to co-registration sites or publishers which can bring your cost per lead acquisition price to a few dollars.
Companies tend to lose steam or increase the pressure on marketers when this environment is present. There is a space for everyone in lead generation. You need to make the right decisions on how to approach it.
Conclusion
Having a lead generation program is essential to the survival of most businesses.
A successful lead generation program is achievable if you do your research and put time & effort into acquiring the right technology, strategy, and ad creatives.
