Lead Sources For Steady Business Growth: How to Qualify and Engage Prospects - Gary Skentelbery

No business, whether in the B2B or B2C sphere, can survive without leads because they can help boost sales, bring revenue, and ensure stable business growth.

So, let's start with defining the term "lead". Then, we will discuss how to generate leads online, why lead generation is necessary, why it's important to have leads, how to label lead types, and why it's more efficient to have inbound leads than simply purchase them.

What Are Leads?

A lead is someone who, in some form, is interested in the products or services a certain business offers. Usually, companies and organizations get their leads' contact info after someone fills in a subscription form on their channel — often, in exchange for something, like a free trial or a discount. However, there is another way for companies to contact leads.

Let's just suppose you're doing a survey on how to tend to your car. A few days later, you get an email from an auto firm. This email explains how a certain company can help you look after your vehicle. This is a lot less intruding than when you have been simply taken out of the dark without knowing whether you were even interested in auto maintenance, right? In this case, you are a lead.

The business information collected from the surveys helps markets contact people who would actually be interested in their services and products. This means the company does not waste time and resources contacting people who are not interested in automotive services at all.

Leads need to turn from visitors into customers. Leads aren't equal, neither do they have the same qualification. Different leads call for different marketing strategies. So, let's describe the main lead types in more detail below.

MQL – Marketing Qualified Lead

MQLs are contacts committed but not ready to accept sales calls from any marketing team. MQL can be a contact that fills up an offer on your website's landing page. Usually, this means the lead is ready to get your marketing materials — no more, no less.

SQL – Sales Qualified Leads

Sales leads are people who seriously consider buying your product or paying for your service. An SQL can be a contact that completes a form inquiring about your service or product. Competent sales managers have to contact this lead as soon as possible, answering any questions this lead may have. Often, this results in a sale.

Product Qualified Lead (PQL)

PQLs are people who are already using the free trial of your product. The odds of turning a PQL into a paying customer are quite high, especially if marketers can comprehensively emphasize all the benefits of using a paid version.

The most efficient channels for lead generation

Even though the types of leads may vary, marketers can still find and engage them via the following channels:

Email marketing

Email marketing continues to be the most efficient lead generating channel, says recent Ascend2 analysis. This comes as no surprise to experienced marketers. Email marketing has been successful for 20 years and is among the many lead-generating channels. Some companies use email finder tools to get started with email marketing, easily available online these days. Email finders are a great solution for companies that cannot wait until they get enough customers to sign up for their newsletters. On the other hand, using email finders is way better than buying ready-made email lists because their quality is, to put it mildly, doubtful.

The only downside of using email finders is that quality tools, like ZoomInfo tend to be expensive. However, you can always find a better and more affordable alternative to expand your email list.

Content Marketing

The second most successful channel for lead generation is content marketing, says the same Ascend2 survey. However, the promotion of content is among the most difficult routes for generating leads because you need to make sure your information reaches your targeted audience. To attract leads with content, you need to create stuff your audience wants to access via Google searches or by browsing news organically feeds on the social media platforms they often use. Experimentation is the greatest strategy to get leads via content marketing. To evaluate what best connects with your clients and attracts them, create materials like blogs, infographics, videos, podcasts, or whitepapers. Track content performance with analytical techniques to determine what type of it you should sustain. Work to target your audience more efficiently and develop content that answers your visitors' questions. This strategy will eventually bring you more leads.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is another effective lead generation channel, even though it greatly depends on your business type and your product's primary consumers. Some companies believe social media marketing is incredibly beneficial, whereas others see low conversions from their efforts. However, the overall marketing efficiency through social media is usually a result of a good SMM strategy. Your marketing team needs an effective, fully implemented plan for social media if you want to produce useful leads through this channel.

Website landing pages

Your company's website is among the most effective tools for generating leads. It's not enough to have a responsive site to generate leads that your company requires for continuous growth. To engage customers, your website (and especially your landing pages) need optimization. To accomplish this, you need to improve the user experience (UX). Landing pages are essential to driving traffic to your website. This implies that page usability and design must be given a lot of consideration. Are they easy to navigate? Is website design up-to-date? Is loading time sufficiently fast? Do all links take visitors to correct pages? To engage leads on your website, you need to keep track of those issues constantly.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Next, there is SEO, another lead channel worth using because it drives natural, organic traffic to your website. If your site ranks high on Google, more people will see it. In turn, it will create more leads for your business. Of course, SEO campaigns take time, so do not expect to hit the first Google page in a week. To speed this process up, you can consider Pay Per Click ads to show on top of Google search results. Alternatively, you can optimize your website keywords for voice search as about 50% of all mobile users use voice search these days.

Lead generation channels are essential to ensure your company's future success. The most successful methods for lead generation include content marketing, landing pages, optimization, SEO, email marketing, and social media marketing. These bring you the greatest opportunities to have your lead bucket filled. However, you should not forget that marketing is about trial and effort, so timely analytics can be of great help — especially if your current budget is low and you need to focus on just one or two channels that work best for you.

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