How to develop an effective lead generation strategy

Lead generation is essentially all the activities relating to the identification and development of potential customers. Businesses use a range of tools through sales and marketing functions in order to generate leads and increase revenue for their enterprises. Without leads, businesses could not survive as their sales pipelines would eventually dry up. 

There exist distinct differences between B2C (business to consumer/retail marketing) and B2B (business to business/corporate marketing) lead generation. The most tangible difference is that B2C markets generally tend to be broad-based whereas B2B markets are more carefully segmented, with customers and competition tending to be more advanced and knowledgeable about products and services.

Lead generation encompasses a variety of different tactics include conducting detailed market research, developing the sales funnel (more on this in our next post), carefully managing your social media channels (through effective social media management), maintaining your website and pages (namely your landing page, product pages and call to action) and keeping your viewers hooked and wanting more through effective content marketing through blogs, social media snippets and e-mail newsletters.

In order to develop an effective lead generation strategy, you will have to have a keen understanding of how the sales funnel works and how to convert a general consumer in your target segment into a lead who steadily converts from a 'cold' lead to a 'hot' lead and eventually a customer of your business.

To achieve this, you will need to blend the tools we mentioned earlier by prioritizing your sales and marketing in order to aggressively seek out fresh leads, qualify them to filter out non-buyers/distractors and then narrow down the remaining percentage into final customers. A successful lead generation strategy perfectly balances all the tools in the arsenal in order to maximize the percentage of leads conversion in the sales funnel.

It's important to balance the quantity versus quality formula when strategizing lead generation. Having a large list of leads is great, but if the leads are sketchy, then it would be better to get your hands on a smaller list with leads which are more promising for conversion. Therefore, you will need to juggle between your number of leads and the potential for conversion of those leads in order to gauge the effectiveness of your strategy.

Leads can be acquired from a variety of sources. These include through social media, webinars, podcasts, videos (think YouTube and Vimeo), email newsletters/subscriptions or even email list purchasing, website forms, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, lead databases/directories and customer referrals (one of the powerful sources). 

Once you have sourced your leads and implemented the lead generation tools, then you can proceed to go for the execution and carefully measure the campaign's success through various metrics like new subscriptions, message responses, website/blog visit data and ultimately, changes in revenue and return on investment.

As we've seen, developing an effective lead generation strategy is crucial for any business, large and small in order to increase revenues and gain market share to improve competitiveness. At the end of the day, without leads converting into customers, a business will find itself quickly running out of customers - which will in turn jeopardize the survival of the business - something even more crucial to consider given the current times we are living in now!

Cheers,

Red