What is Lead Generation?
If you want to learn what is lead generation marketing and what are the proper strategies to make your campaigns as effective as possible, you’ve come to the right place. Today we’re going to answer the following questions:
- What is a lead?
- What is lead generation?
- What are the different types of leads?
- What are good strategies for lead generation marketing?
Let’s get started.
What Is A Lead?
A lead is someone who shows interest in doing business with a company, but nowadays leads are no longer generated through cold calls or by contacting the client first (outbound lead), they are actually generated when the person reaches out to the business first. This is called an inbound lead.
What Is Lead Generation?
According to Hubspot, lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers and clients to your business and increasing their interest through direct communication. This is key for expanding your customer base.
Proper lead generation means a potential client has submitted their contact information through their own voluntary action, such as signing up for a newsletter or a trial period, with the ultimate goal of converting this prospect into a paying customer.
Let’s go over the several types of leads.
Sales Qualified Lead
A sales-qualified lead is a person who has expressed direct interest in purchasing a product from a company. They can be acquired by responding to advertisements to ask about your product.
Service Qualified Lead
Service-qualified leads are potential clients who have contacted your service team and expressed interest in becoming a paying customer or who are existing customers and wish to expand their service or purchase additional products.
Marketing Qualified Lead
Marketing-qualified leads are individuals who have shown interest in your marketing efforts and campaigns but have not expressed interest in direct communication.
Marketing-qualified leads have the potential to be converted into sales-qualified leads or service-qualified leads in the future.
Product Qualified Lead
Product-qualified leads have used your products in the past, through friends, family, or a trial period, and now show interest in purchasing your product for themselves.
These types of leads are most common within companies that offer trial versions of their products, such as trial versions of software with limited features with the option to upgrade to the full version of their product in the future.
Lead Generation Marketing Strategies
The first step towards proper lead generation marketing is identifying your target audience. This is done by understanding the demographics and psychographics of the audience that would find the most value in your product or service.
The second step is developing marketing content that provides value to your target audience in the form of entertainment or information and encourages them to share the content with their peers. Examples of this type of content could be social media campaigns, blogs, or video content on Youtube. Content writing services are a great option for creating consistent high-quality content that can effectively reach your audience.
Influencer sponsorships are a great method of lead-generation marketing, and according to Tomoson, nearly 60% of marketers plan to expand their influencer marketing budgets.
In her interview with Adobe, Kindra Lewis explained that content syndication is also a great way to acquire leads.
Content syndication is the process of republishing your content to other websites, and can be done through channels such as guest posts on other websites. Some sites specifically focus on syndicated content and making an effort to pitch to these platforms can be a great way to boost your reach.
Key Takeaways
- Outbound lead generation strategies are no longer as popular.
- An inbound lead is an individual who has shown interest in your company’s product or service.
- There are four types of leads. Sales-qualified leads, marketing-qualified leads, service-qualified leads, and product-qualified leads.
- Having a proper strategy is key for effective lead generation marketing.
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