What Is Lead Generation?
The definition of lead generation is, “The process of turning a viewer (visitor) into a subscriber of recurring communication”. ( Email marketing is one of the best ways to do this.)
Simply put, lead generation is how you turn your audience into dedicated followers who wish to learn more about the products and services you’re offering.
These people who “subscribe” to your email or contacts list, become a “lead” or “prospect”.
Once someone becomes a lead, AND given you their permission to continue contacting them, it’s your job to follow up with this lead. As you follow up, you’re able to build relationships with each person on your list of leads and potentially turn or “convert” them into customers.
You’re able to generate these audience members and leads by either running paid ads, or creating content in hopes of it generating free organic visitors.
Paid Ads are placements of messaging (content) in targeted ways in the hope of turning interested viewers into leads. Paid ads are one of the fastest ways to kick start lead growth.
Content creation and distributing it through various means, like Social Media and blogging, is a more time consuming activity one uses for attracting and interesting an audience into wanting to learn more.
Blogging can be a great marketing strategy for converting visitors to leads, even though it is time consuming to put out great content, it can be a huge source of traffic and leads for your business.
Both paid lead generation and organic lead generation can be done profitably.
How Does Lead Generation Work?
You generate a “lead”, when someone gives you some of their contact information.
Often they are willing to give you their email, name, or phone number – in exchange for valuable information, training, ebook, freebies, discounts, or because they simply want to learn more about what you’re offering.
The instant someone opt-ins in or subscribes to your email list, they are added to an autoresponder or CRM as a contact lead.
From this autoresponder or CRM, you’re able to send them additional communication and messaging automatically.
These additional communications and messaging called, “follow up emails” are sent in hope of converting / turning the lead into a paying customer.
How To Increase Lead Generation
Now that you understand exactly what lead generation is and how it works, we’re going to cover how to improve your lead generation.
Often businesses get comfortable with lead generation once they’ve discovered how to generate a consistent lead flow.
The problem with this, is that there are a numerous number of tips and tricks one can use to improve their lead generation efforts.
Those that stay on top of their game will get the best results from their lead generation marketing.
These different lead generation strategies and tips can be used to…
- Decrease costs of acquiring leads
- Increase opt-in rates (the % of people who view your ads and decide to opt-in)
- Improve lead quality
- Increase lifetime value of leads (LTV of leads)
By improving each of these metrics, you will quickly increase your businesses profits across the board.
Thus, by increasing your profits you’ll scale your business.
This fuels the cycle of lead generation and customer acquisition. Next, I’m going to share the best lead generation tips and strategies that you can start using immediately.
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Lead Generation Examples
What is an actual example of lead generation and how it works?
An example of lead generation is this…
- There is a form on a website that has a place where you can enter your name and email to request more information.
- You put in your information and hit the button (Also known as a call to action or CTA)
- You are directed to another page that is either a landing page or sales page where you are told more about the offer from the form you filled out.
- You are added to an email list where you are registered as a “lead”. Or someone who wants additional information.
Below is an example of a lead generation form, that performs the function of lead generation.
Lead Generation Tools
There are 2 kinds of tools that you can use in order to gather and manage leads.
- Autoresponders
- CRM’s (Customer relationship management software)
Both of these tools give you the ability to generate and manage your leads however you wish. You can email these leads, segment them, nurture them, score them, and so much more.
The only different between these 2 kinds of tools, is that CRM gives you additional features and functions that an autoresponder does not.
The Different Kinds Of Lead Generation
There are 2 different kinds of lead generation that can be done. Both of them are listed below, and also a description of how they work.
Inbound
Inbound lead generation is where your audience is requesting information from you. This means they are often submitting a form or showing some kind of interest that indicates they want to learn more about what you are trying to show them. An example of this, is a viewer seeing an ad online and putting in their contact information to learn more about what the ad is communicating about.
Usually ads, content production, and social media is used to generation inbound leads.
Outbound
Outbound lead generation is where you or your business manually reaches out to potential leads and attempts to see if they’d like to learn more about what you’re offering. An example of this would be a sales agent, reaching out to a prospect to see if they are interesting in buying the insurance they are offering.
Usually calling, manually emailing, texting, and messaged cold audiences is used to generation outbound leads.
Final Thoughts
We hope you learned a lot about lead generation from this article. After we’ve generated over 50,000 leads in our lead gen journey, we thoroughly understand how to teach others about this topic.
If you have any questions or concerns, please comment below or reach out.
With our kindest regards,
Jon Weberg
Richard Weberg