A Beginner's Guide to Lead Generation: ONLY FOR YOU!

What do you think lead generation is? A list of email addresses of the consumers or may be a list of phone numbers of the consumers that you have collected! Right? Most of the marketers consider it as lead generation and goof up while making conversions! 😀 However, the fact is you can randomly collect email address or phone numbers of the consumers from different sources and do a lot of spam mailing or spam calling irritating the consumers and wasting your time, effort and of course money. Had it been the lead generation ever, there had been no term of lead generation as such! Lead generation is a marketing tactic that requires some effort, some time, some money and a lot of intellect.

The definition!

Lead generation in marketing is the overall process of developing consumers’ interest or inquiry into your products or services. And! This process includes everything right from driving traffic to your web pages to the nurturing of leads and eventually getting the traffic converted to sales-ready leads or what we say qualified leads. For big companies, it isn’t a big deal to spend millions on advertising for acquiring new customers and building their brands. However for small businesses that have the limitation of budget spending millions on advertising at times sounds like a dream not to come true! 🙁 But then the need to attract customer for them remains same or even more. This is the reason why small businesses need to devise innovative & cost effective ways of generating leads in limited budget & resources.

 What is a Lead?

Obviously, like we discussed before anyone who shows interest in your products or services is lead. For example lead could be someone filling up the query form on your web pages or may be someone calling to enquire about your product or service. At times, lead could also be someone visiting a key page on your website. Now, there are two types of leads based on the extent of interest of the consumer in your business. They are:

• Micro Leads – someone filling up the query form on your web page only to avail the offer you are giving such as a whitepaper, e brochure & so on but not much interested in buying from you.
• Macro leads – someone filling up an important lead form such as subscribing for free trial or someone giving you a call or visiting your center or offline outlet.

Means to bring the Potential Traffic to your Web Pages

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best means to bring prospects to your web pages as they are the audience already opted in to receive emails from you. Now based on the query form information they have given, you can send them links to your web pages through your emails containing more information on what they were interested in.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The best part about SEO is it comes for free and so you must leverage it to your advantage bringing in potential traffic to your website through various tactics like link building, guest posting & so on. You can share your content on other authoritative niche websites bringing more & more people to your web pages. The better your content, the more people visit your web page.

Social Media

Now, this one is an amazing way to bring potential traffic to your website. Through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and various other social outlets you can bring prospects to your web pages.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing includes both SMS & Mobile web. Looking at the ever increasing number of mobile web users I don’t think I need to explain as to why & how you can bring potential customers to your website through mobile web. The only thing you need to keep in mind is your web pages are mobile compatible. Besides! A recent study revealed that 98% of SMS messages sent are opened, and 83% of them are opened within 3 minutes. So you can guess how SMS can help you bring your prospects to your web pages , all you need to do is send links to your web pages in the SMSs that you send to your target audience.

 Google Adwords

Bringing potential traffic to your web pages through Google Adwords happens to be one of the most judicious ways of marketing as your ads are displayed to people who are already searching for the kind of products & services you offer. The better your Adwords strategy, the more potential traffic will be coming to your web pages.

Afterword!

Lead generation isn’t a rocket science as long as you have all your tools at place and that you can do some smart work of hitting the iron while it’s hot instead of irritating your prospects who could be your customers and wasting your time in those who have no plans of buying from you. Lead Generation is just one of the sub-components of Digital Marketing Certificate Course (DMCC)@Digiperform.