Lead Generation: A Complete Guide | Leadfeeder
Demystifying Lead Generation
Lead Generation: How To Get Started
Lead Generation: A Guide to Getting Started - Salesforce.com
What Is Lead Generation? Guide for Beginner Marketers
Online Lead Generation (2024 Guide) – Forbes Advisor
Lead generation - Wikipedia
Learn about the process of lead generation, attracting prospects, and converting them into interested customers for your products and services.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to establish and scale your lead generation strategy, so you can start generating quality leads today.
Learn about the different types of leads and proven strategies for successful lead generation. Boost your business with high-quality leads.
Leads are people who are potentially interested in buying your products or services. Learn how lead generation can help you grow your business.
Find out how to define modern lead generation marketing and what lead gen strategies and tools to use to fill in your sales funnel with qualified leads.
In this guide, we will discuss what lead generation is, why it's important, and how you can start generating online leads for your business today.
What is Lead Generation? (+ Tips How to Do It)
Lead Generation
Lead Generation: How To Get Started
How to Grow Your Business with Lead Generation
What Is Lead Generation? A Guide for Marketers
Online Lead Generation (2024 Guide)
Lead generation
What Is Lead Generation?
Why is Lead Generation Important for Brands?
How to Attract Quality Leads?
How to Identify Quality Leads
How Do You Improve Lead Quality?
Example Strategies on How to Attract Quality Leads
TL;DR
Lead Generation Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is lead generation?
The lead generation funnel
How to generate leads
Lead generation marketing strategies
How to capture leads
How to capture leads
How to capture leads
How to qualify leads
Final thoughts
Generate quality leads from website traffic
The Different Types Of Leads
The Lead Generation Process
Lead Generation Strategies And Examples
Lead Generation Strategies And Examples
Best Practices For Lead Generation
Make Lead Generation A Priority
FAQ
Beyond Silos: How Holistic B2B Digital Strategy Drives Pipeline
Automation & AI: What Humans Should Be Doing For Success
How to: Lead Generation
Digital Lead Generation
GUIDE
Lead Generation Explained
The 5 Different Types of Lead
How to Generate Leads
Managing and Nurturing Leads
Article
Sales Pipelines and Lead Routing
Get Started with Lead Generation
The Lead Generation Collection
How to Grow Your Business with Lead Generation
How to Grow Your Business with Lead Generation
Free Small Business Tools to Grow Your Company
Lead Generation in Salesforce
Web-to-Lead in Salesforce
Customer Journeys in Salesforce
Qualifying Leads in Salesforce
Lead Management in Salesforce
Lead Nurturing in Salesforce
The Sales Pipeline in Salesforce
Lead Scoring and Grading in Salesforce
Lead Routing in Salesforce
How does lead generation work?
What is the lead generation process?
Key takeaways
What is the lead generation process?
Helping you build more meaningful connections
Table of Contents
How Online Lead Generation Works: 4 Simple Steps
5 Ways Lead Generation Helps Small Businesses
How To Generate Leads Online: 8 Time-Tested Techniques
Bottom Line
Frequently Asked Questions
Contents
Lead scoring
Lead qualification statuses
Lead generation in Call Centers
Nationalization Efforts
See also
References
Further reading
Lead Quality Pros
Lead Quality Pros
Lead Quality Cons
Setup a Quiz on Your Website
Talk Directly to Potential Leads
Get Referrals
Facebook is a Source for Quality Leads
Use Lead Scoring
Marketing-Sales Feedback Loop
Blogging
Cold Outreach
Contests and Giveaways
What Is Lead Generation?
Why Is Lead Generation Important?
How Do I Generate Leads?
What Is a Lead Generation Tool?
What Is the Difference Between B2B and B2C Lead Generation?
Grow Your Revenue Faster
What is a lead?
What is lead generation?
Why is lead generation important?
What is a lead generation funnel?
Why content is critical for your lead generation funnel
Top of the funnel (TOFU)
Middle of the funnel (MOFU)
Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)
Understand your buyer personas
How to use personas in your content creation
1. Search engine optimization
2. LinkedIn advertising
3. Co-Marketing
1. Email capture forms
2. Site chat
3. Website visitor identification
A 3-step process to qualify your leads
Identify.
Qualify.
Connect.
New Google Shopping Ads Strategies Uncovered
Link Building in 2024: What Works, What Doesn’t, and What’s Next?
Automation & AI: What Humans Should Be Doing For Success
Beyond Silos: How Holistic B2B Digital Strategy Drives Pipeline
Step 1: Do Your Research
Step 2: Create Great Content
Step 3: Develop A Lead Generation Database
Step 4: Qualify And Score Leads
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Coupons, Discounts, And Free Trials
Online Ads
Referral Marketing
Use Your Data
Be Consistent With Messaging
A/B Testing
Use The Power Of CRM Technology
Create Enticing Offers At Every Stage
Integrate Social Media
Clean Up Your Landing Pages
Use Your Partners
Bring Your Sales Team In
Remarket, Remarket, Remarket
What are some best practices for converting leads into customers?
What is lead generation and why is it crucial for businesses?
What are the different types of leads and how do they impact the sales process?
How can content marketing be used in lead generation strategies?
Subscribe To Our Newsletter.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead Generation Defined
Top 5 Ways Marketers Can Innovate for Growth
Top 5 Ways Marketers Can Innovate for Growth
Doing Business in the Attention Economy
Every Journey Starts With a Lead
The B2B Marketer’s Lead Generation Field Guide
The Five Types of Leads
Turn New Leads Into Qualified Leads
The Marketing Funnel
Generating Inbound Leads
Social Media Lead Generation
B2B Lead Generation
The Guide to Social Media for Small Business Marketers
Lead Management
Lead Nurturing
Software for Lead Management
How Technology Makes Lead Management Easy
Scoring and Grading
Routing Leads
The B2B Marketer’s Guide to Account-Based Marketing
Get the #1 CRM built for small business.
Why is lead gen important?
What if it doesn't work?
What are the types of lead generation?
1. Define your leads
2. Tailor your content
3. Invest in lead intelligence
4. Align sales and marketing teams
5. Evaluate your audience regularly
6. Use tools appropriate for the channel
7. Measure the success of lead gen programs
Inbound Lead Generation
Outbound Lead Generation
Inbound vs. Outbound: Which Strategy Is Right for You?
Types of Leads
Search Engine Optimization
Webinars
Industry Research Reports
White Papers or E-Books
Newsletters
Should I buy leads?
How can I generate online leads?
How can I generate online leads?
What types of leads are there?
Criteria for lead scoring
Methods
Best Practices
Assume that you are a street vendor trying to sell chopsticks. You can make a sale by engaging with people and convincing them to buy your product.
But with so many people passing by, it’s impossible to engage with them all. So how do you decide who to approach?
Well, the key is to target those who are actually in the market for what you’re offering — chopsticks!
This is essentially what companies do when they employ lead generation — a process of identifying and targeting potential customers who are likely to be interested in the business’ offerings.
Any person who has an interest in a company’s product or service is considered a lead. Not anyone and everyone is a lead, as people have different preferences and needs. Many businesses make the mistake of marketing to everyone when they should focus on people who are interested in what the company has to offer.
Lead generation can be defined as the process of attracting prospects and converting them into someone who has an interest in your company’s products and services. Modern brands make use of various lead generation strategies such as:
Email and social media marketing for their lead generation might work for online fashion stores, but the same strategies may not work for software companies. People looking for software might require more details and information on the product, which is why a blog or a series of webinars could work better as lead generation tools.
When a person shows interest in your brand’s products or services, the steps that person takes towards making their first purchase just seem natural. You just helped them to fulfill a need or solve a problem.
When a person has no interest in what you have to offer, yet you still try to convince them to make a purchase, they may feel like they are being pushed to spend their money. This can make the customer feel like they were forced to buy your product and it can hurt your brand’s reputation.
Attending to your target audience only through lead generation can ensure that your brand is ideally matched with the right customers. More benefits of lead generation include:
Most marketing departments measure lead quantity when determining a successful lead generation campaign. Sales teams, on the other hand, focus on lead quality. Leads with a clear intent to purchase your product, have the finances and means to do so, and meet the parameters set by you are considered as quality leads.
If a company focuses on lead quality, the chances of converting a lead into a customer drastically increase. Having higher conversion rates will allow you to confidently invest in your quality leads, increasing your return on investment (ROI).
Focusing on quality leads can potentially increase the rate of new customer acquisition. Getting new customers at a high rate will allow you to quickly grow a loyal customer base. This can also improve your ROI in the long term, as the faster you build your customer base, the sooner you will be able to retarget new and existing customers.
As mentioned above, focusing on quality leads can drastically improve conversion rates and ROI. However, there are a few drawbacks to quality leads. For instance, a sales team that focuses solely on their quality leads can end up neglecting their other duties such as after sales calls or product deliveries.
Investing time and money into quality leads is still a risk that salespeople will have to take. A quality lead can still back out at the very last moment. You won’t just lose the deal, but you would have lost all that time and effort that went into convincing the lead to purchase your product.
Lead quality is usually determined after going through a list of leads that were acquired through a lead generation campaign. Most campaigns will focus on lead quantity. So marketers and sales teams will still have to go through all leads to determine their quality leads.
Setting up a quiz on your website will allow visitors to answer the questions you need to qualify them as a good lead. At the end of the quiz, you can supply them with a free resource (e-book or PDF), which will bring value to your quiz.
With B2B marketing, it’s never easy to connect directly to company owners or executives. You usually have to go through other channels (PAs, employees, and receptionists) before you can get to the boss. Try to get in touch with company owners directly through platforms such as LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a business-centric platform, so if you do pitch something to an executive, it will be accepted. In some cases, other platforms such as Email, WhatsApp, or Facebook might work, but you run the risk of upsetting the person you contact. If you are going to use these platforms to communicate with potential leads, then its best you do your homework first by finding out more about the person you are contacting.
Once you have successfully reached out to an executive, you must ensure that you have a high-quality presentation, or sample ready.
Referrals are a powerful source of quality leads. If someone used your product and saw great results from it, they would recommend it to their colleagues and friends. In most cases, they won’t spread the word to people with little to no interest in your product, as it will be a waste of their time. Instead, they will ask someone who they think will have the finances and the need for your product, which matches the description of a quality lead.
Airbnb issues a credit to the new user that is referred, as well as to the user that made the referral. They basically implemented a referral system that incentivizes customers who produce quality leads.
If you do get in touch with a company owner or executive, you could offer them your product for free in exchange for quality leads. High-level execs network with each other all the time. If you build a good relationship with one company owner, they could introduce you to other owners and executives that would be interested in your product.
Facebook offers many customization options for businesses on their pages and groups. However, most companies don’t make full use of these options and instead, they just post content related to their products.
Pay careful attention to the layout of your facebook page and treat it like a sales page or a landing page to your website. Constantly update the page with engaging content and make sure that there is a clear Call-To-Action for leads.
The definition of a quality lead will vary according to a company’s product or service. The best place to start when identifying quality leads is by tracking all inbound leads. An example of tracking lead information is through website forms and marketing campaign software like Mailshake.
When a prospective lead fills out a form on a website to gain access to free downloadable content like a PDF or e-book, they will have to provide their information. Just by providing their name, email, and contact number, you will be able to sort the data into leads, existing customers, and spam.
If your company sells multiple products like software, apps, and technical hardware, then you could add more fields to your forms to gather more info on leads. This can further categorize your leads by department, product, interests, etc.
If you plan on acquiring leads through social media or email, then you could simply keep track of your lead interactions on a spreadsheet. Make sure to include all interactions with potential customers and leads. The more information you have, the better you will be able to asses the quality of your leads.
Manually inputting your findings into a sheet can become time-consuming and difficult to manage at times, which is why it is recommended to use lead management software.
Lead scoring allows you to rank your leads by their interest levels and readiness to buy. You assign points to leads based on their actions and behavior on your website. There is no exclusive method for scoring leads, which is why companies define their own scoring systems to suit their needs.
Once you have totaled up the scores of all your leads, you can then rank your leads according to the scores they received. Leads with high scores are considered good leads and can be labeled as ‘hot’, ‘100%’, or ‘A’.
Leads with above-average scores are ‘warm’ leads. You can consider warming up these leads when you plan your next marketing campaign.
Leads with above-average scores are ‘warm’ leads. You can consider warming up these leads when you plan your next marketing campaign.
B2B marketers tend to further distinguish leads by their explicit data such as industry, title, and company.
B2B marketers tend to further distinguish leads by their explicit data such as industry, title, and company.
The data you collect from your leads do not end when the marketer hands over the lead to the sales team. Especially during complex sales cycles. The sales team must provide feedback on every interaction with the lead to the marketing team.
If marketers wait too long, they run the risk of having to analyze old data which becomes irrelevant because the sale has already been made or lost. If all marketing does is send out leads to the sales team without feedback, they will assume that sales are being made and continue generating leads.
If marketing receives feedback from sales (weekly or monthly), they will be able to adjust future lead generation campaigns to improve the quality of the leads that are submitted to sales.
Blogging is a no brainer if you run an online business. Your company website should have a blog section that posts articles regularly. If leads find these articles useful, they will visit your website frequently.
Blogging is a no brainer if you run an online business. Your company website should have a blog section that posts articles regularly. If leads find these articles useful, they will visit your website frequently.
If you write on topics centered around your product or service, then your readers will be considered as good leads, as they have an interest in your blog, which is related to your product or service.
If you write on topics centered around your product or service, then your readers will be considered as good leads, as they have an interest in your blog, which is related to your product or service.
You can effectively navigate visitors of your blog to other product landing pages by inserting links into your blog posts.
Send out a cold email to a prospective client is still an effective strategy for generating good leads. Companies don’t use cold outreach because of the fear of being labeled a spammer, but if done correctly, cold outreach will land you some quality handpicked leads.
With cold outreach, you research the companies that would benefit the most from using your product. If you sell commercial ovens, then you should research restaurants that will be most suited to use your product, then, reach out to them via email.
The same goes for an online business. If you sell an app for Shopify stores, then do your homework and create a list of Shopify stores that you can target.
Don’t send out the same email to every single Shopify or eCommerce store out there. That’s just spamming. Narrow down your list to Shopify stores only that require your software.
When you have your list of emails ready, you can then send out customized cold emails. Customization is key and can only be achieved by getting as much information on the prospect as possible.
Running contests and giveaways is an excellent way of generating leads. Contestants exchange emails for a chance to win a prize. If you select a prize that your ideal leads are interested in, then they would possibly enter your contest.
Contests and giveaways are viral in nature and are held over a short period. This means that you can generate large amounts of leads within a short space of time. You can then work on analyzing and ranking your newly acquired leads.
People love free stuff, even in the B2B marketplace. You could offer discounts on SaaS software if you wish to attract B2B leads. An example would be to offer a marketing tool bundle that includes your product, and other products that complement yours.
Hosting a contest or a giveaway might seem difficult to manage. However, you can use a service like Vyper to manage your giveaway and all the leads that your contest generates.
Acquiring tons of leads is great, but you should not ignore the importance of high-quality leads because of their likelihood to purchase your product and their ability to move further along your company’s sales funnel.
Lead generation is the process of attracting prospects and gaining their interest in your company’s products and services. To generate leads, you can use a range of strategies such as email campaigns, content marketing, social media engagement, and other online and offline methods.
Lead generation is an essential part of any successful marketing campaign. It allows you to attract and identify potential customers who are actively looking for products or services that your business offers. By targeting these people, you can create a much more effective advertising strategy that delivers higher conversion rates and improved ROI.
There are many ways to generate leads. You can create content that is targeted towards your target audience, write emails that draw attention to your products and services, use remarketing campaigns on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, or leverage referral programs and partnerships with other businesses. Additionally, you can also use SEO techniques to boost organic search engine results for your website.
Lead generation tools are software or web-based services designed to help businesses reach more prospects and convert them into customers.
These tools are typically used in combination with other marketing tactics, such as email campaigns, website optimization, and social media management. They can provide a range of benefits including lead scoring, tracking engagement on multiple platforms, and automating outreach processes.
B2B and B2C lead generation are two different approaches to generating leads. B2B lead generation focuses on building relationships with business owners, executives, and decision makers in order to provide custom solutions that meet their company’s individual needs.
B2B and B2C lead generation are two different approaches to generating leads. B2B lead generation focuses on building relationships with business owners, executives, and decision makers in order to provide custom solutions that meet their company’s individual needs.
On the other hand, B2C lead generation is the process of generating leads for businesses that sell their products or services directly to consumers.
Lead generation is the critical driver of growth for B2B businesses. It’s your key to cutting through the noise, building a relationship with your customer, and influencing the buying process.
We understand why it’s daunting. You need to develop a model for creating content, attracting traffic, converting it, and then qualifying it to pass to your sales teams.
We understand why it’s daunting. You need to develop a model for creating content, attracting traffic, converting it, and then qualifying it to pass to your sales teams.
We understand why it’s daunting. You need to develop a model for creating content, attracting traffic, converting it, and then qualifying it to pass to your sales teams.
And you need to do all this at scale, while fighting for your buyer’s attention in a cluttered media landscape.
But it doesn’t have to be as overwhelming as it seems. In this detailed guide, we’ve broken down each stage of creating a lead generation strategy into actionable steps you can take one at a time.
Whether you’re a complete beginner starting from scratch or an expert looking to tweak an existing strategy, you’ll find straightforward explanations and actionable advice to help you generate more quality leads.
Before we get into the details, let's make sure we're talking about the same things. In this section, we're going to define the basics of lead generation.
A lead is anyone who expresses an interest in the goods or services your company offers but may not be ready to buy yet.
This interest is represented as an exchange of information, such as providing a name and email address for a piece of content.
Don’t confuse leads with prospects. There’s a difference. A lead is a potential customer who still needs to be qualified to become a prospect. (This means they’re a good fit for your business and may want to do business with you in the future.)
Lead generation is the process of attracting and engaging your target audience to the point where they want to give you their information.
This process works by driving targeted traffic to your website, capturing visitor information and nurturing those who fit your buyer personas.
Lead generation is critical for B2B success. Why? The answer can be summed up in two words: sales cycle.
A study by Marketing Sherpa, found that 90 percent of B2B sales take more than one month to close, while 10 percent take more than one year.
Why does this matter? Because capturing a potential customer’s information at the beginning of this process gives you the opportunity to influence it. And with buyers facing more distractions than ever, you’re going to need all the influence you can get.
What’s more, once you’ve captured a lead’s information—you can qualify them. This means you figure out which ones are most likely to generate revenue for your business and focus your time and energy on converting those.
If you can establish a strategy that generates high quality leads and scales, then you’ve found the key to delivering sustainable growth for your business.
At first sight, it may seem that your potential buyers take a rather random approach at buying. Sometimes they make a purchase, and sometimes they don't. But this couldn't be further from the truth.
While there are a lot of differences in the way each individual makes a purchase, there's still a process leading up to your buyer's decision. Marketers have developed the concept of a lead generation funnel so they can visualize the entire process and become capable of influencing it.
Instead of focusing on making a sale right away, as may happen with a B2C company, a B2B marketer needs to develop a long-term approach to their sales process. This allows them to segment potential clients, nurture them properly, and hand them over to the sales teams once they're ready to buy.
In this chapter, we’ll show you what a lead generation funnel is, how to define it, and how to build yours.
A lead generation funnel represents the journey a person takes from the moment they give you their information to the moment they make a purchase.
A lead generation funnel represents the journey a person takes from the moment they give you their information to the moment they make a purchase.
Defining this is super important, because 50% of qualified leads aren’t ready to purchase at first contact. Your funnel provides the roadmap to get them there.
It’s represented as a funnel because at each stage fewer people will meet the criteria needed to do business with your company.
Content is critical to your funnel. But before we get into the specifics of what content works and why, let's cover why it’s so important.
Content is the common denominator throughout the lead generation funnel. Whether that’s a blog, an ebook, or a case study, your content will be the tool to turn your lead into a customer.
The key lies in the segmentation. Use your content as the basis for identifying where someone is in the buying process then provide them with unique content that fits their needs to get them to the next stage.
With marketing automation systems and retargeting, you can deliver timely content that solves your lead’s problems. With each piece of engaged content, your lead will progress through your funnel to purchase.
The top of your lead generation funnel should concentrate on attracting a wide audience of potential customers. The goal is to build awareness and trust without focusing on your products.
There are many marketing tactics you can leverage in order for you to attract people at this stage of the funnel, including:
You want the reader to feel enough trust in order for them to eventually give you their personal information.
You want the reader to feel enough trust in order for them to eventually give you their personal information.
While the previous step of the funnel created a personal connection with the visitor, this is where you use that trust to build a business relationship.
In order for the visitor to give you their personal information, you need to offer a piece of gated content that solves a problem or satisfies a need.
After you first capture their information, you can then begin to engage and educate your leads further. Ultimately, establishing your offering as the solution to their problems.
After you first capture their information, you can then begin to engage and educate your leads further. Ultimately, establishing your offering as the solution to their problems.
By the time a lead reaches the bottom of your lead generation funnel, they’re a prospect. They’ve been nurtured about the potential solutions to their problems; a solution that should involve your product or service.
Bottom of the funnel content is tailored to getting your prospects to purchase. They’re almost there, you just need to help them overcome any objections.
At this stage, they know you, trust you, and like you enough to consider doing business with you. What they need now is the reassurance that their purchase decision will be the right one.
Each and every content type helps to lower objections and motivate the prospect to convert into a customer.
Throughout each step of the lead generation funnel, there at first, you need low-touch, educational content that engages people, while at the later stages you need high-touch, transactional content that lowers the barriers to purchase.
Start by defining your funnel adapted to your unique needs, offers, and industry. Get a clear understanding of where your content fits in each step of the funnel so you can plan it correctly.
Now you’ve learned the basics of what a lead generation strategy looks like, it’s time for the exciting stuff—the process of generating leads.
63% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their biggest challenge. Even more say their lead generation efforts are only slightly effective.
If all of this sounds new or hard to grasp, then worry not. In this chapter you’ll learn how to apply the first two steps, and in the following three chapters, we’ll cover how to attract, capture and qualify your leads.
Throughout the lead generation funnel, content plays a critical role in transforming visitors into leads and leads into customers.
But content alone can't motivate people to give you their personal information. Your content needs to tap into an unmet need or problem they have.
If you can address the problems your visitor faces and help solve them through your content, you’ll have the foundation for a successful lead generation strategy.
You build personas by leveraging quantitative and qualitative data from your current or desired customers. That means, you can create personas either based on the customers you have, or from customers who you'd like to attract but haven't yet.
The goal of a buyer persona is to identify the common characteristics of your buyers and keep your marketing team focused on their needs. There’s two types of data you can use to build these personas in practice.
You can get this type of data through the use of web analytics (e.g., Google Analytics) and visitor identification software (e.g., Leadfeeder).
Qualitative data, on the other hand, helps you bring depth into your personas, adding unique parameters to them, including:
These types of answers can mean the difference between knowing your personas and understanding them. The former is logical while the latter is emotional. You need both aspects to create useful and actionable personas.
These types of answers can mean the difference between knowing your personas and understanding them. The former is logical while the latter is emotional. You need both aspects to create useful and actionable personas.
These types of answers can mean the difference between knowing your personas and understanding them. The former is logical while the latter is emotional. You need both aspects to create useful and actionable personas.
You can extract qualitative data through the use of surveys and interviews. Most importantly, you can use your existing customer support, business development, and sales channels to understand the exact expressions, words, and ideas your buyers use.
Once you’ve built your buyer personas, you should understand the key challenges of your target audience and, more importantly, how to position your company to solve them.
If there's one challenge all marketers alike face it’s a lack of personalization in their customer communications.
If there's one challenge all marketers alike face it’s a lack of personalization in their customer communications.
Consumers are tired of being blasted with ever more impersonal messages, which is why 81% want brands to understand and know how to approach them. Sadly, 83% of marketers struggle with creating personalized content because they don't know their customers.
Consumers are tired of being blasted with ever more impersonal messages, which is why 81% want brands to understand and know how to approach them. Sadly, 83% of marketers struggle with creating personalized content because they don't know their customers.
Personas allow you to create content that is more relatable to your different target customer groups. Instead of creating one-size-fits-all content for each stage of your funnel, you can create something far more personalized.
As explained in the previous chapter, the content you create for each of the steps—TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content—will change in length, type, and level of detail. But it should also change based on the data taken from your personas. This is how you personalize to create more impactful messaging.
For example, if one of your personas has a small budget, then a key issue that could slow their progress through your funnel are their price concerns. They may love your product or service, but think it’s too expensive.
The goal of your content for this buyer is to highlight your value and their potential return on investment (ROI). If they don't understand the context behind the price, they can't make the right decision.
For your price conscious buyer to overcome their concerns, you need to create the right content for them when they’re making their buying decision.
After you’ve attracted them with an interesting blog article, captured their information with an ebook, you now need to convert them. This could mean could mean creating comparison articles, highlighting your product tiers, or providing an ROI calculator.
After you’ve attracted them with an interesting blog article, captured their information with an ebook, you now need to convert them. This could mean could mean creating comparison articles, highlighting your product tiers, or providing an ROI calculator.
Understand what’s stopping them progress from one stage of the funnel to the next, and create relatable content to address these problems.
How do you know when to deliver your price conscious buyer your ROI calculator? They’ve visited your pricing page and haven’t converted. They’re ready to buy. Now is the time to remove and address their pricing concerns.
This step requires you to know what content your buyer has already viewed to understand where they are in their journey.
Once they’ve viewed content that aligns with one of your funnel stages, it’s time to deliver content to help guide them to the next stage.
Your personas should define where your buyers are spending their time online when consuming educational information, researching products and making purchase decisions.
For example, your price conscious buyer may spend time researching competitors on website like G2 or TrustRadius, or even Googling comparison searches. In this instance, paying for ads on such searches or review sites will ensure you can direct your buyer to a tailored piece of content at this crucial stage in the buying process.
For example, your price conscious buyer may spend time researching competitors on website like G2 or TrustRadius, or even Googling comparison searches. In this instance, paying for ads on such searches or review sites will ensure you can direct your buyer to a tailored piece of content at this crucial stage in the buying process.
The lead generation process you've seen so far represents the foundation of your entire work. For that reason, it's paramount you set it up the right way.
It’s not as daunting as it seems and you won’t get it right first time. But that’s not the goal. The goal is to get a process in place. Once you have this, you can tweak it, improve it, and replicate it many times over.
You understand how to structure your lead generation funnel, build buyer personas and create build the right content. Now you need to reach your audience.
You understand how to structure your lead generation funnel, build buyer personas and create build the right content. Now you need to reach your audience.
It’s not as simple as it seems. Generating traffic to power lead generation is the number one challenge for two in three marketers.
With companies publishing more content than ever and ad budgets increasing year on year, the competition for eyeballs is fierce.
In this chapter, we’re going to cover three completely different ways to drive traffic to your lead generation funnel.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of visitors you receive from organic search results.
Why is SEO so important for lead generation? Because it can help you bring large volumes of visitors to the top of your lead generation funnel.
Once you've done the work to get a piece of content ranking highly for a relevant search query, it will drive a sustained flow of traffic. More importantly, this traffic is free.
There are a large number of factors that contribute to your search engine ranking. We won’t cover them here. But assuming you have the fundamentals in place, here are three steps you can take to ensure organic search traffic starts delivering you valuable leads.
The first step requires you to define a set of keywords. These keywords represent queries people use to find content; the more searches a given query has, the more traffic you can expect to attract.
If you have a Google Ads account, you can start your search with Google Keyword Planner. Alternatively, use a paid tool like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush. All of these tools mix Google's data with their own to come up with these estimations which will help you find good keywords.
Here's an example of the search volume and difficulty Ahrefs reports for the keyword "SEO strategy."
By considering both the traffic volume and the competitiveness of a keyword (which in this case is by the number of links pointing to the top 10 results for a given keyword), you can get a more balanced idea of the work you need to do to rank for a given keyword.
The previous example has a large volume of searches and also high competitiveness. As Ahrefs explains above, it would require you to get backlinks from around 99 websites to rank in the top 10 results.
The key when searching for keywords is to be realistic. Strike the right balance between high volume, low competitiveness, and relevancy.
Relevancy is very personal to your own business. Ideally, you are looking for search queries that are related to your product or service. Review your buyer personas and the problems your audience is trying to solve.
If you can help answer a question on these topics, you've taken the first step towards presenting your solution as an answer to their potential problem.
The content you create should help people with questions and problems that aren't directly related to your solution. For example, if your product helps people generate leads (like Leadfeeder), then we'll create a piece of content educating people about lead generation (like this guide).
When coming up with potential content ideas, analyze the search engine results for your chosen keywords. This will help you understand what type of content that is already ranking. Then, create something better.
Assume that you are a street vendor trying to sell chopsticks. You can make a sale by engaging with people and convincing them to buy your product.
But with so many people passing by, it’s impossible to engage with them all. So how do you decide who to approach?
Well, the key is to target those who are actually in the market for what you’re offering — chopsticks!
This is essentially what companies do when they employ lead generation — a process of identifying and targeting potential customers who are likely to be interested in the business’ offerings.
Any person who has an interest in a company’s product or service is considered a lead. Not anyone and everyone is a lead, as people have different preferences and needs. Many businesses make the mistake of marketing to everyone when they should focus on people who are interested in what the company has to offer.
Lead generation can be defined as the process of attracting prospects and converting them into someone who has an interest in your company’s products and services. Modern brands make use of various lead generation strategies such as:
These are just a few strategies that you can use to attract potential customers to your product or offer. Most companies prefer to stick to what works best for them, as lead generation strategies differ according to industry.
Email and social media marketing for their lead generation might work for online fashion stores, but the same strategies may not work for software companies. People looking for software might require more details and information on the product, which is why a blog or a series of webinars could work better as lead generation tools.
When a person shows interest in your brand’s products or services, the steps that person takes towards making their first purchase just seem natural. You just helped them to fulfill a need or solve a problem.
When a person has no interest in what you have to offer, yet you still try to convince them to make a purchase, they may feel like they are being pushed to spend their money. This can make the customer feel like they were forced to buy your product and it can hurt your brand’s reputation.
When a person has no interest in what you have to offer, yet you still try to convince them to make a purchase, they may feel like they are being pushed to spend their money. This can make the customer feel like they were forced to buy your product and it can hurt your brand’s reputation.
Attending to your target audience only through lead generation can ensure that your brand is ideally matched with the right customers. More benefits of lead generation include:
Most marketing departments measure lead quantity when determining a successful lead generation campaign. Sales teams, on the other hand, focus on lead quality. Leads with a clear intent to purchase your product, have the finances and means to do so, and meet the parameters set by you are considered as quality leads.
Most marketing departments measure lead quantity when determining a successful lead generation campaign. Sales teams, on the other hand, focus on lead quality. Leads with a clear intent to purchase your product, have the finances and means to do so, and meet the parameters set by you are considered as quality leads.
If a company focuses on lead quality, the chances of converting a lead into a customer drastically increase. Having higher conversion rates will allow you to confidently invest in your quality leads, increasing your return on investment (ROI).
Focusing on quality leads can potentially increase the rate of new customer acquisition. Getting new customers at a high rate will allow you to quickly grow a loyal customer base. This can also improve your ROI in the long term, as the faster you build your customer base, the sooner you will be able to retarget new and existing customers.
As mentioned above, focusing on quality leads can drastically improve conversion rates and ROI. However, there are a few drawbacks to quality leads. For instance, a sales team that focuses solely on their quality leads can end up neglecting their other duties such as after sales calls or product deliveries.
Investing time and money into quality leads is still a risk that salespeople will have to take. A quality lead can still back out at the very last moment. You won’t just lose the deal, but you would have lost all that time and effort that went into convincing the lead to purchase your product.
Lead quality is usually determined after going through a list of leads that were acquired through a lead generation campaign. Most campaigns will focus on lead quantity. So marketers and sales teams will still have to go through all leads to determine their quality leads.
Finding quality leads on social media is a reality. However, it is important that you select the platform that best suits your industry. LinkedIn is the social network that generates the most B2B leads. It makes sense to start here as the platform is built for business owners and professionals who wish to connect with each other.
Setting up a quiz on your website will allow visitors to answer the questions you need to qualify them as a good lead. At the end of the quiz, you can supply them with a free resource (e-book or PDF), which will bring value to your quiz.
With B2B marketing, it’s never easy to connect directly to company owners or executives. You usually have to go through other channels (PAs, employees, and receptionists) before you can get to the boss. Try to get in touch with company owners directly through platforms such as LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a business-centric platform, so if you do pitch something to an executive, it will be accepted. In some cases, other platforms such as Email, WhatsApp, or Facebook might work, but you run the risk of upsetting the person you contact. If you are going to use these platforms to communicate with potential leads, then its best you do your homework first by finding out more about the person you are contacting.
Once you have successfully reached out to an executive, you must ensure that you have a high-quality presentation, or sample ready.
Referrals are a powerful source of quality leads. If someone used your product and saw great results from it, they would recommend it to their colleagues and friends. In most cases, they won’t spread the word to people with little to no interest in your product, as it will be a waste of their time. Instead, they will ask someone who they think will have the finances and the need for your product, which matches the description of a quality lead.
Referrals are a powerful source of quality leads. If someone used your product and saw great results from it, they would recommend it to their colleagues and friends. In most cases, they won’t spread the word to people with little to no interest in your product, as it will be a waste of their time. Instead, they will ask someone who they think will have the finances and the need for your product, which matches the description of a quality lead.
However, customers won’t automatically hand you quality leads. You will have to request referrals from your customers. You can incentivize this process by offering a discount on the next purchase.
Airbnb issues a credit to the new user that is referred, as well as to the user that made the referral. They basically implemented a referral system that incentivizes customers who produce quality leads.
If you do get in touch with a company owner or executive, you could offer them your product for free in exchange for quality leads. High-level execs network with each other all the time. If you build a good relationship with one company owner, they could introduce you to other owners and executives that would be interested in your product.
Facebook offers many customization options for businesses on their pages and groups. However, most companies don’t make full use of these options and instead, they just post content related to their products.
Pay careful attention to the layout of your facebook page and treat it like a sales page or a landing page to your website. Constantly update the page with engaging content and make sure that there is a clear Call-To-Action for leads.
The definition of a quality lead will vary according to a company’s product or service. The best place to start when identifying quality leads is by tracking all inbound leads. An example of tracking lead information is through website forms and marketing campaign software like Mailshake.
When a prospective lead fills out a form on a website to gain access to free downloadable content like a PDF or e-book, they will have to provide their information. Just by providing their name, email, and contact number, you will be able to sort the data into leads, existing customers, and spam.
If your company sells multiple products like software, apps, and technical hardware, then you could add more fields to your forms to gather more info on leads. This can further categorize your leads by department, product, interests, etc.
If you plan on acquiring leads through social media or email, then you could simply keep track of your lead interactions on a spreadsheet. Make sure to include all interactions with potential customers and leads. The more information you have, the better you will be able to asses the quality of your leads.
Manually inputting your findings into a sheet can become time-consuming and difficult to manage at times, which is why it is recommended to use lead management software.
Lead scoring allows you to rank your leads by their interest levels and readiness to buy. You assign points to leads based on their actions and behavior on your website. There is no exclusive method for scoring leads, which is why companies define their own scoring systems to suit their needs.
Once you have totaled up the scores of all your leads, you can then rank your leads according to the scores they received. Leads with high scores are considered good leads and can be labeled as ‘hot’, ‘100%’, or ‘A’.
Leads with above-average scores are ‘warm’ leads. You can consider warming up these leads when you plan your next marketing campaign.
B2B marketers tend to further distinguish leads by their explicit data such as industry, title, and company.
The data you collect from your leads do not end when the marketer hands over the lead to the sales team. Especially during complex sales cycles. The sales team must provide feedback on every interaction with the lead to the marketing team.
If marketers wait too long, they run the risk of having to analyze old data which becomes irrelevant because the sale has already been made or lost. If all marketing does is send out leads to the sales team without feedback, they will assume that sales are being made and continue generating leads.
If marketing receives feedback from sales (weekly or monthly), they will be able to adjust future lead generation campaigns to improve the quality of the leads that are submitted to sales.
Blogging is a no brainer if you run an online business. Your company website should have a blog section that posts articles regularly. If leads find these articles useful, they will visit your website frequently.
If you write on topics centered around your product or service, then your readers will be considered as good leads, as they have an interest in your blog, which is related to your product or service.
You can effectively navigate visitors of your blog to other product landing pages by inserting links into your blog posts.
Send out a cold email to a prospective client is still an effective strategy for generating good leads. Companies don’t use cold outreach because of the fear of being labeled a spammer, but if done correctly, cold outreach will land you some quality handpicked leads.
With cold outreach, you research the companies that would benefit the most from using your product. If you sell commercial ovens, then you should research restaurants that will be most suited to use your product, then, reach out to them via email.
With cold outreach, you research the companies that would benefit the most from using your product. If you sell commercial ovens, then you should research restaurants that will be most suited to use your product, then, reach out to them via email.
The same goes for an online business. If you sell an app for Shopify stores, then do your homework and create a list of Shopify stores that you can target.
Don’t send out the same email to every single Shopify or eCommerce store out there. That’s just spamming. Narrow down your list to Shopify stores only that require your software.
When you have your list of emails ready, you can then send out customized cold emails. Customization is key and can only be achieved by getting as much information on the prospect as possible.
When you have your list of emails ready, you can then send out customized cold emails. Customization is key and can only be achieved by getting as much information on the prospect as possible.
Contests and giveaways are viral in nature and are held over a short period. This means that you can generate large amounts of leads within a short space of time. You can then work on analyzing and ranking your newly acquired leads.
People love free stuff, even in the B2B marketplace. You could offer discounts on SaaS software if you wish to attract B2B leads. An example would be to offer a marketing tool bundle that includes your product, and other products that complement yours.
People love free stuff, even in the B2B marketplace. You could offer discounts on SaaS software if you wish to attract B2B leads. An example would be to offer a marketing tool bundle that includes your product, and other products that complement yours.
Hosting a contest or a giveaway might seem difficult to manage. However, you can use a service like Vyper to manage your giveaway and all the leads that your contest generates.
Acquiring tons of leads is great, but you should not ignore the importance of high-quality leads because of their likelihood to purchase your product and their ability to move further along your company’s sales funnel.
There is plenty of research to be done when determining your quality leads, but it will be worth it in the long run. Nurture your quality leads by building relationships with them. They are your future customers.
Lead generation is the process of attracting prospects and gaining their interest in your company’s products and services. To generate leads, you can use a range of strategies such as email campaigns, content marketing, social media engagement, and other online and offline methods.
Lead generation is an essential part of any successful marketing campaign. It allows you to attract and identify potential customers who are actively looking for products or services that your business offers. By targeting these people, you can create a much more effective advertising strategy that delivers higher conversion rates and improved ROI.
There are many ways to generate leads. You can create content that is targeted towards your target audience, write emails that draw attention to your products and services, use remarketing campaigns on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, or leverage referral programs and partnerships with other businesses. Additionally, you can also use SEO techniques to boost organic search engine results for your website.
Lead generation tools are software or web-based services designed to help businesses reach more prospects and convert them into customers.
These tools are typically used in combination with other marketing tactics, such as email campaigns, website optimization, and social media management. They can provide a range of benefits including lead scoring, tracking engagement on multiple platforms, and automating outreach processes.
On the other hand, B2C lead generation is the process of generating leads for businesses that sell their products or services directly to consumers.
Lead generation is the critical driver of growth for B2B businesses. It’s your key to cutting through the noise, building a relationship with your customer, and influencing the buying process.
We understand why it’s daunting. You need to develop a model for creating content, attracting traffic, converting it, and then qualifying it to pass to your sales teams.
And you need to do all this at scale, while fighting for your buyer’s attention in a cluttered media landscape.
And you need to do all this at scale, while fighting for your buyer’s attention in a cluttered media landscape.
But it doesn’t have to be as overwhelming as it seems. In this detailed guide, we’ve broken down each stage of creating a lead generation strategy into actionable steps you can take one at a time.
Whether you’re a complete beginner starting from scratch or an expert looking to tweak an existing strategy, you’ll find straightforward explanations and actionable advice to help you generate more quality leads.
This interest is represented as an exchange of information, such as providing a name and email address for a piece of content.
A lead is anyone who expresses an interest in the goods or services your company offers but may not be ready to buy yet.
Don’t confuse leads with prospects. There’s a difference. A lead is a potential customer who still needs to be qualified to become a prospect. (This means they’re a good fit for your business and may want to do business with you in the future.)
Lead generation is the process of attracting and engaging your target audience to the point where they want to give you their information.
This process works by driving targeted traffic to your website, capturing visitor information and nurturing those who fit your buyer personas.
Lead generation is critical for B2B success. Why? The answer can be summed up in two words: sales cycle.
A study by Marketing Sherpa, found that 90 percent of B2B sales take more than one month to close, while 10 percent take more than one year.
A study by Marketing Sherpa, found that 90 percent of B2B sales take more than one month to close, while 10 percent take more than one year.
Why does this matter? Because capturing a potential customer’s information at the beginning of this process gives you the opportunity to influence it. And with buyers facing more distractions than ever, you’re going to need all the influence you can get.
What’s more, once you’ve captured a lead’s information—you can qualify them. This means you figure out which ones are most likely to generate revenue for your business and focus your time and energy on converting those.
If you can establish a strategy that generates high quality leads and scales, then you’ve found the key to delivering sustainable growth for your business.
If you can establish a strategy that generates high quality leads and scales, then you’ve found the key to delivering sustainable growth for your business.
At first sight, it may seem that your potential buyers take a rather random approach at buying. Sometimes they make a purchase, and sometimes they don't. But this couldn't be further from the truth.
While there are a lot of differences in the way each individual makes a purchase, there's still a process leading up to your buyer's decision. Marketers have developed the concept of a lead generation funnel so they can visualize the entire process and become capable of influencing it.
B2B companies need a lead generation funnel for the simple reason that, in most cases, a purchase takes a long time to develop. A 2016 survey found that 48% of companies say leads require a long cycle before making a purchase.
Instead of focusing on making a sale right away, as may happen with a B2C company, a B2B marketer needs to develop a long-term approach to their sales process. This allows them to segment potential clients, nurture them properly, and hand them over to the sales teams once they're ready to buy.
In this chapter, we’ll show you what a lead generation funnel is, how to define it, and how to build yours.
Defining this is super important, because 50% of qualified leads aren’t ready to purchase at first contact. Your funnel provides the roadmap to get them there.
It’s represented as a funnel because at each stage fewer people will meet the criteria needed to do business with your company.
Content is critical to your funnel. But before we get into the specifics of what content works and why, let's cover why it’s so important.
Content is the common denominator throughout the lead generation funnel. Whether that’s a blog, an ebook, or a case study, your content will be the tool to turn your lead into a customer.
The key lies in the segmentation. Use your content as the basis for identifying where someone is in the buying process then provide them with unique content that fits their needs to get them to the next stage.
With marketing automation systems and retargeting, you can deliver timely content that solves your lead’s problems. With each piece of engaged content, your lead will progress through your funnel to purchase.
With marketing automation systems and retargeting, you can deliver timely content that solves your lead’s problems. With each piece of engaged content, your lead will progress through your funnel to purchase.
The top of your lead generation funnel should concentrate on attracting a wide audience of potential customers. The goal is to build awareness and trust without focusing on your products.
There are many marketing tactics you can leverage in order for you to attract people at this stage of the funnel, including:
You want the reader to feel enough trust in order for them to eventually give you their personal information.
While the previous step of the funnel created a personal connection with the visitor, this is where you use that trust to build a business relationship.
While the previous step of the funnel created a personal connection with the visitor, this is where you use that trust to build a business relationship.
In order for the visitor to give you their personal information, you need to offer a piece of gated content that solves a problem or satisfies a need.
After you first capture their information, you can then begin to engage and educate your leads further. Ultimately, establishing your offering as the solution to their problems.
By the time a lead reaches the bottom of your lead generation funnel, they’re a prospect. They’ve been nurtured about the potential solutions to their problems; a solution that should involve your product or service.
Bottom of the funnel content is tailored to getting your prospects to purchase. They’re almost there, you just need to help them overcome any objections.
At this stage, they know you, trust you, and like you enough to consider doing business with you. What they need now is the reassurance that their purchase decision will be the right one.
Each and every content type helps to lower objections and motivate the prospect to convert into a customer.
Throughout each step of the lead generation funnel, there at first, you need low-touch, educational content that engages people, while at the later stages you need high-touch, transactional content that lowers the barriers to purchase.
Start by defining your funnel adapted to your unique needs, offers, and industry. Get a clear understanding of where your content fits in each step of the funnel so you can plan it correctly.
As you start creating the content and adapting it to your funnel, you will build the foundations of your lead generation and lead nurture efforts.
As you start creating the content and adapting it to your funnel, you will build the foundations of your lead generation and lead nurture efforts.
Now you’ve learned the basics of what a lead generation strategy looks like, it’s time for the exciting stuff—the process of generating leads.
63% of marketers say generating traffic and leads is their biggest challenge. Even more say their lead generation efforts are only slightly effective.
If all of this sounds new or hard to grasp, then worry not. In this chapter you’ll learn how to apply the first two steps, and in the following three chapters, we’ll cover how to attract, capture and qualify your leads.
Throughout the lead generation funnel, content plays a critical role in transforming visitors into leads and leads into customers.
But content alone can't motivate people to give you their personal information. Your content needs to tap into an unmet need or problem they have.
If you can address the problems your visitor faces and help solve them through your content, you’ll have the foundation for a successful lead generation strategy.
You build personas by leveraging quantitative and qualitative data from your current or desired customers. That means, you can create personas either based on the customers you have, or from customers who you'd like to attract but haven't yet.
The goal of a buyer persona is to identify the common characteristics of your buyers and keep your marketing team focused on their needs. There’s two types of data you can use to build these personas in practice.
You can get this type of data through the use of web analytics (e.g., Google Analytics) and visitor identification software (e.g., Leadfeeder).
Qualitative data, on the other hand, helps you bring depth into your personas, adding unique parameters to them, including:
These types of answers can mean the difference between knowing your personas and understanding them. The former is logical while the latter is emotional. You need both aspects to create useful and actionable personas.
You can get this type of data through the use of web analytics (e.g., Google Analytics) and visitor identification software (e.g., Leadfeeder).
Qualitative data, on the other hand, helps you bring depth into your personas, adding unique parameters to them, including:
These types of answers can mean the difference between knowing your personas and understanding them. The former is logical while the latter is emotional. You need both aspects to create useful and actionable personas.
You can extract qualitative data through the use of surveys and interviews. Most importantly, you can use your existing customer support, business development, and sales channels to understand the exact expressions, words, and ideas your buyers use.
Once you’ve built your buyer personas, you should understand the key challenges of your target audience and, more importantly, how to position your company to solve them.
Once you’ve built your buyer personas, you should understand the key challenges of your target audience and, more importantly, how to position your company to solve them.
If there's one challenge all marketers alike face it’s a lack of personalization in their customer communications.
Consumers are tired of being blasted with ever more impersonal messages, which is why 81% want brands to understand and know how to approach them. Sadly, 83% of marketers struggle with creating personalized content because they don't know their customers.
Personas allow you to create content that is more relatable to your different target customer groups. Instead of creating one-size-fits-all content for each stage of your funnel, you can create something far more personalized.
As explained in the previous chapter, the content you create for each of the steps—TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content—will change in length, type, and level of detail. But it should also change based on the data taken from your personas. This is how you personalize to create more impactful messaging.
The goal of your content for this buyer is to highlight your value and their potential return on investment (ROI). If they don't understand the context behind the price, they can't make the right decision.
For your price conscious buyer to overcome their concerns, you need to create the right content for them when they’re making their buying decision.
After you’ve attracted them with an interesting blog article, captured their information with an ebook, you now need to convert them. This could mean could mean creating comparison articles, highlighting your product tiers, or providing an ROI calculator.
Understand what’s stopping them progress from one stage of the funnel to the next, and create relatable content to address these problems.
How do you know when to deliver your price conscious buyer your ROI calculator? They’ve visited your pricing page and haven’t converted. They’re ready to buy. Now is the time to remove and address their pricing concerns.
How do you know when to deliver your price conscious buyer your ROI calculator? They’ve visited your pricing page and haven’t converted. They’re ready to buy. Now is the time to remove and address their pricing concerns.
This step requires you to know what content your buyer has already viewed to understand where they are in their journey.
Once they’ve viewed content that aligns with one of your funnel stages, it’s time to deliver content to help guide them to the next stage.
Your personas should define where your buyers are spending their time online when consuming educational information, researching products and making purchase decisions.
For example, your price conscious buyer may spend time researching competitors on website like G2 or TrustRadius, or even Googling comparison searches. In this instance, paying for ads on such searches or review sites will ensure you can direct your buyer to a tailored piece of content at this crucial stage in the buying process.
The lead generation process you've seen so far represents the foundation of your entire work. For that reason, it's paramount you set it up the right way.
It’s not as daunting as it seems and you won’t get it right first time. But that’s not the goal. The goal is to get a process in place. Once you have this, you can tweak it, improve it, and replicate it many times over.
You understand how to structure your lead generation funnel, build buyer personas and create build the right content. Now you need to reach your audience.
It’s not as simple as it seems. Generating traffic to power lead generation is the number one challenge for two in three marketers.
With companies publishing more content than ever and ad budgets increasing year on year, the competition for eyeballs is fierce.
In this chapter, we’re going to cover three completely different ways to drive traffic to your lead generation funnel.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of visitors you receive from organic search results.
Why is SEO so important for lead generation? Because it can help you bring large volumes of visitors to the top of your lead generation funnel.
Once you've done the work to get a piece of content ranking highly for a relevant search query, it will drive a sustained flow of traffic. More importantly, this traffic is free.
There are a large number of factors that contribute to your search engine ranking. We won’t cover them here. But assuming you have the fundamentals in place, here are three steps you can take to ensure organic search traffic starts delivering you valuable leads.
There are a large number of factors that contribute to your search engine ranking. We won’t cover them here. But assuming you have the fundamentals in place, here are three steps you can take to ensure organic search traffic starts delivering you valuable leads.
The first step requires you to define a set of keywords. These keywords represent queries people use to find content; the more searches a given query has, the more traffic you can expect to attract.
If you have a Google Ads account, you can start your search with Google Keyword Planner. Alternatively, use a paid tool like Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush. All of these tools mix Google's data with their own to come up with these estimations which will help you find good keywords.
Here's an example of the search volume and difficulty Ahrefs reports for the keyword "SEO strategy."
By considering both the traffic volume and the competitiveness of a keyword (which in this case is by the number of links pointing to the top 10 results for a given keyword), you can get a more balanced idea of the work you need to do to rank for a given keyword.
The previous example has a large volume of searches and also high competitiveness. As Ahrefs explains above, it would require you to get backlinks from around 99 websites to rank in the top 10 results.
The key when searching for keywords is to be realistic. Strike the right balance between high volume, low competitiveness, and relevancy.
Relevancy is very personal to your own business. Ideally, you are looking for search queries that are related to your product or service. Review your buyer personas and the problems your audience is trying to solve.
Relevancy is very personal to your own business. Ideally, you are looking for search queries that are related to your product or service. Review your buyer personas and the problems your audience is trying to solve.
If you can help answer a question on these topics, you've taken the first step towards presenting your solution as an answer to their potential problem.
The content you create should help people with questions and problems that aren't directly related to your solution. For example, if your product helps people generate leads (like Leadfeeder), then we'll create a piece of content educating people about lead generation (like this guide).
When coming up with potential content ideas, analyze the search engine results for your chosen keywords. This will help you understand what type of content that is already ranking. Then, create something better.
Before you publish a piece of content, you need to optimize it. For a more detailed view, you can check out this list from Moz's on-page ranking factors page.
To improve the chances of ranking it faster, you should aim to get a few internal and external links to your newly-published post. This lets search engines find your page faster and consider it of higher authority.
In order to make people go from visitors to leads, you need to offer a "lead magnet." That is, a gated piece of content, like an ebook or webinar, that continues to help the reader.
The lead magnet should provide more depth to the original piece of content your visitor has consumed.
The lead magnet should provide more depth to the original piece of content your visitor has consumed.
For example, this post from Pipedrive, about defining lead prospects, provides an ebook as a content upgrade:
This lead magnet a great next step for readers. After they’ve read the blog and learned how to define their leads, their next question is likely to be: how do I find those leads? Pipedrive immediately provides the answer.
With 645 million users, and in-depth business data on all of them, LinkedIn is the best paid platform for B2B lead generation.
With 645 million users, and in-depth business data on all of them, LinkedIn is the best paid platform for B2B lead generation.
According to a LinkedIn Marketing Solutions report, 61 million LinkedIn users are senior-level influencers while 40 million are in decision-making positions.
With 645 million users, and in-depth business data on all of them, LinkedIn is the best paid platform for B2B lead generation.
You can generate leads that are real decision-makers who have influence over the buyer process. The in-depth user data makes it easy to target your buyer personas. Campaigns can bring instant results as you get what you pay for. LinkedIn has a lead generation ad type, which means that people don't need to leave the platform and you don't need to build landing pages.
Since your goal is to generate leads, you should use the website visited or lead generation objectives.
The website visits objective will enable you to drive traffic to a landing page on your website, the lead generation objective will enable you to generate leads directly within LinkedIn.
The choice you make will depend on your company's needs—LinkedIn’s depth of data allows you to accurately target your buyer personas with real precision.
The choice you make will depend on your company's needs—LinkedIn’s depth of data allows you to accurately target your buyer personas with real precision.
A website visits campaign will lead people to a landing page on your website, where they can enter their information to download your content. Just make sure your ad makes clear that the content is gated, so people aren’t frustrated when people click your ad and land on a download form.
A lead generation campaign, however, will direct people to a lead form within LinkedIn, where their information is pre-populated. This reduces the friction of capturing lead information.
A lead generation campaign, however, will direct people to a lead form within LinkedIn, where their information is pre-populated. This reduces the friction of capturing lead information.
Before you can publish your ad campaign, you need to select a bid and budget. This will define the amount of money you will invest and the amount of traffic you can expect to attract.
As a rule of thumb, the more money you invest in a campaign, the more traffic and leads you can expect to generate.
As a rule of thumb, the more money you invest in a campaign, the more traffic and leads you can expect to generate.
For more information on how to build a winning LinkedIn campaign, check out our comprehensive LinkedIn ads guide.
The aim of co-marketing is to build a genuine relationship with companies that share your audience but aren't your direct competition.
Why? You can leverage one another’s expertise for content creation and audience for lead generation.
Instead of attracting "cold" traffic to a TOFU piece of content (i.e., traffic that doesn't know your brand and thus needs to become aware of its existence), you're leveraging the trust the audience has with your partner.
And when 84% of buyers begin the sales process from a trusted referral, your partner’s existing relationship with their audience is invaluable.