Lead generation definition
Lead generation is the process of targeting the people that have the highest probability of becoming your clients with the right content to make them interested in buying your products or services.
Every business needs to constantly generate leads to feed their sales funnels. More than often, the success of lead generation means the success of a business.
Lead generation is a long and tiring battle that every business has to fight for survival and growth.
Lead generation can be categorized into two different types that are online and offline lead generation.
Online lead generation vs offline lead generation
In today’s world, online lead generation dominates. However, there are businesses that still rely on offline lead generation to make a profit.
Online lead generation is the process of getting your content in front of people online to turn them into leads and clients.
Whenever people go online, whether it’s on social media, email or watching TV, you must try to find a way to make your content visible to them.
Offline lead generation is the process of interacting with prospects in person and trying to turn them into leads or clients.
One example of offline lead generation is offline events where prospects will be approached by salespersons.
The salesperson’s job is to convince them to give their products a try and make a purchase, if the prospects refuse, the salesperson will need to get their contact information for follow-up strategies.
Online lead generation strategies
Whether you want it or not, if you want to grow your business bigger, you must go online.
There are several online lead generation strategies that you should know about. These methods are proven to be effective and are being used by most businesses that are serious about online lead gen.
1. Use a reliable B2B lead database and cold emailing to generate leads online
It may be a surprise to beginners but using a reliable B2B leads database and cold emailing is the fastest and most affordable way to generate leads.
This strategy comprises two parts, the first part is prospect generation and the second part is cold emailing.
Generating prospects
A reliable B2B leads database ensures top-notch data quality, and affordable pricing and provides many tools for its users to get very specific prospects.
However, finding such a data provider isn’t easy. The only way to figure out if they live up to what they claim is actually using them. Give a contact database a try if they provide the followings:
- Free trials
- No credit card is required
- Excellent support
- Refund policies
- Generous discounts for first-time clients
At Limeleads, a leading B2B leads database, we offer all the points above and more. We make sure to be a partner to help our clients make the most out of their lead gen effort.
Simply complete our few-click signup here and get your free trials with us.
If you need anything, do not hesitate to drop us a message at [email protected] or via our live chat support.
Cold emailing
Cold emailing is simply sending emails to prospects to try to make them interested in your products or services.
Cold emailing requires patience since a prospect will likely not convert into a lead on your first email. You will need to send several more follow-up messages at the right time.
You can try cold emailing by sending emails manually, however, it will take you a lot of time and effort to reach a good number of prospects.
Nowadays, email marketing software make cold emailing much easier for businesses by providing email automation features.
Email automation will help you schedule sequences of emails to be sent at a specific time and based on your prospects’ activities and interactions with your emails, website or app.
The email marketing software will also provide you with a detailed view of how your campaigns performed. This is very helpful for campaign optimization since marketing campaigns will need to be constantly updated and optimized to catch up with new trends.
2. Use digital marketing tools and cold emailing to generate leads online
Using a combination of digital marketing tools such as Ahrehs, SEMrush and Hunter will help you generate prospects effectively. However, you won’t have all the information that you want like you usually do with a good B2B leads database.
The reason for this is that these tools are primarily not designed for lead generation, they are the tools that provide competition insights for digital marketing professionals, mainly SEOs.
If you really want to get the information you need, you may need to build a data scraper. A good data scraper will help you collect prospects from web pages and you will have total control of how it’s going to work for you.
However, the problem with this is that building a data scraper is usually very expensive, more or less depending on how much you want it to be capable of doing.
Once you’ve generated a sizable list of prospects, it’s time for cold emailing to do the rest of the lead gen job.
3. Paid ads for online lead gen
Paid ads can help generate leads very fast, however, most small to medium-sized businesses find them very expensive and can’t stick with them for long.
Paid ads are not all expensive for every business, for some businesses that are operating in several niches, paid ads can be affordable. But the only way to find out if it’s the one for you is to try them.
There are a few types of ads that are specifically designed for lead gen such as Linkedin lead gen forms and Facebook lead generation ads.
These types of ads make it easier for prospects to become leads by sending a form to them when they are on social media and enticing them to sign up for your offer.
We advise you to start paid ads slowly with a small budget. After a period of time (usually a month), you will be able to find out how much it costs you per click and lead acquisition.
The biggest advantage of paid ads is that ads nowadays are mostly automatic, meaning machine learning will optimize your campaigns automatically to make them more efficient.
That being said, it’s not always the case, many businesses find paid ads a waste of investment.
4. SEO & lead magnets
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a huge task that focuses on increasing a business’ presence on search engines such as Google and Bing.
SEO helps drive traffic by directing search engines’ users to your site when they are searching for a term on the platforms.
SEO is one of the most reliable ways to generate leads and sales steadily. But why it’s mentioned at last?
Well, SEO has become so challenging for new businesses in recent years. In some niches such as lead generation and email marketing, it’s almost impossible for new sites to get substantial traffic after 2 or 3 years of hard work unless you have an enormous budget for it.
But when SEO works, you’re probably going to rely on it a lot for generating leads and sales. SEO when paired with good lead magnets can increase your chance of getting leads significantly.
A lead magnet can be anything from a simple and useful checklist to a lengthy eBook. Visitors will need to leave their contact information in order to download the lead magnet for free.
People love getting useful stuff for free and the lead magnet also serves as a call to action to entice visitors to take action.
We have a detailed guide on how to generate SEO leads here, you should check it out!
Conclusion
Online lead generation is crucial for most businesses nowadays. If your business is doing well without it, that’s great news, but how about increasing your sales massively by employing proper online lead-generation strategies?
The above-mentioned methods are currently the most popular and effective ways to generate leads. We encourage you to try them slowly to see which one works best for your business.
Online lead generation is a long battle but the reward is the success of your business, and if you started doing a business, that’s what you surely want!
If you need expert advice for your online lead gen effort, we can help with that. Simply send us a message to [email protected] or via our live chat support, we’ve got you covered.
