Leads are the foundation of a company’s future growth. Today, lead generation is particularly effective in ensuring an increase in the number of potential customers and in bringing significant advantages both to a company and its clients.
A company that wants to increase its numbers of potential customers should invest in lead generation: a fundamental part of growing any business. The advantage of lead generation is that it ensures higher revenues, in addition to a significant increase in the number of prospects, both in the medium and long term. The final goal is the conversion of leads into loyal customers, by accompanying them in a process that continues month by month and is based on a solid relationship of trust in the company.
The inbound logic behind lead generation
How does lead generation work in technical terms?
The logic behind lead generation is that of inbound marketing, in other words:
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Attract people potentially interested in your product or service
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Convert them into leads
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Convert these leads into customers
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Build your customers’ loyalty
Attracting potential customers
To attract potentially interested people, you have to use SEO and SEM strategies that can help you obtain a high ranking on search engines. Other useful activities include Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing and advertising campaigns on Google Ads. Participating in trade shows and events is also an excellent way of generating leads, particularly if you take advantage of the opportunities offered by location-based digital marketing.
Turning visitors into leads
After having attracted a high enough number of potentially interested customers, chosen through specific targeting, you need to let them know that they have found, in your company and website, what they were looking for. For this reason, a well-built and user-friendly landing page with an effective call-to-action is the best instrument to turn them into leads. On the landing page, the potential lead can subscribe to your newsletter or provide their personal data to download premium content, like an e-book, a pdf file or something else.
In the next phase, you use the contact info you have gathered, by creating a list comprised of your specific target audience, which forms the basis of the marketing strategy that will convert it into a customer base.
Lead nurturing and customer loyalty
At this point, you move on to the lead nurturing phase, where you focus on giving potential customers additional information about your company. By creating quality content, you will build brand awareness via social networks or Direct Email Marketing strategies. This in turn will lead to the post-purchase phase, and increasing the loyalty of your customers. All lead-nurturing activity, accompanied by the monitoring of results, will quantify the return achieved on lead generation marketing activities.
Why lead generation matters for growth
Lead generation is a fundamental process for the future of a company, as it leads the potential customer through a clear process which will result in a sale. Companies that decide to invest in digital marketing for lead generation purposes, have a competitive advantage over those who don’t. This includes a stronger and more effective relationship with their customers, who can quickly find the products or services they need, as well as benefiting the company, by allowing it to directly address its relevant target market.
Do you own or run a company and want to quickly increase your business’ leads? Then contact Mintense, a digital marketing agency with over 17 years of experience in planning digital marketing strategies tailor-made to the specific needs of our clients.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a lead, and how is it different from a simple contact?
A lead is a person or a company that has given you their details and shown interest in what you sell: a form filled in, a white paper downloaded, a demo requested. A contact is only a name in a database. The difference matters because a lead can be scored, nurtured and passed to sales with context, while a cold contact has to be qualified from zero before anyone can work on it.
How long does it take before lead generation produces revenue?
Rarely in the first month. The attraction phase needs time for search and content to gain traction, and the nurturing phase runs for weeks or months depending on how expensive and considered the purchase is. A low-ticket consumer product can convert in days; a B2B contract with several decision makers takes far longer. Plan the budget over at least two or three quarters and judge the program on pipeline created, not on the first week of form fills.
What is lead nurturing, and why do most leads need it?
Lead nurturing is the sequence of content and messages that keeps a prospect engaged between the first form fill and the moment they are ready to buy. Most people who download something are researching, not buying. Nurturing gives them the case study, the comparison or the technical answer they need next, so that when the budget opens your company is already the reference point. Without it, leads go cold and the acquisition cost is wasted.
Which channels generate the best leads?
It depends on how people look for what you sell. Search advertising and SEO capture demand that already exists and usually deliver the highest intent. LinkedIn works when you need to reach a specific job title in a specific industry. Email marketing converts an existing list better than any paid channel. Trade shows and events still produce excellent leads when the follow-up is organized in advance. Most programs combine two or three of these rather than relying on one.
How do you measure the cost per lead and the return?
Divide total campaign spend by the number of qualified leads to get cost per lead, then track what share of those leads become opportunities and customers. The number that matters is the cost per acquired customer, not the cost per form fill, because a channel with cheap leads and a poor close rate can be the most expensive one you have. Connect the form to your CRM from day one, otherwise the second half of the calculation is guesswork.
Why do so many leads never become customers?
Usually for one of three reasons. The targeting was too broad, so the form collected people who were never going to buy. The follow-up was too slow, and a prospect who waits days for an answer has already spoken to a competitor. Or there was no nurturing at all, and a lead who was six months away from a decision was treated as ready to sign. Fixing response time is normally the cheapest of the three to solve.
