“The way you position yourself at the beginning of a relationship will have a profound effect on where you end up.”
– Ron Karr
91% of marketers claim lead generation to be at the top of their priority list and their most important goal. At the same time, over 53% of marketers have reported that they allocate over half of their marketing budget towards generating high-quality leads.
As important as generating high-quality leads is, about 61% of marketers report it to be highly challenging.
Businesses are literally spending thousands of dollars building lead generation campaigns – which further allows them to bring their customers further down their marketing funnel, ultimately converting them into paying customers.
But – what exactly is lead generation? And why do marketers have it at the top of their priority list?
What’s the buzz all about – is lead generation even worth it?
If that’s what you’re wondering, we’ve got you covered.
This blog post clearly explains what a lead is and what exactly lead generation is. At the same time, we’ll look at what the end-to-end lead generation process looks like for better understanding.
Let’s dive straight into it.
What’s a Lead?
A lead is a person who knows about your business and is interested in your products or services. It’s someone who has submitted his/her personal information in some way.
Let’s say you run a pet care service based in Boise, Idaho, and are looking forward to reaching out to pet owners in your neighborhood. And while your target audience involves every single pet owner in your neighborhood, it’s important to note that not every single one of them is interested in your business.
In fact, most may not be aware of your pet-care business’ existence. Now, as a marketer or business owner, you’d love nothing more than to reach out to them and get them interested in your pet-care services. Upon building a marketing funnel and strategically planning plus implementing your lead generation campaign, you’ll be getting them interested in your business.
And when they know about your business and submit their details – that’s when you’ll have officially converted them into leads.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the strategic process of converting your target audience (who may not even know about your business) into leads. It’s the process of grabbing people’s attention and getting them to submit their contact information – which you’ll be using to further reach out to them to drive sales and boost your conversion rate.
Some of the best ways to generate high-quality leads include:
- Hosting a Webinar
- Publishing High-Quality Blog Posts
- Rolling Out a Truly Value-Adding Lead Magnet
- And more!
For example, there are three reasons we publish weekly blog posts:
- Deliver value and actionable insights to amazing people like you.
- Boost our search engine rankings.
- Generate high-quality leads.
When you read our blog posts, you’ll find that we deliver genuine value – something we love doing. Now, as you find that our blog post actually helped you solve one or more of your problems, you may want to contact us. Maybe, you’re interested in our services.
So – when you hit our “Contact Us” button, you will find out that we have a lead capture form up for you to submit.
And when you submit this form, we’ll have officially converted you into a lead. Ta-da!
Similarly, you can publish an eBook or other form of lead magnet and offer it for free in exchange for your audience’s contact details.
That’s how you can generate leads.
There are different ways to generate high-quality leads – but while you build these processes and systems, you need to make sure that you are actually delivering value to your audience – that’s the only way you’ll make a great impression and have them genuinely interested in your products or services.
The End-to-End Lead Generation Process
Here’s what the lead generation process looks like:
- Your audience discovers your business via one of your marketing strategies which may involve paid advertising, SEO, social media marketing, blog posting, a lead magnet offering, etc.
- Now, depending on the source of traffic, the call to action may vary. For example, to get their hands on your eBook offering, your prospects may have to submit their contact information beforehand. Whereas, in the case of blog posts, you can have a lead capture form at the very bottom.
- Now, your audience needs to submit their information via the lead capture form you have in place.
- When they submit their information, you’ll have generated a lead.
- But that’s not the end. When you turn a prospect into a lead, you need to make sure that you’re striking when the iron’s hot. Don’t let this lead turn cold – otherwise, they may lose their interest in your business.
- As you generate leads, it’s important to either reach out to them via call or strategic email campaigns to get them to purchase your products or services, or maybe get them to book a strategy call with you.
For example, as a business owner based in Idaho, you may be interested in growing your business. So, to generate you as a lead, we’ll roll out a highly engaging and informative lead magnet (eBook) titled “How to Scale Your Idaho-Based Business from 0 to 6 Figures in a Year?”
So – here’s how we’ll get you interested in our eBook:
- First, we’ll run strategic paid ad campaigns – which will redirect you to the eBook’s landing page.
- As you land on the landing page, you’ll see an overview of the eBook, some benefits – all of it completely depends on what you’re offering. At the same time, you’ll see a lead capture form on the page – where you will be asked to share your contact information like Name, Phone Number, Email Address and hit the submit button.
- When you hit the Submit button, we’ll have your information in our system. We’ll have officially converted you into a lead. At the same time, you’ll have the eBook unlocked and ready to read right in front of you.
But as you read the eBook, we’ll have to make sure that we are living up to our promise and hype. If we are publishing a lead magnet titled “How to Scale Your Idaho-Based Business from 0 to 6 Figures in a Year?”, we need to make sure that it’s genuinely exciting, informative, and value-adding.
Otherwise, we’ll be making a bad impression.
As you find out our book to deliver value, you’d love to reach out to our business. Now, to get you to book a strategy call with us, we’ll roll out strategic lead nurturing email campaigns – which will help us bring you further down our marketing funnel.
This series of strategic campaigns will help us ultimately get you to take the desired action.
And that’s how lead generation actually works.
It’s a strategic process and it’s really important to make sure that you do it right. And if you want us to help you build a highly converting and strategic lead generation marketing funnel for your business, our team would love nothing more than to help you out.
