With competition rapidly growing, you need to be proactive in convincing your potential customers or leads to stay interested in your products and services. Turning your target audience’s passive awareness into a sale is a process called lead generation.
Lead generation marketing involves creating a pool of leads and making them interested enough in your brand to become paying customers. To that end, a lead generation service provider creates a plan to attract, engage and nurture your leads, eventually resulting in the opportunity to sell.
As more and more businesses leverage technology to better suit customers’ needs, it’s up to you to adapt. For instance, a social media post featuring your software package discount won’t necessarily spark interest if the viewer did not previously know about you. On the other hand, an excellent social media lead generation approach would be to emphasize the benefits of your software and provide customer testimonials to prove it.
Nearly everyone is online, so you need a system in place and a next-level approach to capture your online leads – and to meet this goal, a lead generation company can become your closest ally.
In this blog, we cover:
• What is lead generation marketing
• Why you need lead generation strategies
• What comprises an effective lead generation campaign
We also discuss marketing lead generation examples and how working with a lead generation marketing company benefits your business.
What Is Lead Generation Marketing?
Lead generation marketing is the process of creating and implementing various marketing strategies that attract and engage your potential customers or leads. A successful lead generation campaign involves a system called a marketing funnel to bring your leads closer to becoming customers. A lead generation service ensures that your marketing funnel effectively nurtures your leads from their first point of contact until the moment they express interest in becoming your customer.
All businesses need to generate leads, but the approach differs depending on the best way to reach your target audience. Specifically, the right marketing funnel and lead generation services for a B2C (business-to-consumer) company will differ from a B2B (business-to-business) company.
B2C vs. B2B Lead Generation Campaign
A B2B lead generation agency helps companies that offer products or services to a business’s decision-makers instead of directly to consumers. An example of a B2B lead generation campaign is a software free trial offer through email marketing lead generation because when your prospects agree to be contacted, it’s easier to stay in touch.
Conversely, let’s say you’re a B2C company in the fashion business. In that case, you might focus on social media lead generation through Instagram. A good strategy would be to accept registrations for an exclusive preview of your collection, then send updates to your contacts when the collection is released.
A B2C and B2B lead generation campaign will differ according to its target audience and desired action, but both strategies share the same goal of winning customers.
Top 2 Reasons You Need Lead Generation Marketing
Because we live in a highly digital world, any good lead generation company would tell you to focus on generating leads online. What sets a professional lead generation service apart is that you benefit from years of experience and a team that is always ahead. Working with a lead generation expert means you have the best practices in place to help you win more customers.
Two major benefits of having the right marketing lead generation approach:
1. Traditional Marketing Is Out
Lead generation starts by capturing your target audience’s attention with a message that resonates with them. But they can easily be distracted and swayed by your competitors. After your initial touchpoint, it’s essential to follow through with a landing page that convinces them to engage with you and with content that keeps your brand relevant. Personalized communication and curated brand experiences are increasingly becoming the standard for marketing.
2. Steady Source of Leads
Lead generation is a process of establishing a touchpoint with your audience that gives you a way to reach them again. If you set up your marketing funnel well enough, your lead generation strategies can nurture and continuously produce leads instead of blindly chasing after customers. In today’s digital world, engagement is critical for sales, and every digital channel has a role to play in improving your lead generation strategy.
The Marketing Tactics an Effective Lead Generation Strategy Involves
Because the question what is lead generation marketing? has no simple answer, let’s talk about proven lead generation tactics. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, learning some of the lead generation best practices can help you align your strategy with your unique goals.
Drive profitable results with these expert-approved lead generation strategies:
1. High-Quality Content
Capture your target audience’s attention with content that features things they are already interested in. For instance, a good lawyer lead generation agency would publish content about frequently asked questions (FAQs) in law. The type of person searching for FAQs online is precisely the kind of person lawyers can help.
“Prioritize the quality over quantity for your content. It’s imperative to create content that is of value and contains strong calls-to-action (CTAs),” said Tristan Harris, lead generation expert and demand generation manager at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Harris calls SEO “the foundation that the lead generation house is built on,” and says that neglecting SEO can lead to wasteful spending on key strategies like content marketing and link building.
What’s more, about 97 percent of people seek information about a local company online more than any other source (SEO Tribunal). Through SEO, you increase your online search visibility and open your business up to more leads. For example, if HVAC lead generation services don’t incorporate SEO, a search engine will not see the relevance of services to the people searching “HVAC” online.
3. Link Building
Link building involves increasing links to your site from authoritative or highly credible websites in your industry. Backlinks can be requested through outreach or earned through great content. A large part of SEO is optimizing for keywords, but link building proves your site is trustworthy by taking another website’s word for it.
Harris maintains that content, SEO and link building are the core focus for growing inbound leads – these strategies all pave the way for leads to come to you. “When you invest in this foundation and open your doors to leads this way, it drives your cost-per-lead (CPL) down over time,” he said.
4. Digital PR
If link building is focused on increasing your search rankings by associating with authoritative sites, then digital public relations (PR) is generally about winning media-focused links for brand awareness. Harris says the two are intrinsically linked in that digital PR takes what you’re doing and amplifies it by generating coverage and links back to your site.
But bear one thing in mind: If you want a reporter to notice your request to feature you, you need to make sure your content is impressive.
5. Pay-per-click (PPC) Marketing
Paid campaigns are always a good option to get results in a relatively short amount of time. Your priority for PPC marketing is to get noticed by your potential customers through stellar creatives and compelling copy.
A word of caution – PPC is not for everyone. And if your ad doesn’t stop your target audience from scrolling, it’s not going to be effective. You will need to consider a variety of factors before running PPC ads. Harris recommends considering your capacity for creating ads, current inbound leads, budget, cost and more. “In some industries, profit margins are very high and PPC makes sense, but it’s not always the case,” he said.
6. Landing Page Optimization
PPC ads help you get the click, but it’s the landing page that does the convincing. If you click an ad from an insurance lead generation campaign, only to be unimpressed by the next page, you probably won’t buy insurance. A landing page features complete details that an ad might have left out. Through landing page optimization, each page is designed to engage your audience and gather leads.
Remember that a PPC or email lead generation CTA that only links back to your homepage will be inefficient and ineffective. According to Harris, landing page optimization to support such campaigns is a necessity to get the conversions you need. Landing page optimization best practices include A/B split testing your landing page elements to generate better results.
7. Email Marketing Lead Generation
“You can’t send an email to a random list and expect a positive return. Focus on curated lists over massive blasts,” said Harris. “Provide value to your readers, whether through coupons for eCommerce, interesting data or research for professional services.”
Email marketing lead generation is a great option for business-related activities. For instance, a B2B lead generation agency would prioritize email as a channel that businesspeople use often. Think about lead generation for real estate companies or mortgage companies – these require more details than the average offer, so email lead generation would work well here.
8. Conversion Rate Optimization
With all your lead generation tactics in place, your primary focus is still to get sales. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a process of leveraging and tweaking your strategies to improve results. Through CRO, you enable the traffic to your site from your social media lead generation or email lead generation to convert into leads. Among all CRO and landing page optimization best practices, a clear CTA is critical to bring your leads closer to the sale.
Harris advised, “A good overarching marketing and lead generation strategy should include at least six of these lead generation strategies, but it doesn’t stop here. When it comes down to specific campaigns, your approach will expand and vary based on your goals, target audience and chosen digital channels.”
Working With a Lead Generation Marketing Company
Now it’s time to take the lead generation tactics you’ve learned and put them into action. But it’s not exactly easy, and return on investment (ROI) is a valid concern. You can implement all the landing page optimization best practices out there and still not get the results you want. But anyone can find marketing lead generation success with the right B2C or B2B lead generation agency in your corner.
Lead generation is a lot to handle, and most companies don’t have specialized teams to cover all bases. As Harris says, a content writer can’t handle SEO and a link builder isn’t necessarily going to be a good copywriter. What’s more, it’s a costly exercise to hire talent for each individual strategy.
For these reasons, Harris says even large companies can find value in hiring agencies to further expand their bandwidth for short-term goals and more: “It’s more cost-effective to hire a lead generation company with the expertise to do it better, faster and for less upfront costs.”
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency is a lead generation marketing company and full-service digital marketing agency that has been in the business since 2005. Our lead generation agency has helped grow businesses of all sizes and industries through our results-driven lead generation services for more than 16 years.
Our goal is to deliver the highest quality leads at the lowest possible cost-per-lead. What makes our lead generation agency unique is our data-driven approach to minimizing your CPL and maximizing your ROI.
Contact us today to talk to a lead generation expert and get started on a winning lead generation marketing strategy.
