This introductory article discusses lead generation marketing that is the initiation of consumers' interest or inquiry into business products or services. Leads can be generated for purposes like list building, email marketing, e-newsletter, list acquisition, or sales leads.
Leads generation methodology typically falls under the umbrella of advertising, however, can include non-paid sources like organic search engine results or referrals from your customers.
Leads come from varied sources or activities — digitally via the internet, through individual referrals, telephone calls whether made by a company or telemarketers, advertisements, and events.
A 2015 study found that 89% of respondents cited email as the most-used channel for generating leads, followed by content marketing, search engine, and finally events. However, a study from 2014 found that direct traffic, search engines, and web referrals were the three most popular online channels for lead generation, accounting for 93% of leads.
Lead generation is a combination of activities where leads are moved through a purchase funnel commonly refer to as pipeline marketing. A lead usually requires to follow up on once you've reviewed and qualified it to have potential business value, you then convert the lead to a business opportunity. This opportunity goes through many sales stages before the deal is won.
Hence for your business, you should use omnichannel distribution to acquired leads online and traditional distributions channel offline to acquire leads to your business and run them through your purchasing pipeline to won a deal.
Type of leads
In the lead generation market, you have two types of leads that are sales leads and marketing leads.
Sales lead: comes from demographic criteria like FICO score in the United State(are numbers that represent the creditworthiness of a person, the likelihood that person will pay their debts)
income, age, household income, psychographic.
A bit about what is psychographics, in a nutshell, is a qualitative method used to depict traits of humans' psychological attributes. Mainly personality, values, opinions, attitude, interests, and lifestyles. Psychographics are applied to cognitive attributes like attitudes, interests, opinions, and beliefs as well as overt behavioural patterns. Because of the focus activities area of Psychographics, the factors are sometimes abbreviated to 'AIO variable'.
Psychographic studies of individuals or communities can be valuable in the fields of marketing, demographics, opinion research, prediction, and social research in general. As an example of its use in marketing: in the 2016 US presidential election and the opposing campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, with the latter using them extensively in microtargeting advertisements to narrow constituencies.
Hence, if the president team using psychographic data to segment their constituency, you should use them in your business to market yourself correctly to the right audience for your business segmenting yourself to narrow your target market.
Marketing leads: are typically brand-specific and are generated for a unique advert offer. In direct contrast to sales leads, marketing leads are sold only once. Because of transparency requirements for generating marketing leads, marketing leads are often mapped to their sources and optimised this way.
Another type of Sales Lead
Investor lead: An investor lead is the identity of a person or entity potentially interested in participating in an investment, and represents the first stage of an investment sales process. Therefore, investor leads should have some disposable income to participate in appropriate investment opportunities in exchange for return on investment in the form of interest, dividend, profit sharing, or asset appreciation.
Investor lead lists are normally generated through investment surveys, investor newsletter subscriptions, or through companies raising capital and selling the database of people who expressed an interest in their opportunity.
Investor Lead lists are commonly used by small businesses looking to fund their venture or simply needing expansion capital that was not readily available by mainstream banks and traditional lending sources.
If you want to increase the capital for your business, start by sourcing investor lead lists if you do not want to go through your mainstream bank or lending sources.
What are leads qualification?
Business leads tend to be grouped into segments to the level of qualification present within your business. there are two types that your business can consider for qualification.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): Typically those leads come from inbound channels such as web search, or content marketing, and have express interest in your company products or services. Such leads have yet to sales qualified(SQLs) by your sales team as they need to be screened first for appropriate sales qualifying criteria to be follow-up with, need, budget, capacity, time-frame, interest, or authority to purchase.
For example one of your staff in your organisation is interested in purchasing my playbook after seeing it advertised on my LinkedIn feed and visiting my online store playbook product page description but does not have the authority to purchase it. Hence my business obtained a qualified marketing leads but did not acquire a sales qualified yet.
The staff informed the manager of your organisation of their interest in the organisation purchasing for the sales staff team our marketing playbook The core assets of marketing revealed with its attached dual implementation support system The Cellar membership and explained how beneficial it will be for the sale team to upskill their marketing knowledge and learn how to use efficiently marketing strategies and tactics.
The manager thinks it a good idea but does not have the authorisation to purchase, and contact the director and start to explain to the director the benefit the sales team will gain if the organisation should purchase the playbook stating they can learn the following:
to use the core assets of marketing to their advantage
the art of persuasive communication
to nurture their audience and grow
effective communication and listening skills
to build trusted relationships with their prospects and customers
to find leads in their target market
to find sales opportunities...
The director is impressed with the opportunity presented and the potential increase in sales should the sales team staff applies the information of the book. The director liked the idea of The Cellar membership attached to the playbook and decided to purchase 100 copies for distribution within the organisation after looking at the organisation budget which permits such a purchase.
Our business as obtained sales qualified because an authoritative person agree to the purchase of our playbook The Core Asset of Marketing Revealed with its dual system attached - The Cellar
Here an idea, why not purchase our playbook for your sales teams to upskills and generate more qualified leads and sales for your organisation. The benefits of using our playbook are highlited clearly in our example. If you are an authority who has the purchase authorisation for your organisation consider this a very beneficial step up for your sales team or your business overall.
So you see some sales are not straightforward and required several processes to take place before the deal is won. However, qualified leads can be nurtured to ensure future sales.
Online lead generation methods
Online lead generation: Is mainly an internet marketing term that refers to the generations of prospect interest or inquiry in business products or services through the internet. Leads generated through this method are known as contacts that can be used for varied purposes list building, e-newsletter acquisition, reward program, loyalty programs, or membership club acquisition.
Listed below are the main online leads acquisition channels:
Social Media
Email Marketing
Online Advertising (Cost per mille - CPM, Cost per click - CPC and Cost per action - CPA)
A bit about costs per action advertising. CPA charges by the lead only. The price per lead can be bid up by demand. CPA is useful for marketers looking to pay only for specific actions. Online lead generation and CPA advertising are also known as affiliate marketing and in CPL (cost per lead) campaign, advertisers pay for interested leads — contact information of an individual interest in the advertiser's products or services.
CPL campaigns are more suited to brand marketers and direct response marketers looking to engage consumers at multiple touchpoints; by building a newsletter list, community site, reward program, or member acquisition program. However, in CPA campaigns, the advertiser typically pays for a complete sale by card payment.
The marketing industry recently experienced an increase in online lead generation as well as banner and direct response advertising that work off a CPL pricing structure. In the pay-per-acquisition(PPA) pricing model, advertisers only pay for qualified leads resulting from those actions, irrespective of the clicks or impressions that went into generating the lead. Today PPA advertising has an active role in online lead generation because of its advertiser-friendly pricing models and they are less susceptible to fraud and bots.
In conclusion
Direct marketing: is communicating an offer, directly to a pre-selected customer and supply a method for a direct response. for example my supplier often sends me in the post direct marketing of a product which may prick my interest and enclose a full working sample product in their sale letter with an easy to order form containing product sample ordering procedure with a payment structure. It is also known as direct response marketing amongst marketers. contrasting advertising which is of a mass-message nature.
At Girlfridayz we use direct marketing often mainly in November time by giving away a pen bearing our business detail with the simple message 'with the compliment of girlfridayz' and our details to the local communities directly or sales letter posted to prospect or customers.
As well as lead generation through online applications, direct marketing an offline lead generation methods a part of leads nurturing the process of continually contacting potential buyers whether to update the information provided or improve customers knowledge throughout the buying process through a set of actions that the marketing team makes in order to nurture the leads and they can be both manual or automatic processes.
If you enjoyed reading this blog post why not share it with your friends, colleagues, associate, and family members they might be appreciative of the information provided in this blog post.