Lead generation became more and more important in the year of digitalization since 1:1 sales meetings have gotten virtual and less effective. The majority of digital products, services, and consultation services were already using lead generation tactics but now, c2c and d2c companies have started to use lead generation tools as well. We can say that in the upcoming years lead generation companies will be more important than ever.
Table of Contents:
What is Lead Generation?
What is a Lead?
What Does a Lead Generation Process Look Like?
Lead Generation Marketing
What Does a Lead Generation Company Do?
What Are Best Lead Generation Companies?
How Lead Generation Companies Work?
Lead Generation Checklist
What is Lead Generation?
As discussed in one of our previous articles, lead generation is the process of finding and connecting with your potential customers. Generally, sales specialists work a lot on improving their lead generation muscles and spend a lot of time creating new generation channels and tactics. As well as creating channels it’s extremely important to create funnels for each of those channels.Through this process you capture the prospective customer through an action that attracts them, turn them into customers that are genuinely interested in the product or service you offer. Examples of this process can be seen in blog postsi campaigns, digital content, job applications and such. This has become an extremely sought after method in company marketing and sales initiatives, as it offers no infringement on privacy. The lad is formed solely through an expression of interest through the submission of consensual personal information.
What is a Lead?
As explained above, we can call a potential customer a lead. The major goal in lead generation is to capture the contact information of that potential customer to the company database and create a strategy to convert that potential customer into a paying customer. Through finding a lead, you turn a prospect who is not currently using your product to, say, fill out a survey of interest in the general domain of your service, and generate the appropriate assumption that this individual would be interested in your product. Then, you can follow up on this survey, the tool you had used to generate leads, and invite them to subscribe for your company, rather than directly mailing out to countless unrelated and uninterested individuals for subscription.
What Does a Lead Generation Process Look Like?
Lead generation generally starts with a trigger. It can start with an email campaign, a social post, a blog, or even with a persuasive presentation. After the person that is hooked with the piece of information received from those channels, it’s expected them to visit the landing page or directly contact the salesperson. After coming and discovering the landing page, call-to-actions work and visitors on the site finally get attracted to the offer and drop their intention of a potential buyer. This process is convenient both for you and the end-user as you limit the prospects you reach out to create a more intuitive specifically tiered prospect pool. The information collected in this process helps you personalize communication channels and address user problems that already exist directly. This ensures smart conversion of temporary visitors to your site into customers.
Lead Generation Marketing
To create good lead generation marketing teams should come up with good content strategies. Content strategies should include all of the platforms since every platform could offer a different segmented audience. The marketing team should be sufficient on email marketing, social media marketing, and setting up great ads. Ads are important because they push those campaigns further and help those campaigns to become their most effective versions. It’s a fact that content creation is a time taking hard task but we have already covered some tips on repurposing content through channels.
Tim Barker, the Chief Product Officer of DataSift once said, “Customers are now smarter, more connected, more informed, more influenced and influential socially, and less likely to respond to campaign-bait. Marketing has to create content people actually want.” Through accurate lead generation, you are able to evaluate audience profiles and the buyer journeys, outline recurring customer pain points, and create content that will directly address these pain points. Finding and converting leads will allow you to boost your company’s awareness and enhance customer loyalty and sales, optimizing your marketing efforts.
What Does a Lead Generation Company Do?
Lead generation companies handle the complex architecture of a sales funnel. Basically creates templates and layouts for their customers to capture the required contact information and save it to the proper database and tag if needed. Generally, lead generation companies charge their customers by the amount of lead collected, branding flexibility, and detailed analytics.
What Are Best Lead Generation Companies?
Decktopus
Decktopus is one of the most interesting lead generation companies created to this day. They are positioned in the document creation market and with the integration, they have added recently to their tool lead generation became suitable. It might be looking like Decktopus is yet another presentation tool but with the form, domain integration, and custom branding companies now can generate leads at the end of their sales pitches. Also, Decktopus is one of the affordable lead generation tools with $6/month pricing.
Quick Decktopus Lead Generation Tutorial
- After creating an account and upgrading your account to pro one of the things you can do is to create a deck from the dashboard.
- Then pick one of the sample decks (sales proposal is suggested) or start from scratch.
- Pitch your idea or hook your audience.
- Add one of the form layouts.
- You can apply your branding by adding a footer logo and notes as well as your brand colors and fonts.
- You can also connect your domain to push this deck as a landing page with Google or Facebook ads.
- Get the link from the share link button and place it on the proper channels.
- Now you are ready to collect your leads! Get an e-mail notification every time someone interested leaves their contact information!
If you have further problems please visit the help center.
TryInteract.com
TryInteract is a creative lead generation platform where users can create engaging quizzes and share them with potential audiences. Engaging peoples can leave their emails and turn into leads and even segmented as their interests. The pricing starts from $29/month.
Prospect.io
Prospect.io is a sales automation tool that is integrated with popular platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot. Prospect.io enables you to find decision-makers and launch a cold email campaign. The pricing starts from $99/month.
Reply.io
Reply.io is another chrome extension to find emails from LinkedIn by separate and by bulk forms. Also with the sales engagement tool enables you to manage lists and make direct contact through the platform.
Hunter.io
Hunter.io is another amazing tool to find emails of target companies by departments. With this email finder tool, you can find the right person to connect by just using the domain of the company. Pricing starts from $39/month.
HubSpot Sales
HubSpot sales is a service of HubSpot that enables you to do many valuable things in order to generate leads. For example, tracking email opens and clicks. It has free features but the pricing starts from $50/month.
Snov.io
Snov.io is a platform to collect emails of people from domain names, company names or their LinkedIn profiles. Also like other similar tools users can send email campaigns and track them. The pricing starts from $39/month.
Sumo
Sumo is a tool to integrate with your website and show pop-ups, welcoming messages to visitors to turn them into leads. Also with Sumo, you can list and segment your leads and send them specialized campaigns to better convert. Other than generating leads with this tool users can map their users on their websites to check their landing page performance. There is a free plan available but paid plans start from $29/month.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the most popular platforms for email marketing. Users can build mail lists by integrating contact forms to their websites, create email campaigns and get insights about their campaigns as well as building A/B tests. The free plan is available and very popular but paid plan starts from $10/month.
ActiveCampaing
ActiveCampaign is one of the tools that are featured in one of our latest articles with their affiliate program. This is another popular email marketing tool with cheaper paying options like $9/monts with a freemium model.
InstaPage
InstaPage is an easy to use landing page builder that can integrate with CRM tools like HubSpot and Salesforce. The tool is a no-code and drag-and-drop landing page builder where users can create lead capture forms and track their users with heat maps to optimize their performance. Their paid plans start from $68/month.
How Lead Generation Companies Work?
As explained in previous sections there are many lead generation companies that are approaching potential customers in various ways. Some of them approached lead generation by attracting customers from the landing page to measure the interest. Some are just providing information of contacts for sales peoples that are trusting their instincts.Before ending the article let’s look into how to build a lead generation flow for your company.
Lead Generation Checklist
Build a Landing Page
Being online is the only way to connect with your potential buyers and the only way to be present in your market. After all, what is the effort when nobody hears about you? A landing page is not only important to become present online it’s also a good way to communicate with visitors around the world. So a good company that is trying to generate leads should produce content to keep calling back their visitors. For this purpose landing pages should also have blog pages with good SEO content. Also optimizing landing pages is extremely important to please the visitors in their sessions. If the page is taking too long to load you would not wait, if the page doesn’t have good navigation you wouldn’t know how to contact with right people to ask questions.
Build a Contact Form and Offer Your Contact Information Available
Sometimes call-to-actions don’t work even if you successfully bring visitors to the landing page. You just cannot convince them to buy but it’s extremely important to collect their information because somehow they are interested in the service you’re providing. To reduce any kind of question and to give every visitor a chance to connect with you and ask you questions always make contacting you very easy.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a very good opportunity to reconnect with your leads and keep them updated. Make sure to do weekly and monthly campaigns to keep open and click rates up. Call them back to your website to connect and feed them with their interests.
Retargeting
Every person that showed interest in your service at some time is a person ready to be converted. Always create retargeting campaigns once in a while to call them back to your website and try to have a second chance with them to explain your services one more time.
Referral Marketing
Always set up an affiliate campaign because the best way to convince someone is to get their trusted ones to hire as your salesperson. It’s a fact that sometimes it doesn’t cost at all to make a sale with a referral. In order to increase your affiliate sales make great connections with your affiliates and influencers and make sure that they understand your culture and what you offer very well.
Blog
A successful blog is a perfect way to attract interested people to your website organically. For this manner, you should build a great SEO strategy or even hire a professional to handle this because organic search is so important.