Lead generation is the core activity of marketing teams. All the marketing efforts, campaigns and business strategies revolve around the same objective – Generating more business leads. Right from identifying the right target audience, and informing them about your brand presence, products and services to converting them into loyal customers, lead generation strategies play a crucial role in boosting your business revenues.
This blog dives into lead generation and how it impacts your business growth.
Table of Contents
What is Lead Generation
Lead generation is the process of identifying and attracting prospects who resonate with your Ideal Customer Profile and converting them into your customers. Lead generation efforts often include progressing a prospect from the information discovery phase to conversion. It captures audience information, establishes connection and engagement to nurture them and demonstrates product benefits and values.
What are Lead Generation Strategies
Quality lead generation is a challenge for many marketers. This calls for effective lead generation strategies. There should be a perfect blend of art, technology, data solutions and analytics to create a successful lead generation process. Here are six highly-effective lead generation strategies that will help your business grow.
Build Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) & Buyer Persona
The only way to solve your customers’ problems is to understand them. The first step in excellent customer experience is always knowing your audience, their characteristics, problems and expectations. Building an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and buyer persona will not only help you understand who your relevant audience is but also enable you to personalize your marketing communication and sales campaigns accordingly.
Understanding the most relevant and important attributes of your customers boost your lead generation. This helps in establishing strong connections and improve customer engagement. They believe you understand their problems and trust your products and services to solve them.
Enhance the Buyer Journey
Today, customers expect nothing less than the best. It holds true for the products and services as well as the communication and engagement you offer. The customer experience throughout their buying journey has a great influence on how they perceive your brand, products and other business offerings. Providing the relevant information during various phases of the buying cycle can be a great way to enhance the customer experience, help them make the rightbuying decision and improve brand loyalty.
Every buyer goes through multiple touchpoints during the process of discovery to purchase. Marketers must ensure every touchpoint adds value to their experience and simplifies the buying journey.
Establish Strong Presence on Multiple Channel
Many marketers are still debating over which channel is better – inbound or outbound marketing. Being hung at this debate will only mean you lose out on the best of both worlds. Today, customers are consuming information from multiple sources and sticking to only one channel will never be enough. Your brand must establish a strong presence on different channels – online, offline, events, emails, websites, social media, and more.
This will help you widen your audience reach, create better awareness about your brand and improve your lead generation process. Multi-channel presence ensures you don’t miss out on any prospects and strengthen your business presence.
Prioritize Personalization
Personalizing communication is the best way to tell the customers you are putting in effort to understand their needs and expectations. This creates a great sense of loyalty and trust in your brand. With the audience being flooded with bland marketing emails and ads, personalized communication is a breath of fresh air and the best chance to stand out of the crowd.
Personalized campaigns create a genuine connection and appeal to customers. They willingly interact with your brand and explore your business offerings. This opens up new growth opportunities and improves your lead generation process.
Leverage Automation Technology
There is so much that can be done but so little time that marketers have. If they are utilizing their limited time in carrying out repetitive, mundane business processes, they are not only underutilizing their resources but also decreasing their productivity. Also, this approach can make the process complicated, slow and error-prone. This will eventually lead to loss of business and can impact the brand image.
Marketers can leverage smart technology to automate and streamline most of the repetitive processes like lead capturing, tracking, and nurturing. Automation technology can simplify the lead generation process and enable marketers to focus more on enhancing customer experience.
Marketing & Sales Collaboration
The lack of communication and collaboration between the sales and marketing teams can lead to confusion and impact the lead nurturing funnel. If your marketing and sales strategies aren’t aligned, you mist miss out on deals despite using automation technology and personalizing communication. There should be proper accordance regarding the lead qualification criteria and the conversion process.
Sales reps follow up on MQLs only if the pre-defined qualification criteria are met. This makes it easier for everyone to track the lead count and monitor the lead journey. When sales and marketing teams co-own the lead generation strategies, the entire process becomes smooth and hassle-free.
How Lead Generation Strategies will Help you Boost Revenues
The primary objective of every B2B business is to increase revenues and profitability. Lead generation plays a crucial role in achieving this objective. Having effective and full-proof lead generation strategies will help you boost revenues. Let’s check out how –
Expand Audience Reach
Businesses often restrict their audience base to a certain geography as they are unaware of the potential prospects from other places. Lead generation strategies help you understand your ideal customer profile and map out other characteristics of customers that fit your target audience. You are able to reach more people and personalize the communication for better connection.
Enhance Customer Engagement
Once you understand what your customers are looking for and what solutions can solve their problems, it becomes easier to provide relevant and helpful information. This enhances the customer experience and encourages them to actively interact with your brand. An engaged prospect is more likely to make a purchase than a less engaged or disengaged prospect. Understand the factors that influence a prospect’s buying decisions and the stage of the buying journey will help you approach them with appropriate strategies and information.
Stay Ahead of the Curve
Lead generation strategies help you understand the market trends, customer behavior, purchase history and thus, predict the future trends and market demands. This helps you take a proactive approach towards meeting customer demands and offer better quality products and services. Reaching out to them before your competitor does will improve your chances of making the sale. This also helps you offer better customer experiences and value-add to the customers.
Become Cost-efficient
Lead generation and lead nurturing strategies help you save costs and resources while identifying and converting high-value leads. As the prospect fits your ideal customer profile, you can deploy your resources to convert them into customers. This ensures you are not wasting your time, money and resources on customers that are not likely to make a purchase. Lead generation strategies, eventually, lower your Cost Per Lead and help you improve your business ROI.
Shorten the Sales Cycle
Lead generation strategies help you optimize your resources, lead journey and the sales cycle. At every touchpoint, throughout the sales cycle, the prospects are offered valuable knowledge and information resources that help them make smart and informed buying decisions. When the prospects have all the knowledge about your business offerings and all the information required to make buying decisions, they convert into customers faster. This helps you shorten the sales cycle and thereby, increase your sales conversion rate and business revenues.
Grow Key Accounts
Account-based marketing as a lead generation strategy helps marketers get better results with less but focused efforts. You can target high-value accounts and focus your resources and marketing efforts to convert those accounts. This is a more personalized approach to sales and marketing campaigns. The prospects are more likely to buy your products and services and associate with you for a long time. Lead nurturing becomes important to establish and grow customer connections and engagement. These accounts are your high-yielding accounts that contribute to the majority of your business revenues.
Final Word
Every marketer realizes the importance of lead generation strategies for business growth. However, it becomes difficult to plan, execute and monitor all the strategies. To overcome this challenge, many organizations partner with demand generation and lead generation service providers. They not only help you increase your brand awareness, target relevant audience but also boost your sales conversions and business revenues.
B2B lead generation can seem difficult but partnering with a lead generation service provider will make your job easy. You will be able to optimize your resources, become cost-efficient and leverage the service provider’s expertise for your business growth.
