What is a marketing lead?
A marketing lead is a person who has shown interest in buying or using a brand’s product or service.
A person becomes a marketing lead when he or she has gone through different layers or stages of the brand’s lead generation. A lead generation process usually includes finding and targeting prospects in the early stages and then turning them into leads.
Marketing leads are what every business strives for. Marketing leads will be fed into the businesses’ sales funnels in which they will be welcome and nurtured with relevant content to slowly go down the funnels and become clients.
In other cases, marketing leads can also be understood as those who are interested in buying a marketing service from a marketing agency.
Today’s technology and Internet have enabled businesses to generate marketing leads more easily, however, the competition is becoming fiercer day after day since every company is trying to go digital.
Therefore, it’s crucial for your marketing and sales team to always be up-to-date with the best lead generation practices.
Marketing leads vs B2B leads
Marketing leads in general may refer to potential clients both as individuals and companies, while B2B leads only refer to companies.
It’s usually much harder to generate B2B leads than marketing leads as individuals. B2B leads usually bring much bigger sales since it’s businesses buying products or services made by other businesses.
If you’re selling to companies, it’s crucial to focus on generating high-quality B2B leads, meaning these leads have the power to decide the outcome of your sales pitch.
At the end of the day, you only want to spend hours persuading business owners to buy your products or services for their companies, not days talking to everybody on their team.
How to generate marketing leads
Overview
Generating high-quality marketing leads has never been easy, it usually takes a lot of time and effort to achieve the desired result.
Lead generation can even be a bigger challenge for beginners and those who are not into technology and software.
If you’re not into technology and software, we strongly recommend trying a reliable lead database. A good lead provider will facilitate your lead-generation process by proving you with tools that let you target high-quality leads quickly and accurately.
However, there are not many great lead databases on the Internet. To pick one that fits your business, you will need a real strategy.
Build a scraper to extract prospects from web pages
A scraper is a software that will automatically collect intended types of information on web pages. Building a scraper will give you the ability to customize how it works to achieve maximum results.
A scraper can be expensive, however, it’s likely a one-off purchase, therefore, you should really consider whether you really need it or not.
If you’re a beginner and unsure about building a new scraper, we recommend using a data extractor Chrome extension to minimize your lead generation cost.
After finishing collecting a sizable list of prospects, you will need an email marketing tool to help you with your cold email outreach to reach out and turn the prospects into leads.
If you use cold calling, it may work as well, however, we recommend focusing on cold emailing first.
Use a combination of digital marketing tools to generate prospects and leads
A combination of digital marketing tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush and Hunter will help you generate a good list of prospects.
Then, like the above method, you will also need to run an outreach campaign to connect with your prospects. Unlike the above-mentioned strategy, this way doesn’t give you access to the prospects’ phone numbers.
Therefore, only cold emailing will work for you. If you would like to have other contact information such as phone number or social media profile to diversify your outreach, we recommend giving Limeleads a try.
This strategy is affordable for many businesses compared to building a scraper or paid ads, however, it can be technical to implement properly. If you’re not fond of this strategy, ads may be your go-to.
Paid ads
Paid ad is probably the fastest way to generate marketing leads. It’s fast and effective but is expensive.
When it comes to paid ads, it’s better to consider targeting for sales rather than leads because the cost per lead won’t be cheap. From our experience, most small to medium-sized businesses can not stick to paid ads for long.
Paid ads for leads aren’t very effective in the long term because it’s difficult to find out the leads’ real value to a business, while paid ads aimed at sales are much easier to calculate ROI.
Ads platforms like Google Ads will let you run ads based on a specified ROAS. For example, you can set up your Google Ads to target ROAS of 50%, 100% or even 200%. As long as your ads can make ROAS of more than 0%, you’re good to keep it running.
However, we understand that sometimes, finding a qualified lead who will become your partner and work with you on a project is more valuable than making a sale. In this case, paid ads can help you find prospects and leads fast.
Social media
Social media can be great for generating high-quality leads, especially for selling high-value items.
Selling luxurious items or services need solid personal relationships to find prospects, leads and clients. When it comes to making friends nowadays, social media is a great place.
You usually don’t have many solid relationships as they require a lot of time and effort to build. However, close friends have the highest chance of becoming your clients.
SEO & lead magnet
SEO has always been one of the best and most sustainable ways to generate leads. People know it and therefore, everyone does SEO.
SEO competition has become increasingly more challenging for new businesses. If you’ve just opened an Internet business and want to take on SEO, you may need to think twice.
There are basically several niches such as digital marketing, lead generation, etc where 2 or 3 years of your intensive SEO work won’t take you anywhere. If you’re an SEO expert, you may be successful if investing that much time and effort, but if you’re a beginner, you’re advised to do a lot more research.
If your SEO already works, congratulations, your lead generation effort will benefit greatly from it. A good lead magnet will help you achieve the maximum result.
A lead magnet is something for free download in exchange for your site’s visitors’ contact information. A lead magnet can be a useful eBook or a simple checklist.
Lead magnets can also help your paid ads campaigns generate leads more effectively, and the more effective your ads are, the less it’s going to cost you.
Use a reliable B2B lead database
Using a reliable B2B lead database is one of the simplest, fastest and most affordable ways to generate excellent marketing leads.
A good lead tool like Limeleads will give you the ability to target very specific prospects, down to where they live, their companies, websites, phone numbers, emails and social media profiles.
Highly targeted prospects with high data accuracy are essential for any lead generation campaigns and for a lot of startups out there, the cost per lead is also a big factor. That’s why using Limeleads to generate excellent leads is a no-brainer.
While there are many lead providers on the Internet, only a few names are considered good ones and worth trying. Businesses that look for a fast and affordable way to generate prospects and leads often end up wasting money on a bunch of bad services before they can find a fit.
While there’s no better way to find out the truth than actually using the tools, there’s a real strategy to pick the right one for you. Give the services a try if
- They offer free trials.
- No credit card is required.
- Excellent support to help you go about
- Refund policies
- Generous discounts for first-time clients
At Limeleads – a leading B2B leads database, we offer all the points above and much more. We make sure to be a useful partner to our clients to help them reach their full lead gen potential.
Simply sign up for an account and get free trials with us here. If you need anything else, feel free to contact us at [email protected] or via our live chat support.
