Lead generation
Lead generation means something different depending on the type of business you run and the industry that you’re in
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the process or pipeline for converting anonymous web traffic into contacts so you or your marketing team can continue proactively marketing to those contacts in the future. For small businesses selling services, collecting qualified leads and building an email list ensures a steady stream of future customers for you or your sales team.
But you’re not just collecting a visitor’s contact information. You’re connecting with your target audience and providing them with something of value in exchange for their information. Once visitors have shown interest and requested to join your email list, you’re in a position to nurture those leads until they’re ready to buy actively
What is the purpose of lead generation?
Where is lead generation in the marketing journey?
It’s often the second stage of ‘inbound’ marketing. It happens after you’ve pulled traffic to your page and before you convert them into a viable potential customer.
It’s the process of turning traffic into interested prospects.
Here’s what the typical process looks like:
- A web user sees one of your marketing materials, like a paid advertisement, social media page, or blog.
- In that ad, they see a CTA (call to action) that encourages them to take a non-committal action. (“Learn more,” “keep reading,” or “get this offer” are pretty common CTA examples.)
- The CTA brings them to a landing page. This landing page is designed and optimized for lead generation by offering a lead magnet.
- On the landing page, the visitor fills out a form to receive the offered lead magnet.
- Now they’re a lead!
Landing pages are the most common and effective means of digital lead generation, but you can also do a similar process with website pages. We’ll talk about both landing pages and website pages in this guide.
Why is lead generation so important?
What are the benefits of lead generation?
- It gives you a higher ROI on the resources you’ve invested in attracting traffic.
- You can target interested buyers (sales-qualified leads) more effectively than you can with cold calling strangers.
- You grow your list of leads and customers. Leads are yours to keep. Your contact list is highly valuable and can even be part of your business’s valuation.
- You can collect key information about prospects that helps you better tailor your marketing campaigns, sales tactics, and even your products/services to them.
Strangers seldom become customers after one visit or interaction with a brand. They need multiple impressions from your brand to make a purchasing decision.
If you don’t have your visitor’s information, you lose all control over these impressions. You have to cross your fingers and hope they’ll find their way back to your website or social media page (which is rare).
But if you grab the visitor’s information, you control their future impressions of your business, both in quality and quantity. You can send them more offers, remind them how great your brand is, and pull them further through your sales funnel.
How to improve your lead generation
Aside from driving more traffic to your site, there are many ways to generate more leads.
Since content is often a key driver of leads, experiment with different pieces of content, placements, and lead magnets to determine which type performs best. This typically involves identifying your key buyer personas and creating compelling, useful content to drive high-quality leads.Beyond incentives, a key part of the conversion funnel that can be optimized is the lead form.
Although it is beneficial from a business standpoint to collect as much information as possible about a prospect, more form fields reduce form submissions. Experiment with different form lengths to determine what is optimal for lead capture and lead information.
Many other aspects of a site can be optimized as well, from having a clear design design to making the site distraction-free and easy to navigate so that users can easily get to the content you want them to see. Exploring data in an analytics platform can help visualize how potential leads navigate your site. For more lead generation inspiration, see our post on 50 B2B lead generation ideas.