Lead Generation: what it is and how it works4 min read
We speak of Lead Generation to refer to inbound marketing actions that are used to acquire new contacts in a targeted way and to generate profiled contacts that are truly interested in the services offered or the products sold by the company itself. Today every company operating on the market, in any sector and place in the world, should deal with lead generation.
What is Lead Generation and how it works
A lead is in fact defined as a costumer interested in the product / service offered by a company, who has already had contact with it and has also left their data, therefore reachable and loyal by the company itself. Every entrepreneur should draw up a list of contacts but, in order for these to be really useful, a careful lead generation strategy is required, which can make use of advertising tools and customer acquisition, not just online but also offline.
Much of a company’s turnover today can derive from a good marketing strategy that cannot ignore lead generation, probably the most useful tool to generate an increase in sales and interested contacts, i.e. the so-called leads. o prospects, who in the medium / long term become loyal customers.
The marketing department is fundamental in establishing the right techniques that the company must implement to generate potential targeted contacts, attracting people who are really interested in the activities, the name, the mission or the products sold by the company itself. Everyone today has a presence on the web but if the sites or blogs or social networks are not planned for the best, they risk tu be useful.
Lead Generation tools
Even e-mail marketing, now widespread in Italy for years, has upset the way of marketing and designing advertising campaigns, so much that in the last decade we have started talking about native advertising and all the tools generic and dispersive such as banners and pop-ups, etc. have almost disappeared completely.
Today, with lead generation, the purchasing decision-making process has totally changed. The aim is not so much and not only to sell in large quantities, but to build relationships and earn contacts to build loyalty over time, so that clicks return constantly and the product and / or service of the company is appreciated and remembered in order to be enjoyed more and more in time. This strengthens the brand and increases sales and consequent revenues.
If we refer to the digital presence of a company, we cannot ignore SEO, i.e. organic positioning on search engines, SEM, content marketing, social media marketing and email marketing. All these actions are tools that serve to convert interested users into potential customers, with a view to lead generation.
How to activate the lead nurturing
Using an effective lead generation strategy cannot fail to incorporate within a series of lead nurturing activities and constant monitoring of results, to quantify customer loyalty and return and rebound actions. Therefore, it is essential that lead generation is part of the company’s marketing strategy.
The term lead nurturing underlies the relationship of trust and empathy that we try to create with new contacts, therefore the premise of every lead generation strategy is the definition of the target and the potential customer, so as to understand how to communicate in the best way with him, once his identikit has been made.
The main purpose, therefore, is to establish a relationship with your leads and then “convert” them into potential customers. It is necessary to study how to acquire the contact, but above all to take care of the “public relations” to put it in the old way, establishing one-to-one communications to cultivate leads. In this way the conversion rate increases, thanks to a targeted strategy, so that the contacts are conducted up to the purchase phase, in a very specific path (the so-called funnel).
Lead generation and Inbound marketing
We have said that lead generation puts the user / potential customer at the center of communication, going through the following stages of the process: acquisition of user traffic, attraction of new users, conversion to action (call to action), user loyalty and sale of products or services.
According to some of the latest world statistics, 63% of marketing professionals consider it essential to work on generating leads, perhaps through discount policies or other marketing strategies, always aimed at generating leads. Much of the economic investments of companies are aimed precisely at attracting the interests of users to the brand and their website.
There are very useful tools available to create lead generation, and there are also some tricks, such as software that can evaluate the different offers and calculate the potential profit of each to automate all stages of the process of publishing offers and assigning the lead. Despite the benefits that one of these software may show, it is always better to prefer strategy analysis to total automation of lead selling.
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