What is lead generation and how can it help your business? Getting your unique business message out there can be tough. You're happy to budget for marketing, sure, but it's frustrating how much of what you advertise falls on indifferent ears. Lead generation is all about side-stepping that frustration and hitting your bullseye: the receptive potential client.
What Is Lead Generation?
At its most basic level, lead generation is the conversion of a prospective client into an interested party likely to become a paying client. Leads are people or businesses which have already shown interest in your brand. You've had some conversations and know what problems and pain points they have, and you have some solution waiting in the wings.
This client, or prospect, wants to learn more about how you can help them. Reaching out to them with offers or services that solve their problems will be more likely to be met with success.
Target Your Ideal Clients
Implementing a professional lead generation campaign such as we provide furnishes you with a consistent flow of high-quality, long-term clients. Lead generation and demand generation cut through the crowd and get straight to the people who really want your services. These are your ideal clients: the ones you exist to help and who create demand for your valuable services.
Why Lead Generation?
All brands want leads because leads become customers. However, many businesses are stuck in the dark ages, hawking their wares to whoever happens to come by. Embrace the Age of Enlightened demand generation and start targeting your niche audience!
Using lead generating methods, you:
- target only the right prospects
- improve brand reputation
- collect valuable prospect information
- join the modern world of marketing
How Does it Work?
Lead generation is an effective marketing methodology that focuses on understanding your audience and creating value for them. It seeks to cater to their needs and problems, sometimes with free offers to attract them to the brand. Depending on whether you provide services to businesses or individuals, lead generation will look a little different.
Business to Consumer (B2C)
When converting individual prospects into leads, many businesses use social media ads, blogs, and email campaigns. These platforms will contain engaging copy which culminates in a persuasive call to action (CTA). When the prospect clicks on the CTA, they will be sent to a landing page and offered a free, valuable gift, such as an eBook, course, or template, but which is accessible only after registering their name and contact information.
Business to Business (B2B)
When converting businesses into leads, a slightly different approach is needed. You want to be proactive and reach out to prospective clients, but Facebook and Instagram ads aren't as applicable here. You need a professional decision-maker data focused way to identify and connect with potential clients. You also need business-relevant offers to entice them, such as white papers and case studies in their field.
How Do I Generate Leads?
Generating leads is what we do and, if we do say so ourselves, we're pretty darn good at it too! We use buyer-intent data-driven techniques to identify and reach out to prospects.
Account-Based Marketing
We specialize in B2B account-based marketing, which starts with identifying the ideal account/client. You can see the simplified process from start to finish below.
ABM Breakdown:
- Account Selection
- Contact Identification
- Nurturing
- Account Conversion
Generating leads is all about perfecting the first two steps of this process with a stellar marketing campaign. We're going to into detail to show you just what's involved in each of these steps.
1. Account Selection
This is the first step in lead generation and requires a good deal of data analysis. To get maximum ROI for your business, you want to make sure that all resources aimed at generating leads are effective, efficient, and targeted. That's where we come in.
Data Collection and Analysis
We partner with a data collector that pulls the online footprints of millions of businesses worldwide. This data collector allows us to find patterns and create a picture of what these businesses are looking for. This gives us access to exactly who is looking for the services you offer right now.
You need to know which businesses are currently in the market for your services. You don't want to waste time calling prospects just to hear, "We've got that area covered right now, thanks anyway." Click.
2. Contact Identification
Behind every client account are real humans: individuals with different likes, dislikes, habits, and influences. We use our access to extensive data points to ascertain who to talk to, when to talk to them, and how to approach them. We then reach out and screen for prospect interest in the following ways:
Teleprospecting
No one likes a cold caller. Telemarketing is an ineffective way to get clients but an effective way to annoy them. Teledemand is different. By targeting only the right people, with the right needs, at the right time, you increase your chances of building your client base immensely.
Teledemand is the first tool in your campaign toolbelt when looking for relevant prospective customers. It's a chance to deliver a nuanced, tailor-fit message that addresses the client's immediate needs. How do you know the client's immediate needs? That's where all that data research we were talking about earlier comes into play.
Email Campaigns
Email is still the most used method of communication and information sharing. Our SmartMail campaign format allows for optimized brand messaging to get your brand noticed and emailed opened.
Social Media Outreach
Utilizing social media in an outreach campaign is an absolute necessity these days, and one of the best platforms for B2B is LinkedIn. Reaching out to professionals on this platform has been shown to increase the response rate by 3X that of usual email response rates. This is because decision-makers aren't bombarded by sales pitches and other communication in LinkedIn message boxes. Your relevant, solutions-based message will stand out.
Our LinkedOUTbound campaign ensures that your brand and services are being seen in all the right places. We manage everything for you, from mining for prospects, sending out connection requests and tailored messaging, through to keeping up with your inbox and sending positive client responses on to your sales team for follow-up.
Leads Generated
Using the above methods, prospects who respond positively to the outreach can be "nurtured". An ongoing conversation ensues, where we gain the opportunity to really learn what your soon-to-be client really wants out of your service. This is a great way for us to tailor your offerings to their needs and really impress them.
At this point, all the hard work has been done. We have reached out, offered your services, built brand recognition and reputation, and found responsive businesses. We've started some great conversations with prospects and gained their interest and appreciation helped fill your pipeline.
Once you generate a lead, it's just one more baby step to conversion into a profitable, happy, long-term business contract. Visit Prospect Hunter to schedule a campaign demo and learn just how much business we can generate for you!
