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.