Inbound Marketing: Lead Generation

This morning I could not contain my excitement when my colleague said I am writing about lead generation. I am not a sales person by profession, and/or passion. But I am the leading sales person in the company, in fact I use lead generation to assist me with my sales, and the lead is more qualified, more willing to buy, and I close 71% of my sales on the first meeting. I am not a sales guru, but closing 71% on my first meeting is a pretty impressive record.

 So let's get into it, what is "Lead?" A lead is when someone has shown interest in your company's product or service. And in online terms, a lead is when someone completes a landing page to get access to a webinar, company offering, ebook, or a product demonstration. Having someone's email address does not make them a lead, rather consider them as a contact, they have provided their email address as a subscription to a blog or newsletters. You now have an opportunity to convert this person into a lead. When a person completes a form on your website called a Landing Page with an interest in something you are offering, you are able to qualify them and with special skills, nurture the lead and closing will be an easier task. Beats cold calling.

Since information transactions through landing pages generates leads, marketers often ask how much information is sufficient to ask your potential lead. The more information you ask, especially sensitive information, the less likely the visitor will complete and submit the form. This will also give you an opportunity to involve your sales team and ask them what information they need to nurture the lead. Too little information on your landing page will burden your sales process and your sales team will not be able to prioritize their leads. Have enough information to make it easier, and often ask your lead to specify what they are interested in, or ask them what is their biggest challenge in 140 characters or less. This will help your sales team to prioritize the leads and helps your marketing team ensure the right leads receive the right campaigns.

Inbound lead generation is by far the easiest way of generating lead, and better than cold calling or other forms of prospecting. Think about it, when you get an inbound lead, the visitor has completed the landing page form on your website, meaning they have read your offerings and more importantly they know who you are. So it saves your sales team a ton of time trying to explain who you are and what you do. The lead already knows your business and this builds to your professionalism and your credibility. When driving leads online, a business needs to have a few key elements in place. From a tactical perspective, a marketer needs three crucial things to make inbound lead generation happen:

1. Landing Pages - A landing page is a website page that has one distinct purpose: lead generation. This page contains a form that captures contact information from a visitor in exchange for an offer.
 2. Offer - An offer, in the context of lead generation, is some sort of content or product that is of enough value for a person to provide contact information in exchange for access to it. Traditional lead generation offers include things like ebooks, whitepapers, webinars ect.
3. Call-to-Action - Landing pages and offers are useless if no one sees them. to send people to a landing page, you need a call-to-action. Often abbreviated as CTA.

Below here are some best practices and to learn more about this you can visit Huspot.

1. Improve Positioning of Your Calls-to-Action 
2. Be More Clear About What You're Offering
3. Use Images, Not Just Text
4. Use Colors that Contrast with Your Site Color Scheme
5. Make your CTA a Hyperlink to the Corresponding Landing Page
6. Place CTAs on the Most Relevant Pages
7. Add CTAs to Each Blog Post

Off course these are best practices to optimize your lead generation and not commandments. Don't be afraid to try your own things, but if you are using the above, you are on the right track. Lastly as a marketer, your work does not stop the second that a lead hits the submit button. Your top priority is to ensure that the lead makes it to your sales team quickly and you can use your in-house CRM software to manage this process. Secondly as a marketer you need to aid the sales team in converting that lead into a customer. One of the best ways to do this is through a process lead nurturing. And lastly remember this, lead generation is not the ultimate goal, generating revenue is the ultimate goal. Work closely with your sales team and your leads to optimize the revenue generated directly from your marketing efforts.