Among several metrics that can determine the success of your business, lead generation is one of the most important determinants. Yes, you can assess the success of your marketing efforts through customer engagement, lifetime value of customers, brand awareness, and more but to judge that your business is actually making progress and is headed in the right direction, the best way is through conversion rate and lead generation!
According to HubSpot, the biggest challenge for about 61% of marketers was lead generation. Through this article, we’ll explore what is lead generation and what are the benefits of lead generation that make it essential for any business!
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What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation refers to the process of attracting potential customers to the organisation and converting them into clients who are interested in the products and services of the organisation. An individual who shows an interest in the products and/or services of the said company is considered being a potential lead. Here’s some useful information for you. Oktopost has revealed that LinkedIn is the most effective social media channel when it comes to lead generation and 80% of leads in a B2B firm come from LinkedIn.
However, you need to remember that everyone is not lead and therefore, your marketing and customer acquisition efforts should be focused on only the interested parties according to their preferences and needs. Some of the top strategies undertaken by brands for lead generation include social media marketing, networking, email marketing, blogging, website landing pages, coupons, live events and seminars, and contests and giveaways.
Why is Lead Generation Important for Your Business?
The most obvious reason why leads are important for your business is that, without leads, your revenue and growth will come to a standstill. Furthermore, lead generation is one such process that can help you build credibility, trust, visibility and interest from your potential leads. This in turn can help you acquire genuine and high-quality traffic and top-notch customers for your brand!
Marketing Charts have revealed that about 56% of B2B organisations credit their increased revenue and exceeding goals to effective lead generation campaigns. Here are some benefits of lead generation which make the process important for your business:-
1. Helps Boost Your Revenue
When your marketing efforts are good and the lead generation process is carried out correctly, you can boost your revenue to finally achieve your business goals! If you are able to successfully reach out to your target audience, you can capture the attention of your potential qualified leads.
Furthermore, paying attention to your target audience’s interests and addressing their issues as a part of the process can help you convert more potential leads easily and increase your sales. You need to ensure that you carry out activities such as contests, giving offers and dropping messages well to generate interest in your prospects. According to Campaign Monitor, out of all the lead generation tools, Email gives the highest ROIs.
2. Build Up Your Market
Lead generation can really help you in expanding your prospects and your market in the industry. This process can help you know your prospects better and give you an idea as to where you can direct your efforts to expand your reach. Marketo has revealed that companies that carry out lead nurturing activities tend to generate about 50% more leads and at 33% lower costs.
You may find out that some of your customers are from job roles or firms that you have currently not included in your marketing campaigns. Therefore, you can learn more about your customers and potential leads and strengthen your position in your current market while you advance into newer ones!
3. Increase Brand Visibility And Awareness
Lead generation involves several strategies that can help you in getting your brand noticed and increase its visibility. For instance, you can engage in content marketing and write blogs about your niche and your products and services to get noticed.
Social media marketing is also an essential part of the process and can help you create a lot of buzzes around your brand. This benefit goes two-ways. Lead generation can help you in increasing your brand awareness and with an increased visibility you can acquire more prospects and customers for your business! Social Media Examiner revealed that 66% of marketers credited social media to generating leads when they would just spend six hours weekly on social media marketing.
4. Eliminates Cold Calling
Cold calling is an attempt by businesses to contact potential customers who have had no prior contact with your business to introduce them to the brand and try to sell the products and services. Sometimes brands make the same attempts through emailing. However, there is no certainty that you can get customers for your brand through cold calling. Many times, you may in fact lose your potential clients if you do not keep a check on the calls and emails or spam them.
HubSpot revealed that only about 18% of marketers are of the opinion that outbound methods are profitable in lead generation, while the majority of them disregard such methods. Lead generation can help you get rid of this and eliminate similar outbound methods that are not benefiting your business. This is because lead generation can help you bring in genuine leads and interested customers. Plus, it will help you save time and resources which you can utilise in more useful campaigns with assured results.
5. Create Business Opportunities
Besides helping you find potential customers for your business, lead generation can also create business opportunities for you. One of the ways these opportunities may be presented before you is through collaborations on a permanent basis or just for some events and seminars. Marketing Charts reports have revealed that events are the best way of generating leads. Furthermore, they also revealed that case studies are the best way to finally convert your potential leads.
This would again open up opportunities for you to interact with their audience and increase your brand awareness and can result in more leads. In other ways opportunities through lead generation in B2B firms can be in the form chances for your employees to learn new skills that would in the long run benefit your own organisation.
6. Lead Generation Costs Less Than Advertising
Now some of you might get confused by reading the above line “lead generation costs less than advertising” because usually advertisements are a way of acquiring leads. So how does this really work? Advertising is one such strategy that requires your business to be really successful and is just one of the ways to do it. It is expensive without many options to explore.
However, lead generation gives you option to select the strategy that is most cost-effective and beneficial according to the current standing of your business. Plus, lead generation can be really cost-effective as the pricing only increases with the increase in difficulty of acquiring certain prospective leads since higher-quality leads tend to give you higher conversions. PureB2B has revealed that about 30% of marketers are of the opinion that paid advertising is an overrated strategy.
We hope that this article was helpful in understanding the benefits of lead generation and how it can help your business! Lead generation is not a difficult task if you do it correctly and without doing it right, you basically do not have leads, which means you do not have customers and thus no growth in business. In order to make sure that your business grows and continues to acquire customers, upgrade your lead generation efforts and campaigns and watch your business flourish like never before!
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