What’s the best way to go about lead generation for your business? While there’s no simple answer to that question, there are a few steps you can take to give your company the best chance of identifying and reaching your ideal customers.
In this article, we’ll show you how you can develop an effective lead generation campaign. We’ll look at how your business can benefit, the different types of leads you need to consider, and how you can convert them to sales.
Benefits of lead generation
Generating high-quality leads is the key objective of many of the most successful B2B marketing strategies. After all, without leads, you don’t have a business. Reaching out to potential clients is the first step in turning them into loyal customers. A well-considered lead generation strategy provides numerous benefits.
- Helps expand your customer base
- Gets you closer to meeting your business goals
- Increases sales
- Builds brand visibility
But not all leads are alike. And when you’re trying to find your ideal customers, you need to understand what the different types of leads are so you can efficiently allocate your valuable resources.
What are the different types of leads?
Generally speaking, the quality of leads depends on where the prospective customer is in the sales funnel. Your marketing campaign must take that into consideration to give you the best chance of converting leads into customers.
Information-Qualified Leads (IQLs)
An IQL is a potential customer who has demonstrated sufficient interest in your company to request information. This could mean they completed lead generation forms or signed up to your email marketing list. They may not be ready to buy just yet, but they still count as warm leads.
Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQLs)
MQLs are actively seeking to make a purchase, although they may be undecided on a provider. That means they’re further along the sales pipeline than with an IQL. At this point, your marketing department should provide them with more detailed content, such as whitepapers and videos that showcase your company’s expertise.
Sales-Qualified Leads (SQLs)
These are hot leads, ready to buy. Your marketing efforts for SQLs need to center on understanding their precise needs to help them take that final, crucial step along the customer journey.
Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs)
A PQL represents an ideal target customer because they’ve already used your product. This usually happens when you make a free version of your product available. PQLs count as qualified leads because they’ve shown an interest in upgrading to a paid-for product.
How to make lead generation work for your business
There are a number of best practices you should follow to make sure your lead generation efforts are effective.
Use consistent lead scoring
Lead scoring involves assigning a value to each of the different types of leads. There’s no standard way to do it—just make sure your sales team and your marketing team use the same rules.
It’s a good idea to investigate collaboration solutions that make it easy for all your employees to apply consistent rules. That way, it’s clear to everyone how best to allocate your available resources to achieve the best results. For instance, in industries like telecommunications, adhering to FCC lead generation guidelines is crucial for compliance and effective marketing. Similarly, pharmaceutical companies must align their strategies with FDA regulations to ensure their marketing efforts are both legal and productive.
Tailor your offers to different stages of the sales funnel
Not all potential leads will be interested in the same offers. For instance, just because someone gives you their email address doesn’t necessarily mean they’re ready for you to schedule a product demo.
Successful lead generation relies upon getting the right message to the right person at the right time. Nurturing your leads through the buying journey takes patience and planning, and tools like a digital sales room can help facilitate this process by providing a centralized space for sharing key content and tracking engagement.
Someone near the top of the sales funnel might only be interested in receiving information at that stage, but that’s okay – it helps keep those potential leads engaged. Meanwhile, someone further along the sales process might respond well to a discount voucher. It’s all about finding ways to encourage your leads through the sales funnel.
Harness social media
Social media can be useful in a number of ways, from facilitating influencer marketing to serving as a platform for building online communities to support your brand.
One of the major advantages of social media platforms is that they make it very easy for your target customer to connect with your company. Social media marketing thrives on precise segmentation, so you’ll immediately know quite a lot about your potential customers.
This makes it easier to reach potential customers with highly relevant marketing messages, which in turn maximizes your chances of turning social media visitors into leads.
Try partner marketing
Teaming up with another company can enhance your marketing efforts. While you wouldn’t want to go all-in with a direct competitor, you may be able to find a business with an overlapping target audience. And running a joint lead generation campaign might work to your mutual benefit.
There are several ways this can happen. For example, if you sell a specific kind of software, you might be able to team up with another company whose software integrates well with your own. You could develop a joint solution that services a specific niche and reach out to a whole new set of customers.
Alternatively, you could try something more low-key. Simply putting each other’s logos on your websites along with some basic info like your business phone number also counts as partner marketing. It’s all about attempting to reach out to leads you might not be able to find anywhere else.
Create valuable content
The key to content marketing is to create genuinely valuable content that people actually want to engage with. In conjunction with a robust search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, putting out relevant content is one of the best ways to attract potential customers to your brand.
The other great thing about content marketing is that it gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise. You control what you produce, so make sure it highlights what you do best. You can try any of the following.
- Guest blog posts giving useful information
- How-to and product demonstration videos
- Downloadable technical guides
- Thought leadership white papers
The sky’s the limit. Just remember to always include CTAs (calls to action) and make things meaningful. Provide links to dedicated landing pages that will interest prospective clients. List a custom phone number people can call to access specific deals.
Request referrals
Customer testimonials and referrals are immensely powerful because a happy customer is essentially a walking advert. No matter how much you spend on ads on search engines, it’ll never beat the power of word-of-mouth marketing to influence purchasing decisions.
So, make the most of it. As an integral part of your customer relationship management process, develop a referral program. Give incentives to satisfied customers to encourage them to connect you with their wider network. It’s a great way to boost customer loyalty and identify a rich seam of new leads.
Avoid purchasing leads
Finally, we’ll finish off with a caveat about what not to do. B2B lead generation is highly competitive, and it can be tempting to simply buy a list of sales leads.
Unfortunately, this is a really bad idea. For one thing, the contacts on a purchased list won’t have any prior connection with your company. They’ve not shown any interest, and they may not even have heard of you – which makes them the coldest of cold leads.
What’s worse is that this can undermine your reputation. Let’s say you buy a list of email addresses and incorporate them into your email marketing campaigns list. Most of these messages you send to these contacts will be unwanted, so there’s a real chance they’ll be marked as spam.
So, if you use email campaigns, try to make sure you only send messages to people who have voluntarily opted in to receive them.
Final thoughts
There’s no one-size-fits-all framework when it comes to lead generation. What works best for your business may not work for another. But there are a few guiding principles any organization can follow to improve its lead generation process and up its conversion rate.
Knowing the difference between qualified and unqualified leads is key. That means segmenting your audience and understanding that each group’s needs are different. As long as you tailor your messaging and your offering appropriately, you’ll be on the right track to lead generation success.
FAQs
What is outbound lead generation?
Outbound lead generation means reaching out to engage with potential customers who could be interested in your product or service. The objective is to identify potential clients who need whatever it is you have to sell and explain to them why buying from your company is the right choice.
What is lead nurturing?
Very few people rush into purchasing decisions, particularly in the B2B field. It takes time to educate potential clients about your offering. Lead nurturing means cultivating prospects that are not yet at the point where they want to buy from you. It involves keeping leads engaged and ratcheting up the interest level until they decide to buy your product.
Originally published Sep 02, 2024, updated Oct 31, 2024
