3 Basics Of Lead Generation

Lead generation is important if you want to grow your business.

There is a lot of choice in today’s world and your prospective customers could choose you, or another provider, to solve challenges they are experiencing.

When looking for solutions to problems, customers will often use up to three social media channels to research products or brands. Interaction with leads on social media will allow you to collect information on prospective buyers of your products/services to help you market to them.

This might seem pointless, as you may think that if the customer is researching the product then they are ready to buy. However, this isn’t always true. Only 2% of purchases are completed on the first interaction and 3% happen on the second interaction.

Amazingly, 80% of purchases can occur between the fifth and twelve interactions so to ensure you have the chance to reach this number of interactions, you should develop a strong lead generation process.

Here are the three basics of a good, lead generation system.

1. Definition Of Your target Audience

You need to decide who is interested in your product, needs it, and can afford it. Not everyone will match all three criteria.

You can use various demographics to build up your ideal customer profile. This might include: age, gender, financial resources, area they live in and likes/interests. It might also be useful to imagine your target audience as a real person. Give them a name, a job, and a history. This contextualises your ideal customer and makes them seem more real.

At the same time try to identify:

• Their pain point – Why they need your product/service.
• Objective – What is their objective in getting you to solve their problem.
• Information sources – What do they use to research products/services (i.e. social media, search engine, local media, etc.)

From this information, you can create ideas for marketing your business and its solutions.

2. Content Marketing

Content is a valuable resource for lead generation. There are over two million blog posts published every day, and enough YouTube videos published every second to take 24 hours to watch. The best content marketers develop strategies that attract target audiences with useful information that helps solve their issues.

Articles, ebooks and social media updates all help businesses to collect details such as email addresses, names, and budgets. With this information, you can create more content that is relevant and focused on the needs of the prospect.

For all of this to happen, you need to plan. Create content that builds a story and trust. You can’t develop a strong lead generation system by just producing something in five minutes. It takes time and analysis to create an effective system.

3. Lead Management Process

This is the process where you manage leads from their initial interaction with the business up to the sale. Using the best tools and data monitoring assets available, your marketing team should be able to give you a detailed overview of the best ways to spend your marketing budget to achieve success.

If you want to develop an effective process, you need to follow six important steps. These are:

• Identify the metrics to measure
• Define when a prospect is sales ready
• Create a sales funnel with stages and status
• Design and implement lead processing and routing
• Develop a model for lead scoring
• Implement a combined sales and marketing SLA

With this in place, you can ensure you are creating leads, processing them through a pre-determined and measured marketing path, and look to close the deal at a point when you know the prospect is going to be receptive.

Conclusion

Your audience has a choice. You need to make sure that when they make a final purchasing decision, you are at the top of their list. To do this, you need to identify your ideal customer, create a plan for your marketing content and produce a system to process leads which highlights when to pass a lead onto sales.

How is your lead generation system? Have you created any lead generation processes?

Let us know in the comments below.

Tagged in: lead generation, Online Marketing, Small Business