Companies who aim for business success dedicate large amounts of resources to lead generation. Acquiring leads is one of the main objectives of any small and large business.
The fact of the matter is, if prospects are not ready to engage your services or buy your products, it would be quite a challenge for you to close those deals and make sales.
Basically, any good leads are prospects that have a particular interest in your service or product and are in the market to make a service engagement or make a purchase. As you read on, we will discuss how these high-quality leads can assist companies such as yours in boosting their sales and a return on investment (ROI).
Sadly, there are still companies that rely on and choose to go after quantity over quality when it comes to leads.
With the advent and popularity of modern marketing tools, social media platforms, and software, modern marketers today are now able to fine-tune their skills in acquiring high-quality leads. The main challenge a skilled marketer now has is on how to determine which of their leads is of high quality and are ready to commit and buy.
What is Lead Generation?
Anyone who shows interest in a company’s service or product is considered a lead. However, not just anyone and/or everyone can be considered a lead, for the simple reason that people have varied tastes, preferences, and needs.
A lot of businesses make a huge mistake and try in marketing to everyone, when what they should focus on people who are genuinely interested in what the company has to offer.
The process of attracting people and converting them into someone who has an interest in your company’s products and/or services is lead generation.
What is the Purpose of Lead Generation for Businesses?
Consider this, a business without any leads or a company that does not put to generate them is a company that will not have a wide opportunity to convert prospects into customers. And we need not stress what befalls businesses who have little to no customers.
The importance of lead generation for businesses is that it increases sales and expands the businesses’ customer base needed to grow. Though we must stress that lead generation is a time-consuming and difficult process, but it doesn’t need to be.
Gone are the days when companies rely on plain intuition; they now need to develop strategies for the types of customers they are trying to, or want to, attract. Without such strategies in place, a company will be unsure as to what kind of people it should be targeting.
Creating leads is vital for new businesses. Why? As we mentioned above, the importance of leads is that without them people can’t be converted into customers. And without any revenue coming in from these conversions, it will be quite difficult to keep your doors open and compete in the market, regardless how good your services and products may be.
It would be remiss of us if we don’t say that there are various ways of generating leads, but not all existing methods work equally well for different companies with varying business goals and targets.
For product and service-based businesses, one of the best tools you and your marketers can employ, as far as sales are involved, are lead magnets. Lead magnets assists your potential customers and consumers to acquire a ‘task’ of how you can help and support them for FREE while learning some value-added information that will help them immediately.
Your free resources bridge the gap between awareness to the trust stage that can ultimately lead to a higher percentage of closing of more deals
We will discuss this further in the next section immediately below.
What is a Lead Magnet?
Even if you’ve never heard of the term “lead magnet,” there’s a good chance that you’re already familiar with them. Lead magnets are extremely common with Inbound Marketing for one simple reason – they work very well.
A lead magnet, at its core, is anything of value that you can exchange for a prospect’s contact information. The primary goal of a lead magnet is to maximise the number of targeted leads you are getting in exchange for an offer.
If you simply ask for a prospect’s email address without offering anything in return, you won’t be able to get as many addresses as you will if you offer an attractive trade. For some types of prospects, it can be a piece of content that educates them in your niche or simplifies the work that they do. In others, the opportunity for discounts or free stuff might be more compelling.
For a marketer, a lead magnet makes it easier to conduct their job, and it makes their efforts more effective.
How Businesses Increase Sales Using Lead Magnets
In the real world, when you get the chance to meet someone new, and you want to interact with them again in the future, a reciprocal exchange of contact information is commonplace.
That is what the beginning of your relationship with a new potential online customer is like. The prospect becomes aware of your business, and you learn for the first time that they may be interested in your business and what you can offer.
What you will need from this prospect to complete the introduction process is that you’ll want your prospect to provide you with their contact details, usually, their email address. Once you get hold of it, you will then be able to reach out to them with email marketing initiatives that are designed specifically to turn them into customers.
However, if you can’t offer something of value in exchange for a prospect’s email address, the process falls apart. Lead magnets are crucial to email marketing, and without a good one, you won’t get past the introduction process.
By providing exclusive content, often referred to as “gated content” that is only available in exchange for a prospect’s email address, you imply that the content has more value than your other content.
It may seem like an oversimplification, but it is within human nature to desire or want something that is being withheld. That compulsion will drive the prospect more if the true value of your offering is evident. Done right, you will be able to acquire a massive number of email addresses in a short amount of time.
Building your customer base by trading valuable content for email addresses has been proven to be a successful strategy. And with a larger customer base, increase in sales is much more highly probable.
More Than Just a List of Names
Leads generated by marketing are no longer an indiscriminate list of names sent to sales. It is now possible to generate leads by attracting potential customers using a variety of methods, providing them with helpful information, building and nurturing relationships, and evaluating which leads are ready to make a purchase.
You may not realise it, but you are already generating leads – though you might just don’t know it. The process of getting in touch with people who might be interested in your offerings begins the moment someone visits your website or hears about your product or through word-of-mouth.
If you want to see an increase in your sales revenue, start by getting in touch with us at The Growth Manager today. We can help you get started with creating effective digital strategies with our Business Development Mentoring Program that generate more qualified leads for your business. Contact us today and let’s get started.
