Have you noticed more brands are using social media to market their products? With 4.4-billion people using the Internet, it’s an obvious choice. Moreover, it’s more cost effective than traditional media and, depending on your lead generation strategies, you can target a specific audience and see how effective your campaign is in real time.
It’s easy to follow how other brands do their online marketing, but, sadly, not every marketing campaign fits how a certain business can manage their own leads. It’s a tricky business – online marketing that is. You can be wasting your client’s precious resources with bad marketing strategies and cold leads – especially if you’re a beginner.
If you want to learn the ins and outs of good online marketing, you need to take a good look at this beginner’s guide to generating leads online for a start.
What is a lead?
Before we dive into the specifics of the lead generation process, it’s best that we know first what a lead is – after all, this is a beginner’s guide. A lead is someone who is interested in your company’s product or services. In layman’s terms, a lead is a potential customer.
How can someone qualify as a lead?
You can tell if someone can qualify as a lead when they are considered more likely to apply for a position or avail your product or service. This can be done by collecting enough information to discern if the lead has a valid interest in your business. That person may have engaged or shown interest more than the others through an email, survey, inquiry, and the likes. The basis for identifying a qualified lead can change depending on the lead definition of your business created for your client.
What are lead generation and management?
Now that you know what a lead is, it’s time to know how to get a lead and what to do with it. Enter lead generation and management.
Lead generation is the process of luring people into someone naturally interested in your product or service. This can be anything from engaging written articles, entertaining videos, beautiful pictures, email blasts, surveys, ads, and even free items. Anything!
But what happens when leads start pouring in? You need to learn lead management. It’s the process of lead generation (capturing leads), tracking their activities (if possible), and giving them the attention they need to help them apply for something, make a purchase, or avail service from you.
Why do you need lead management?
A study from AutoDeal about online leads reveals that not all leads are equal, thus requiring businesses to take different strategies across different platforms to get high conversion rates. Knowing where the high-quality leads come from will help you allocate resources properly and maximize different channels. This way you will be able to guide your lead across the buying funnel, increasing the chances of sales conversion with as low pay-per-click (PPC) cost as possible.
So how exactly can you generate leads online? Well, among the many lead generation ideas out there, you can start with these six tips:
Be the market expert
When you think of brands such as Coca-cola, Colgate, and Lego, you instantly associate the names with their products. That’s because they’ve already established their authority in their respective market. If you want your product or service to become just like them, you can start by creating outbound content that provides important educational information. You don’t even have to mention your own product. Just make sure it has your logo to subtly establish your brand as a market leader or gain recognition.
Quality rather than quantity, at least in lead generating
The number of blogs, videos, infographics or email blasts you have doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make your audience curious. Create content that can engage your audience or, at least, have a lasting impression on them. The more hooked they are, the higher the chance of a sale.
Photo courtesy of Tracy Le Blanc via Pexels.com
Use all the tools that are available to you
As previously mentioned, no leads are equal. You need to keep in mind that not everyone can fit in one boat or would like to ride in it. Do multichannel marketing. Use various social media platforms, PPC ads or email marketing. Cover as many channels as you can to increase the chances of getting high-quality leads.
Photo courtesy of Lukas via Pexels.com
Study the data and your leads
Just because you’ve got a lead and turned it into a sale means you can just sit back and relax. As an online marketer, you need to take the time to study the data you have from a lead. Ask yourself questions like: What made them want to purchase your product? What kind of content made them interested? How did they find your business? Knowing these will help you create a solid campaign and get higher quality leads.
Conduct A/B test
Conducting A/B testing or split testing is a great way to improve your lead generation process. It’s basically testing two ways to achieve one goal to see which is better. This will help you determine what works and what doesn’t. Do this in your social media posts, email marketing, and landing pages, and do it often.
Then test some more
Don’t let the success or failure of your marketing campaign stop you from improving. The dynamics of people are a never-ending process of discovering things that will work to gain their attention. Moreover, your marketing budget will also change constantly. So you’ll have to keep working and studying to improve your campaign to get more data, high-quality leads, and, ultimately, increase profit.
Lead generation can be confusing and requires a lot of work. Knowing the basics can help you, your business and your clients reach greater heights when it comes to getting high-quality leads. Continue to work on your process and, hopefully, the results will follow.
