Facilitating lead generation

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation consists of attracting and converting target audiences that have shown interest in your product or service. The goal is to guide prospects through the buyer’s journey to the end of the sales funnel (aka a closed deal). 

Content is one of the leading tools B2B marketers use to generate leads. This may consist of social media posts, blog posts, live events, and coupons. You use forms to capture leads that engage with the content and add them to a lead nurturing email campaign.

Why is Lead Generation Important for Business?

A company without a lead generation strategy is a sitting duck. Its revenue and growth will rely on the whims of a target audience that may or may not know it even exists. You’ll have no “leads” for sales to go to. 

And why are leads important? Because without them, it’s challenging to maximize growth and revenue. 

Lead generation is a process that builds visibility, credibility, trust, and interest from a specific group of people (potential leads). So by focusing on lead generation, it can help drive traffic from high-quality prospects. And with high-quality prospects comes high-value customers. 

In other words — more revenue for your business. With proper lead gen strategies, you can grow your business and the lifetime value of each customer.

What are the Benefits of Lead Generation?

1. Expand Your Market

When you started your business, you likely targeted a specific group of people. But is this the only sector you can and should be targeting? Lead gen enables you to learn about your prospects. 

Maybe you’re getting engagement from companies and job roles not included in your marketing campaigns. With lead gen, you’ll see this trend and can add them. 

Now, you have the opportunity to expand into new markets you otherwise wouldn’t have.

2. Grow Your Following

Content creation and communication are a big part of lead generation efforts. It consists of crafting quality content and starting conversations on social channels. The goal is to share valuable content with your target audience, so as to position you as a thought leader in the industry. 

In turn, this builds a community of professionals who like and follow your brand. Some will become customers and even more may turn into brand advocates. And who couldn’t use more of those?

3. Gather More Customer Reviews

Social proof is everything when it comes to convincing prospects to convert into customers. And there’s no better form of it than a review from a past client. 

But you don’t always get these automatically (even when your product or service is excellent). So it pays (literally) to ask your customers for testimonials and reviews. 

You can then use this within your marketing collateral, such as your website, emails, videos, social media posts, and infographics.

4. Boost Your Revenue

When done correctly, lead generation can maximize your brand’s ability for reaching target prospects. This requires using the right messaging, offer, and content to generate interest from these specific groups. 

In doing so, you’ll find it easier to capture the attention of qualified leads, which makes it easier for sales to convert them. The revenue growth potential is great, especially when you’re focusing on interests and pain points your audience cares about.

5. Generate Business Opportunities

Lead gen doesn’t only help with finding prospects. It can also present business opportunities. Maybe a non-competing brand in your industry reaches out to host a webinar together. And by teaming up, you gain access to their audience (and vice versa). 

6. Improve Lead Quality

Creating content and dumping it onto the web can get you traffic. Maybe even a ton of it. But if your visitors aren’t converting into leads, then it’s a wasted effort. With lead generation, you’re taking a highly targeted approach to content creation. Everything you write for your brand — from the website and email copy to social media and blog posts — needs to cater to these specific groups. 

This makes it easier to create topics and messages that resonate with each audience. And by doing this, you’ll improve the quality of your leads, which improves conversions and sales.

7. Build Visibility and Awareness

Maybe you’re a startup that recently launched without much buzz. Or you’re an established business that’s operated behind the scenes for years. And now you want to get more eyes (and wallets) focused on your company. Creating visibility and awareness is vital to turning the tide in your favor. You can do this by creating content your audience cares about and sharing them on the channels they frequent.

8. Eliminate or Reduce Cold Calling (and Emailing)

When you have hot leads coming to you, why continue using unnecessary outbound methods like cold calling and emailing? This will free up the time of your salespeople so they can focus on closing more deals with leads they know want your product.

9. Automate Lead Management

There are now software tools you can use to automate lead generation and management processes. This includes tools like email marketing software, CRMs, and customer data platforms (CDP) and Sending Platforms. By implementing them into your lead generation strategy, you can simplify and hasten your pipeline. 

For example, your CDP captures information about leads. Then leads are segmented into a nurturing campaign carried out by your email marketing tool. Then your CRM keeps track of all communications between leads and your business. By making these tools accessible to marketing, sales, and customer support teams, you can synchronize data and initiatives. 

Trending Lead Generation Strategies

So what are some of the ways you can adopt lead generation within your marketing campaigns? There are several trending strategies brands are using today. Here’s a look at some of them:

• Personalizing all marketing and channels using behavioral lead data and predictive scoring. 
• Tracking website performance and analytics to identify the source of traffic and leads. 
• Optimizing your website for conversions by using the right copy and message to resonate with target groups. 
• Using automation tools to simplify and speed up lead generation and sales. 
• Implementing interactive content to engage business leads on your website. 
• Incorporate real-time responses using live chat and chatbots. 
• Adopt video content in the form of webinars, tutorials, product demos, and animated visuals. 

The methods you use should align with your sales teams. By combining the efforts of marketing and sales, you can achieve greater results. For example, sales should share intel about the questions, concerns, and hurdles prospects have. Then marketing can turn around and develop marketing content that addresses these issues. This way, leads are prepared to make a purchasing decision by the time they reach your salespeople.

How to Engage and Utilize Influencers

Maybe you have a new startup company and haven’t yet built-up a substantial customer base. Maybe your small company has been around for years, but you don’t know who your influencers are or never thought much about utilizing influencers.

While it may seem like your company doesn’t have an influencer, take another closer look. As you’ll see later in this article, your brand has multiple influencers right under its nose that you may not be aware of.  Regardless of whether the influencers are a big name with hundreds of thousands of followers or an unknown average joe with less than a hundred followers, every company has at least one influencer.

• Identifying who your influencer (s) is/are is the first step. Once you know who they are, you can come up with an influencer marketing plan to reach out to them and get them more involved in your lead generation.
• Utilizing influencer marketing for lead conversion and for generating marketing qualified leads leverage the influencer’s number of followers, the authentic, trustworthy, regular engagement between influencers and their followers and the expertise and knowledge of the influencer in order to amplify the company’s image, brand and messaging.

Influencer marketing strategies may seem straightforward, but they involve much time and thought. You’ll need to communicate with the influencer and come up with some sort of perks and content to get them interested. Keep in mind that the influencer has taken time to create their following and if you request irrelevant, salesy content, the influencer may choose to turn your offer down.

If you’re not sure who the influencers for your company are, there are some tools available to help. Some of the top ones include: Buzzsumo, Klout, Kred, Revfluence and Traackr.

• Utilize Employees

Your company’s employees are some of the best influencers you have. Not only are they passionate about your brand, they are also familiar with how your company’s products  and services work. Try to set up an employee reward system that encourages employees to share pre-written content about the company on their social media channels.

• Use Customers to Advocate for Your Brand and Products

Happy, satisfied customers are an invaluable asset and resource your company can use for its influencer marketing strategies. Instead of looking for only the popular, most active influencer, spread the involvement around to multiple happy, loyal customers. Chances are, your brand influencers are a part of this customer group anyways.

Create a streamlined process through which you can ask customers to share their experience with your product, service or brand via print such as an email or in a short video. You can use these materials in one’s marketing and sales material to garner marketing qualified leads that result in better lead conversions.

• Look for Relevant Micro-Influencers

It is the dream of every company to get endorsed by some uber famous influencer who has millions for fans and subscribers. However, an influencer with a bigger following isn’t always better nor is it always realistic to go after these mega influencers. Instead, aim for “micro-influencers” who have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. These influencers don’t have a large number of followers, but they are better and more personally engaged with their followers. These “micro-influencers” have better engagement rates which can make them a more valuable lead generation tool for your company.

Before you go and market every one of your company’s “micro influencers,” do some research about their relevancy. These smaller influencers have a distinct personality, passion, style and type of content shared with their audience. They are close to their audience and followers and when they start featuring unrelated content that is merely for advertising and sales, they can lose some of their hard-earned followers.

Look for “micro influencers” whose passions, interests and values align with those of your brand, products and services. Additionally, do some research on each influencer to validate their expertise.

• Allow the Influencer to Use Their Unique Voice

Followers have come to love and expect certain content from an influencer and influencers know what kind of content interests and is of value to their followers. To boost your pipeline sales and lead conversions, let influencers craft and share your company’s sales and marketing content. Simply inform the influencer of your brand’s objectives and expectations and let them do the rest. It’s a great way your company and the influencer can build and maintain trust with followers and provide authentic, relevant content followers would enjoy.

• Utilize Influencer Reviews

When influencers speak, their followers listen. This is because influencers are seen as authentic, trustworthy and credible. If an influencer goes public with a glowing review of your brand, product or service, share the heck out of it. You can also encourage influencers to write positive reviews by offering free samples for the influencer to try or ask for affiliate links or discount codes when your brand is mentioned in a blog post. With these links, the influencer can also get a cut of the sales, thereby solidifying your company’s relationship with the influencer.

• Do Some Guest Blogging

Swap content and space on your company’s and influencer’s websites and social media channels through guest blogging. Work with the influencer to come up with blog topics that will resonate and interest the influencer’s followers. Conversely, reach out to influencers and ask them to write a blog post on your company’s website. Inform them of the relevancy and similarity of content your brand produces and what they provide to their followers. Give the influencer free-reign on the topic, length and detail of the post, granted it is on a topic that is relevant to your brand. After you put the post on your website, share it on social media.

• Collaborate With Influencers on a Piece of Content

Whether it’s an interview video, a co-written blog post or ebook, you can get your influencers involved in a way that picks their brains and lets them demonstrate their passion, knowledge and expertise. After all, when it comes to the online world, content is king and if you want your pipeline sales to improve, working with influencers to help produce informative, interesting and fresh content is a must.

Conducting influencer marketing is a great way to utilize a valuable resource to improve your company’s pipeline sales and lead conversion as well as boost the number of marketing qualified leads. There are numerous tactics you can utilize to involve your company’s influencers.