Generating leads is the first point of sales for every business. Whether online or offline, lead generation is important and has proven to help businesses overtime.

Without lead generation, a business is as good as non-existent. Which is why in this post, we’ll be looking at what lead generation is and effective strategies for generating leads.

What is A Lead?

A lead in the marketing world is a potential customer who has shown interest in your product or service.

The individual shows an interest by his willingness to provide contact information such as an email address or a phone number.

An individual interested in knowing more about your business is also classified as a lead.

Once you generate a lead, it is important to nurture the person to avoid losing them to your competitors.

For instance, when you put out engaging and relevant content for your audience and you receive a message from a potential customer, that person is officialy a lead and should be nurtured properly in order to move from a lead to a loyal customer.

We have different types of leads based on their level of awareness and their level of interest. Let’s look at the different types below.

Types of Leads Based on Level of Awareness

1. Cold leads

Cold leads are individuals who have zero knowledge about you or your product.

A prospect who has no idea about your product or service is a cold lead.
You can generate cold leads through outbound marketing.

2. Warm leads

An individual who shows an interest in your business without showing any readiness to buy, is defined as a warm lead.

These leads are individuals who have interacted with your brand in one way or the other.

For instance, a warm lead can be a social media follower, someone who has asked about your services or a prospect that hopped on your free consultation or webinar.

When an individual shows an interest in your business, you need to follow up in order to convert him to a hot lead.

3. Hot leads

These type of leads are individuals who have actively shown interest and are considering to make a purchase. Hot leads are individuals who are ready to make a purchase. When nurtured right, this type of lead will become a customer

Types of Leads Based on Level of Engagement

1. Information Qualified Leads (IQLs)

An information qualified lead is an individual that has demonstrated interest in your content and is moved to the conversation stage where they get pre qualified.

2. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

These types of leads have engaged with your marketing effort such as attending a webinar or filling out a Google contact form. These types of prospects are deemed to become customers seeing as they’ve taken the effort to engage with your business.

3. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)

Sales-qualified leads are prospects considered ready to be engaged for direct sales. This is because of the level of interest they’ve shown and how they fit the ideal customer profile.

4. Product Qualified Leads (PQLs)

When a prospect engages with your product and shows a certain level of interest, he is classified as a product qualified lead. This kind of lead is a person who uses a free trial of your product and starts asking about the paid one.

5. Service Qualified Leads (SQLs)

These category of leads are individuals who have shown an interest in your service. This could be in the form of a free consultation to them for their business.

Once an individual shows an interest in your business, it is necessary to follow them up to understand what their pain points are, group them properly and then nurture them to become customers.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is a marketing strategy where a business or a brand attracts, converses and converts a potential customer into a buyer.

The process of attracting leads for your business involves different marketing tactics that we will be looking into.

Strategies for Effective Lead Generation

There are different strategies that a business can put in place to generate leads. These strategies are important as they help you to gain traction for your business.

When done right, a business can generate high quality leads that will eventually turn to high paid customers. Below are the best strategies for generating leads.

Inbound lead generation.

This is also known as inbound marketing. This is a strategy where a business aims to attract potential customers to themselves through targeted and relevant content that draws the audience in.
Strategies for effective inbound lead generation include:

• Content marketing: Creating and sharing high quality content like blog posts, articles and videos that are relevant to your target audience is a simple way to generate leads and close them as clients.
  
• Social Media Marketing: Leveraging social media platforms like WhatsApp, instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook by putting out compelling and engaging posts that will generate high quality leads will help your target audience find you, which will in turn, help you generate quality leads.
  
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): To generate quality leads from your website, you have to optimize your website and content to rank higher in search engine results so that your potential customers can see you and decide to work with you.
  
• Email Marketing: Emails have been known as one of the best ways to nurture potential customers. Build an email list that helps you nurture your audience and generate quality leads.
  

Outbound lead generation

This marketing strategy is considered one of the powerful strategies for acquiring quality leads. This process helps speed up the lead generation process.

When a business reaches out to a prospect who may not be aware of their product or service with the intention of generating interest and establishing a sales pipeline, it is termed outbound lead generation.

Outbound lead generation can be done in the following ways:

• Cold calling: This method involves reaching out to a potential customer who has not heard from you before through a call to pitch your product or service.
  
• Cold emailing: Sending an unsolicited email to introduce and pitch your services to a potential lead who doesn’t have any connection with you.
  

For instance, have you ever received a call or an email from someone you don’t know who’s trying to explain to you what their business can do or why you need to become a customer?

Remember those times you’ve searched for and sent messages to the profile of your target audience letting them know how your service can help them?

That is what outbound marketing is. It’s popularly known as cold outreaching and when done right, you can generate quality leads and convert them to customers.

Referral Marketing

This involves encouraging satisfied customers to refer their friends and family. This strategy is one of the best strategies that can be used to generate leads.

Imagine you’re a skincare enthusiast who is careful about the kind of products you use, and then one day, a friend comes over to your place and informs you of a skincare brand she patronized that has made her skin soft and supple.

You won’t think twice to patronize them too right? This is because the business has been suggested to you by a friend who has used the products.

It’s always important to encourage your customers to refer others to you. It helps to build trust and generate high quality leads.

Networking Events

Attending industry specific events to meet potential leads is an underrated means of generating quality leads.

Your potential customers are always looking for ways to make their life better, create time for other little things and even make more money.

When you attend industry events, you have an opportunity to learn from both the industry leaders and the potential customers present.

This can help you put out targeted content that answers their questions and positions you as the right person for the job.

Lead Magnets

One of the best ways to find your potential customers is by putting out a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is an offer or free resource that helps your potential customer solve a burning challenge. Businesses do this in exchange for contact details.

A lead magnet could be in form of an ebook, a webinar, a free consultation etc. Putting out lead magnets helps you attract potential customers through their interest in your free guide.

You can then reach out to them individually to understand why they hopped on the freebie and how your business can help them move past their current challenge.

Landing Pages.

A landing page is a page that a potential customer lands on after clicking through from an ad, email or any other digital location. This helps to generate leads especially ones that are ready to buy.

You need to create dedicated pages that are optimized for capturing lead information and put a clear call to action so that they can understand the next step to take.

Why is Lead Generation Important?

No business can thrive without generating leads. It is like the wheels on which a business can move on. Creating strategies for generating these leads can help your business scale effectively.

Not all leads will convert to customers, but these strategies will help you increase revenue—more leads creates more ground for converting customers.

Lead generation also helps you to build visibility and trust for your business. Choose a strategy that is relevant to your business and start converting those potential customers to full fledged customers.

Best Practices for Generating Leads

We’ve looked at the strategies for generating leads, now let’s look at the best practices for getting these leads.

1. Know Your Audience

You can’t generate quality leads if you don’t know who you’re targeting. Develop detailed profiles of your ideal customers that includes their demographics, interests, lifestyle, pain points and desires.

Developing a detailed buyer persona helps you understand the kind of people you’re trying to target as customers as not everyone in the market is your potential customer.

Create High Quality Content to Generate Leads

You’ve identified your target customer, you know what keeps them up at night and where they want to be in the nearest future.

The next thing to do is create quality content that will practically call them out. Hint on their pains and frustrations and position your business as the best fit for solving that problem.

This practice helps in targeting inbound leads for your business.

Optimize your Website

Millions of people input search queries on Google daily.

Optimizing your website for ranking will help you find potential customers for your business.

Ensure a great user experience and create clear call to actions to take your audience further down your sales funnel.

Leverage Social Media For Lead Generation.

Businesses are on social media. Use these platforms to find your target audience.
Create valuable content and run targeted ads to reach your target market and generate quality leads.

Network Effectively

To make the most out of your social media handle, you have to network with businesses in your niche and with your audience.
This helps to build trust and positions you as a credible and authentic person.

Track And Analyze

Monitor your strategies. Track your website and social media platforms. Find out what works and double down on it.


Understand what works and what doesn’t. Put different strategies in place for generating these leads and watch your business drive quality traffic.

Conclusion

Generating leads is very important for your business growth. Ensure you put in strategies that will help you attract your ideal customers.