What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation consists of attracting and converting target audiences that have shown interest in your product or service. The goal is to guide prospects through the buyer’s journey to the end of the sales funnel (aka a closed deal).
Content is one of the leading tools B2B marketers use to generate leads. This may consist of social media posts, blog posts, live events, and coupons. You use forms to capture leads that engage with the content and add them to a lead-nurturing email campaign.
Why is Lead Generation Important for Business?
A company without a lead generation strategy is a sitting duck. Its revenue and growth will rely on the whims of a target audience that may or may not know it even exists. You’ll have no “leads” for sales to go to.
And why are leads important? Because without them, it’s challenging to maximize growth and revenue.
Lead generation is a process that builds visibility, credibility, trust, and interest from a specific group of people (potential leads). So focusing on lead generation can help drive traffic from high-quality prospects. And with high-quality prospects come high-value customers.
In other words — more revenue for your business. With proper lead gen strategies, you can grow your business and the lifetime value of each customer.
What are the Benefits of Lead Generation?
You get it — leads are essential to the sustainability of your business. But how exactly does lead generation benefit your organization? Here’s a look at nine reasons you should focus on lead generation.
1. Expand Your Market
When you started your business, you likely targeted a specific group of people. But is this the only sector you can and should be targeting? Lead gen enables you to learn about your prospects.
Maybe you’re getting engagement from companies and job roles not included in your marketing campaigns. With lead gen, you’ll see this trend and can add them.
Now, you have the opportunity to expand into new markets you otherwise wouldn’t have.
2. Grow Your Following
Content creation and communication are a big part of lead generation efforts. It consists of crafting quality content and starting conversations on social channels. The goal is to share valuable content with your target audience, so as to position you as a thought leader in the industry.
In turn, this builds a community of professionals who like and follow your brand. Some will become customers and even more may turn into brand advocates. And who couldn’t use more of those?
3. Gather More Customer Reviews
Social proof is everything when it comes to convincing prospects to convert into customers. And there’s no better form of it than a review from a past client.
But you don’t always get these automatically (even when your product or service is excellent). So it pays (literally) to ask your customers for testimonials and reviews.
You can then use this within your marketing collateral, such as your website, emails, videos, social media posts, and infographics.
4. Boost Your Revenue
When done correctly, lead generation can maximize your brand’s ability for reaching target prospects. This requires using the right messaging, offer, and content to generate interest from these specific groups.
In doing so, you’ll find it easier to capture the attention of qualified leads, which makes it easier for sales to convert them. The revenue growth potential is great, especially when you’re focusing on interests and pain points your audience cares about.
5. Generate Business Opportunities
Lead gen doesn’t only help with finding prospects. It can also present business opportunities. Maybe a non-competing brand in your industry reaches out to host a webinar together. And by teaming up, you gain access to their audience (and vice versa).
It’s a mutually beneficial partnership that can lead to well…more leads.
6. Improve Lead Quality
Creating content and dumping it onto the web can get you traffic. Maybe even a ton of it. But if your visitors aren’t converting into leads, then it’s a wasted effort.
With lead generation, you’re taking a highly targeted approach to content creation. Everything you write for your brand — from the website and email copy to social media and blog posts — needs to cater to these specific groups.
This makes it easier to create topics and messages that resonate with each audience. And by doing this, you’ll improve the quality of your leads, which improves conversions and sales.
7. Build Visibility and Awareness
Maybe you’re a startup that recently launched without much buzz. Or you’re an established business that’s operated behind the scenes for years. And now you want to get more eyes (and wallets) focused on your company.
Creating visibility and awareness is vital to turning the tide in your favor. You can do this by creating content your audience cares about and sharing them on the channels they frequent.
8. Eliminate or Reduce Cold Calling (and Emailing)
When you have hot leads coming to you, why continue using unnecessary outbound methods like cold calling and emailing? This will free up the time of your salespeople so they can focus on closing more deals with leads they know want your product.
9. Automate Lead Management
There are now software tools you can use to automate lead generation and management processes. This includes tools like email marketing software, CRMs, and customer data platforms (CDP) and Sending Platforms. By implementing them into your lead generation strategy, you can simplify and hasten your pipeline.
For example, your CDP captures information about leads. Then leads are segmented into a nurturing campaign carried out by your email marketing tool. Then your CRM keeps track of all communications between leads and your business. By making these tools accessible to marketing, sales, and customer support teams, you can synchronize data and initiatives.
Having this bird’s-eye view of prospects and their behaviors is vital to improving marketing and sales campaigns.
