What is Lead Generation in Digital Marketing?
In a nutshell, digital marketing has always worked under the premise of creating enough awareness and traffic regarding specific products or services. Gone are the days when traditional marketers would knock on your doors, post fliers, or give you a call. Nowadays, it’s about making digital approaches to entice your target customers to patronize your offer. One of the most effective ways is through lead generation.
Lead generation has many facets and must be fully understood to grasp the concept. If you want to know more about this and how to use it in your business, you’re in for a treat. This article comprises things you need to understand about lead gen and how to leverage its fullness.
What is a Lead?
Now, before discussing lead generation, we must first define what a lead is. A lead refers to people or groups of people who are interested in what you’re offering. This can be measured by the engagement and traffic in your content. Simply liking, sharing, or subscribing to your page or site automatically makes these people your target prospects.
Identifying your leads is the first step to bringing new customers in. This process is similar to identifying who your target demographic is. However, honing in on your information is a more specific method since it points to specific people or groups.
In contrast to giving cold calls, identifying leads is much more tactical since these people already know about your products or service. Not to mention that the best thing about leads is these prospects are the ones who decide to see more of what you’re offering in your brand.
What is Lead Generation in Digital Marketing?
Lead Generation is the process of bringing in potential customers to your brand to convert them into customers. Marketing methods such as blogs, social media posts, SEO and other inbound methods, contribute to bringing potential customers to your business. The key is to create captivating content and cap it off with a hard-to-resist call to action (CTA).
Call-to-action statements tell visitors what to do next and are usually found at the end of blogs or within social media promotional ads. When prospects click on the recommended landing page from the CTA, they are well on their way to becoming leads.
However, getting the prospects to click on what you want them to click isn’t the end. You still have to entice them to sign up for newsletters or subscribe to your website for new articles. Once you accomplish that, you have successfully generated leads.
What are the different types of Leads?
Marketing-Ready Lead (MRL)
Marketing Qualified leads have interacted with your marketing team’s initiatives but still need to be prepared to be contacted by sales. An example of an MQL is someone who completes a form on a landing page.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
Sales Qualified Leads have demonstrated specific actions that show a clear interest in becoming paying clients. An example of an SQL is someone calls to inquire about your product or service. Your sales and marketing teams can determine the exact definition of what qualifies as an SQL.
Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
Product Qualified leads have tried your product and displayed actions that suggest a desire to become a paying customer. PILs typically exist for businesses that provide a product trial or a free or limited version of their product, with opportunities to upgrade – this is where your sales team plays a role.
Why Do You Need Lead Generation?
We’ve already talked about lead generation for a while, but we have yet to discuss its benefits. Well, fret no more. Here are the top reasons why you need lead generation in your business.
1. Builds Visibility and Awareness
Lead generation introduces your brand to your market. This is helpful if you’re a startup business or recently decided to bring your brand online. By doing lead generation, there’s a high possibility that you will get more eyes on your brand, which will become paying customers.
There will also be a considerable chance that your business will soon skyrocket and compete with other stable companies. All you need to do is create and share content that will help your target audience, and soon the tide will turn in your favor.
2. Demonstrates Return on Investment (ROI)
Return on investment (ROI) is what businesses look for to balance risks vs. rewards. Company owners are investing in various strategies to market their products or services.
That’s where lead generation becomes a game-changing factor. Because unlike traditional marketing, it shows reports and other proof that the strategy is effective. When you’ve created compelling content and other ads, prospects responding positively can be expected and scaled.
Why is Lead Generation in Digital Marketing Important?
Since digital marketing is what most brands rely on right now, it’s essential to understand how effective lead generation is in making digital marketing a go-to tactic for enticing new customers.
That said, here are the reasons why lead generation is essential in digital marketing.
1. Brings in the Right Customers
The best thing about lead generation is your prospects take part on their own accord. They were intrigued by your posts or ads and clicked on your CTA, so it was their choice to learn more about your company.
When your prospects are already interested, the effort you will exert to get them more interested is little to none. You’ve already wowed them once, so it doesn’t take much to wow them again and finally seal the deal.
2. Collecting Data is Easier
As mentioned earlier, knowing your target demographic gives you an edge over the competition. Lead generation allows you to gather various information about your usual prospects through Digital Marketing Analytics. In turn, you can use the information you’ve collected to tailor-fit your subsequent successful lead-generation campaigns to your target demographic.
Lead generation is one way of knowing what type of people usually clicks on your marketing materials, improving your future marketing tactics. Nowadays, information plays a huge part in doing business, so having valuable information about these things will give you an edge against your competitors.
3. Introduces Lead Automation
Another game-changing fact about lead generation is that it allows you to do things automatically. This can happen through various automation tools such as CRM and email marketing software. If you find the right tool for your brand, getting leads and making them trust your brand will hasten and become much more effective.
You can also synchronize other tasks, which makes generating reports more accurate. This will help your small business scale and adjust your marketing strategies.
Different Types of Lead Generation Marketing
Suppose you’re pondering if lead generation will be effective in your marketing efforts. Ponder no more since this can be accomplished in many ways. Yes, you don’t need to stick to one process. In fact, lead generation marketing tactics keep on increasing over time. To fully grasp these concepts, check out these types of lead generation strategies.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search engine optimization (SEO) strives to drive website traffic and generate high quality leads organically. By using commonly searched keywords and strategically placing them on your articles, your website will achieve a respectable ranking on search engines, making it easier for your target leads to reach you.
To give you a clear perspective, when people search for specific keywords, they mostly click on the first few pages displayed on search engine results. Therefore, aiming to rank on the first page will benefit you in gaining more website or page visitors.
Paid Media
Paid lead generation is maximizing the usage of ads on social media sites and other major platforms. Instead of waiting for your posts to gain traction organically, like in SEO, paid lead generation is a great way to get people invested in your offer.
However, as its name suggests, you must invest in these marketing tactics. Furthermore, you must customize and target appropriately to reach a desirable result.
Email Marketing
Email lead generation works if you already have a good grasp of identifying your target demographic. Once you know your primary audience and their pain points, you can craft content they will find appealing.
The goal is to get these prospects to sign up and receive regular emails from you. This process is called customer care. If you nurture your customers and show them that you understand where they’re coming from through your emails, they will be ready to take the next step. It will also help if you entice them with freebies and other promotional digital items upon signing up. Email Marketing is one of the most cost-effective lead-generation strategies to help you generate leads even on a low budget.
Social Media Marketing
Of course, who would want to avoid leveraging the power of social media platforms? Optimizing your profile on various platforms, creating compelling content, and having clear, easy-to-understand calls to action make a huge difference. You can take things further by having automated chatbots that answer queries from your visitors. Running various contests is also an excellent way to attract more people to your company and generate leads.
Social media lead generation takes advantage of the number of people using these platforms and tries to get people interested by having creative strategies. What’s left for you to do is search what’s the best platform to use and where your desired customers usually hang out.
Content Marketing
Lead generation through content marketing refers to creating compelling content that will spread throughout different platforms. The first step is identifying which platforms are famous for your target demographic.
Once you know the most used platforms by your prospects, you can tailor-fit your content to these platforms. Social media sites often use videos and photos, and webpages use blogs as marketing tools.
Creating compelling content that speaks to your prospects is critical to generating leads. You have to be creative in which tools to use and optimize them properly. And, of course, create your content to offer solutions to your target market.
Conclusion
Lead generation is a much more organic way of gaining new customers. If you were to pit this method against traditional marketing, you would prove that it’s much more scalable and easier to track.
Furthermore, lead generation and digital marketing are like two peas in a pod. Your goal is to entice people interested in what you offer by organically bringing them to your brand’s platforms.
