Lead generation is the process of acquiring a person’s contact details for a sales person to close later. In the context of digital marketing it’s where ads (and content) are put in front of people who are likely to be a client.
The biggest challenge businesses have are filling their pipeline with leads, nurturing them, and finally closing them. This is a process which requires significant effort. Fortunately, lead generation is something that you can outsource to a Digital Marketing Agency, so when a lead is generated, it is sent to you via email and/or SMS automatically.
Question is, how does a Digital Marketing Agency, such as us, generate leads for our clients? There are two key ways in which we do that:
- Simply put an ad in front of people who we believe are likely to be a client. The ads are setup using Google AdWords or Facebook.
- Use ads to lead people to a website landing page, which contains enough information and builds enough rapport for them to leave their contact details.
That is a simple way of putting it, but here are some things that need to be worked out:
- Identify who exactly you want as a client
- Where do these people congregate online?
- Organise them into audiences
- For each audience determine how much rapport and trust needs to be established before they are ready to make a purchasing decision with you
- You need a lot of trust (ideal customer audience): Create “lead magnets” to incentivise people to leave their contact details
- Just need it done (in market audience): make it super easy to collect their information or for them to get in contact with you
- These audiences, depending on where they came from and their intent, require a dedicated landing page, which is customised to their needs, wants and desires with the sole focus of getting them to make contact or submit their details
The success of a lead generation campaign is measured when the leads are valuable to your business and they have been generated at a sustainable cost.
Mechanisms to Generate Leads
In Market Audiences
An in-market audience is defined as a group of people who are actively looking for the product or service you offer and the likelihood of them making a purchasing decision is high. The best way to tap into these sorts of audiences is by selecting the right channel to access them.
Google AdWords (Search Ads) – the most successful platform for generating leads and sales, because if someone is using Google to search for something, they are definitely actively researching, considering a decision to purchase, or are ready to buy.
Google Display Network (GDN) – if someone lands on your website and doesn’t make a decision to buy, it’s in your best interests to bring them back (remarketing) and convert.
Email Marketing – if you have a healthy list of email addresses, it’s worthwhile finding out what sort of email is going to activate them into a sale or a re-purchase.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO, organic search results) – a great and possibly essential strategy is to organically rank higher in Google so less money is invested in Google Search Ads.
Ideal Customer Audiences
There may be a number of reasons why you would consider trying to create a market or a warm lead pool:
- There is no market for what you offer – there may be no one actively searching for your products or services.
- The cost of using Google AdWords is to high – for some busineses they would not even bother trying with Google AdWords, because in some cases the competition is far too high and so are the costs to acquire new business.
Instead, these are the best channels for creating a warm lead pool and attempting to directly convert:
Facebook Ads – an ad that is displayed in front of someone who you and/or Facebook believe is most likely to be a client / customer.
Google Display Network (GDN) – a text, image or animated ad that is shown on various websites across the internet who display Google Ads.
Content Marketing – some products or services require more trust and rapport before a potential client or customer is ready to part with their money, and content marketing is where valuable content is provided to build this trust.
