Lead Generation

A potential customer in your target audience who is interested in purchasing the product or service you offer is referred to as a “lead” in the digital marketing world. Now, to capture this lead – meaning you make them take the first step in your sales cycle – marketing agencies see value in employing different marketing tactics otherwise known as lead generation marketing.

Ok, let’s break it down a little more. To put it simply, leads are potential customers who are interested in your products and services. To capture these leads, we leverage many marketing tactics that will make the user sign up for something online by completing a form, contacting the business directly, or even walking into the store.

If your business is not doing this now, you have been missing out on a big chunk of revenue. Well, it’s simple. All businesses need customers to grow. And to get those customers, they need to market to potential customers first and gain their attention. This is where lead generation marketing comes into play.

These leads can then be passed on to the sales team to convert them into buying customers. This generally involves adding them to an email list for further nurturing. And with advancing technologies, business intelligence software can even track your product demand and customer trends from the lead generation marketing data.

Rather than being one or the other, lead generation is a part of both sales and marketing. While most leads are generated through a form of marketing, they are generated to help drive sales and increase business opportunities.

Unfortunately, in some situations, there can be mild hostility and tension between the sales and marketing teams within a business. This can be down to a crossover of roles and responsibilities, disagreement of methods, a lack of communication, or unaligned strategies.

To create an effective lead generation process from start to finish, sales and marketing need to work together in harmony rather than constantly clashing with one another.

When creating a lead generation strategy that brings together your sales and marketing teams, you need to develop a clearly laid out, and easily understandable process that both teams can use to effectively work together.

This process should include:

• A clearly mapped out document explaining which teams and individuals hold certain roles and responsibilities.
• A clear and quick method of communication that both teams can access.
• A clear understanding of when information needs to be shared/discussed between departments and the individuals who should be addressed.

An effective lead generation strategy should be able to segment sales and marketing whilst simultaneously bringing them together. This can take a good amount of work to get right, but when done correctly your process for generating new business will be far smoother and more efficient.

Gone are the days when your customers would see your ad in the local newspaper and call you with inquiries about a particular product. The expansion of technology and advertising platforms has allowed customers to shift from traditional media outlets like newspapers and television to social media and digital websites.

This has given rise to various advertising and marketing platforms online. From selling on social media giants like Facebook and Twitter to local online stores with delivery options on Shopify. It sure is a marketer’s dream with so many options to choose from – for lead generation marketing of all sorts.

Below are some lead capturing tactics we can help you scale your business with:

• Capture leads through website forms
• Generate leads through Google Ads
• Using direct emails to capture new potential leads
• Use email lists to capture new leads
• Leveraging social media to capture new leads

Marketers and salespeople alike want to fill their sales funnel — and they want to fill it quickly. Enter: The temptation to buy leads.

Buying leads, as opposed to organically generating them, is much easier and takes far less time and effort, despite being more expensive. But, you might be paying for advertising anyway … so, why not just buy leads?

First and foremost, any leads you've purchased don't actually know you. Typically, they've "opted in" at some other site when signing up for something, and didn't actually opt into receiving anything from your company.

The messages you send them are therefore unwanted messages, and sending unwanted messages is intrusive. (Remember that disruptive call I got when I was trying to eat my spaghetti? That's how people feel when they receive emails and other messages from people they didn't ask to hear from.)

If the prospect has never been to your website and indicated an interest in your, products or services, then you’re interrupting them ... plain and simple.

If they never opted in to receive messages specifically from you, then there's a high chance they could flag your messages as spam, which is quite dangerous for you. Not only does this train to filter out emails from you, but it also indicates to their email provider which emails to filter out.

Once enough people flag your messages as spam, you go on a "blacklist," which is then shared with other email providers. Once you get on the blacklist, it’s really, really hard to get back off of it. In addition, your email deliverability and IP reputation will likely be harmed.

It's always, always, always better to generate leads organically rather than buy them.