What is lead?
Do you know what a lead is? Currently, lead generation and management is the best way to make your company grow and it is part of the reality of many businesses. Well-done management has the power to increase the results of digital marketing.
If you want to increase your sales, the solution is right in front of you: it is essential to understand how to generate new leads, distinguish the types of leads and prospects and, finally, develop successful actions. Check out!
What is lead?
Basically, a lead is a customer who shows interest in your product and has the potential to purchase your service. Thus, the person offers their own contact, whether email or phone, by filling out forms on landing pages and/or websites.
The objective is to accompany the brand and get a value offer on your website such as content, tool, evaluation, product or service orders, among other things. In other words, someone who is probably interested in knowing more about your business, both in terms of knowledge and service offerings.
Let’s imagine that a company offers tips about its service, but only to people who sign up. As soon as this visitor fills in his data, he automatically becomes a lead.
Lead Types
When someone asks you how many leads you have on your list, that person is wanting to know how many contacts you have registered. However, not every lead can really be very interested in the service.
It may be just curious about your product, so it is extremely important that you know how to qualify your customers. To help you, below, we have separated the main types of leads!
Qualified Marketing Leads (MQL)
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), translated from English, means “Qualified Marketing Lead”. Represents that person who already knows your work, had contact through downloaded content, but still has no potential to actually become a customer.
There are digital marketing tactics that serve to influence this person to start enjoying your products. Therefore, it is important to keep him close to the brand and very well informed about what happens.
Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
This type of lead, called Sales Qualified Leads (SQL), is nothing more than the evolution of the aforementioned MQL example. These are customers who are already really interested in your product and are about to purchase your service.
In that case, it’s time to present the best sales conversions and let your teamwork on this user. They are the transition between leads and prospects. In other words, it’s all a matter of building a relationship with your leads, this process is essential for generating your sales.
Prospect
A prospect is a person or company that has the types of problems or challenges that your business can create value upon. Therefore, you need to disqualify them from your sales pipeline (activity map) if you can’t create the solution or if they don’t realize the potential your brand can offer.
In the field of digital marketing, the prospect (“prospecto” in Portuguese) is used in many terms. It’s crucial to understand each of them and how they can help your digital business. Overall, the prospect should:
- have fit (fit) with their personas and their market share;
- have the financial means to close deals with your company;
- be the person responsible for making the purchase decision (or having authorization).
As he has not yet been qualified as a real lead, he needs to be worked and educated to find in his company the opportunity to solve his possible problems. HeroSpark can help you with this challenge. Access here and find out how!
Now that you know what it’s about, a new question arises: how to generate a lead more easily and in less time? Let’s talk about it below!
Define prospects to generate new lead types
How to generate a Lead more easily and in less time?
You can understand that this process between having a lead and making it become your customer is indeed challenging, but don’t despair! There are ways to do this more easily. Below, see the 12 essential tips to help you and boost your sales:
1. Create your persona
The first step for anyone who wants to grow in lead generation is to create their persona. After all, how to communicate correctly if you don’t know who you’re talking to? A persona is a fictional representation of a perfect customer, an ideal figure for your target audience.
The persona is based on real data about customer characteristics and behaviors, as well as a creation of their personal stories, motivations, goals, challenges and concerns. The more personalized your communication, the greater the engagement with your customers. You must have an identification of your persona with the content offered.
In addition to having knowledge about personal characteristics such as age, gender and preferences, understanding your persona’s pain and/or need is one of the most important points. It is likely that your company has more than one. Therefore, understanding and knowing each one of them is essential to identify opportunities for your business.
2. Create a page to capture contacts
Create a button on your website page where the person can fill in their data and, mainly, their email. From there, make sure these emails are read by the persona. After all, this is the basic step for you to have the first contact with your lead.
3. Use tools for lead management
The main role of these tools is to show you who your leads are and what they are doing on your website. Knowing this, choose what you most identify with. Here are the 3 best players that can help you with your lead management tools:
Hubspot: the platform offers total control of the customer relationship, managing customers via email, social media or any type of contact, in addition to offering a plug-in for Gmail or Hotmail, allowing you to follow everything in real-time
Sales Form: the North American company is responsible for producing the CRM Sales Cloud. It offers products focused on customer service, marketing, artificial intelligence and application creation through cloud-based software
Marketo: The Marketo platform is a more sophisticated tool and provides complete data about your leads, as well as functionality for email marketing, creating landing pages and forms.
4. Be proactive with your leads
Keep in mind that what is often lacking for a customer to shake your hand and close a deal is information. That’s why it’s important to keep in touch! You can send a simple email offering help, explaining how the market works or showing some of your materials for the person to check, for example.
After that, your customer list will probably increase, thus providing a greater number of sales and market growth with your product. This medium will definitely help you in your migration process between traditional and digital sales.
5. Content production
The production of content and newsletters can also be highlighted in this lead generation process. Well-positioned content is a strong attraction for your blog. And without good work, there are no contacts to list. For a practical example, go here and check out the HeroSpark blog!
Content engages and drives your visitors to become leads. They are typically your lead’s first contact with your brand. As a gateway for your company to be able to present your product or service to a future customer. To generate leads, you need to provide useful content and rich material.
You might be asking yourself: what is rich stuff? Basically, rich material corresponds to good content that tends to be more extensive, informative and useful to your target audience. It can be done as an ebook, infographics, spreadsheets or simulators. That is, they are more in-depth materials that present important information and functions about your business.
Having a blog on your company’s website and generating good content is worthwhile because it makes the positioning more coherent and puts customers in context. The purpose of lead management is to bring the prospects at the top of the sales funnel down to the bottom.
Evolution must be natural, according to the steps we have mentioned so far. It is up to the marketing team to separate those with the greatest potential and who are prepared to receive an offer.
6. Landing pages and pop-ups
You’ve created your persona, so she needs to have access to the content you’ve produced. For that to happen, use tools to help you in this process. After all, what are landing pages?
Landing pages are pages that help you generate leads. They are very important because they have a simple and objective structure. From a marketing automation tool, such as HeroSpark, you can quickly create your landing page. A capture page usually contains:
- Main call;
- Description of the rich material offered;
- Form (name, email, phone number) so you can have a first contact with your leads.
In the case of the pop-up , the feature works as a window that opens in your web page’s browser. The main types are:
Pop-up form: is displayed on your website centrally when the visitor tries to leave the page. It’s great for retrieving visitors who were already determined to close the page.
CTA (call to action) pop-up: appears in the corner of the screen when your visitors scroll 50% of the page. It has two main goals: promote your landing pages and advance your visitors on the buying journey.
7. Ebooks
One of the most efficient techniques that digital marketing uses to generate new business opportunities is to offer free ebooks on topics in the company’s area of expertise.
The digital book serves as a kind of bargaining chip to get more information from potential customers. That’s because, generally, people don’t mind leaving email and some more data in a form in exchange for rich, dense content.
This is the most classic offer used in the digital world today. The advantage is that it allows you to go deeper into the desired subject and explore it in a way where a blog, for example, would not be possible. An ebook is also good content to partner with another company. Thus, efforts are divided and it is possible to write even more complete content.
8. Infographics
Infographics are great materials to generate value for your audience. They are visual representations capable of mixing text and image and making the content very dynamic. Many companies offer the infographic for free on their blogs. This type of promotion is valid, especially if you put the code at the end of the post for other blogs to share the infographic and generate backlinks to your site.
9. Whitepaper
This technique is little used. It consists of longer posts, but not enough to take off the blog and short enough to be called ebooks. Ç
If your company invests in Google AdWords and today only has direct conversion offers, such as a quote and contact request, it’s worth creating a whitepaper. This will drive some of the traffic there and the action will be faster when it comes to increasing lead generation and, better, keeping the same investment.
10. Lead Scoring
Lead Scoring is a scoring technique used to measure those who are more ready to buy, qualifying and prioritizing automatically or manually. Generally, the lead ranking comes from two scores:
- profile (data such as position and segment)
- interest (information such as accesses and consumed content).
The main benefit of this practice is to make marketing and sales teams more efficient, providing more offers from the same set of leads.
The common mistake is to think that this technique is only valid for large companies that already have a vast list of leads. This is a myth! Because of this, many businesses end up missing out on excellent opportunities to get ahead of competitors and sell more.
11. Digital Marketing Planning
One of the most effective ways to generate leads is with the help of digital marketing. This tool directs the company’s dissemination and promotion efforts to the digital environment, helping to create a more objective sales flow.
After all, as mentioned above, part of the negotiation with customers who have already shown interest in the product or service offered. A digital marketing plan must contain:
- Scenario Analysis
- Competition Analysis
- Business strengths and weaknesses
- financial contributions
- Useful Strategies
- Action Schedule
- Expected results, converted into goals for salespeople and the sales force.
12. Use CTA’s
The Calls to Action (CTA), translated into Portuguese as “calls to action” are the main resource to generate leads in the digital world. Represents the moment when an interested party clicks a button and approaches your company. However, for the customer to click, they need to be convinced by a good argument.
Therefore, extend your content marketing strategy to CTAs and explore your differentiators to convince potential customers to effectively enter your sales channels. To find out how to do this successfully, go here and read our step-by-step post on the subject!
Sales Funnel
Since it’s clear what a lead is, lead types and prospects, it’s time to see how the sales funnel can help you in your business and how to make your customer reach the top of it. So here we go!
s your persona ready to add your product to the cart and check out? Doing a sales funnel analysis is the most accurate way to understand who the prospect is and its importance to digital marketing.
The sales funnel is used to organize the content that will be shown to the public according to its principles, needs and differentials. Thus, potential buyers are nourished with gradual and increasingly specific information about the product and its differentials. This practice is essential for any marketing and sales department that wants to increase company results.
Through this concept, it is possible to gain insights into possible improvements in the process steps and also to other areas, such as product development. The 3 steps of the sales funnel are divided according to the persona’s behavior in each of them and, consequently, by the type of content needed for the conversion. Check it out below:
Top of the funnel
The top of the funnel is the learning and discovery stage, as most people who enter the site are not interested in buying a product or service to solve a problem. In most cases, they don’t even know they have a problem.
At the top of the funnel, also called “attraction”, a large volume of content is thrown in a way that reaches the greatest number of interests in the target audience. To reach expanded leads, this content has to be studied and not chosen randomly. A good strategy starts with profile segmentation based on the persona of the business, the market and its competitors.
Middle of the funnel
Within the world of SQL, some will identify that they have problems and needs that need to be resolved. This step can be called “consideration”, as it houses the leads that are closer to a purchase, show greater interest in the company and have advanced maturity to advance their decision making.
Consummation is identified, ensuring that the following actions are personalized in order to further qualify their potential for the purchase. In this part, it is important to be able to create a sense of urgency.
Otherwise, the buyer will identify that your company has a solution to their problem, but will not go to great lengths to solve it. Do you want to get out of this step soon? Click here and check out our post on the subject!
Funnel bottom
The so-called “decision” step, last within the sales funnel and also the most funneled of all, is where prospects will be approached and transformed into MQL or SQL. After passing a large mass through the funnel, the number of individuals decreases and allows for a more personalized analysis of each one.
The bottom of the funnel happens when leads are already qualified and close to becoming your company’s customers. In other words: add the product or service to the cart and complete the purchase! This means that, after understanding the types of solutions available, they started to consider your company as one of the best options.
The purpose of the content at the bottom of the funnel is to show you why your solution is better than the competition and why you should hire it. This ensures the identification of prospects that must be approached immediately to close the purchase.
HeroSpark: Meet the SparkFunnels Tool
Now that you know what leads are, how the sales and prospects funnel works, and what to do to generate these customers, tell us: do you know the SparkFunnes tool? Create high-converting sales funnels and generate real results for your digital business with the help of HeroSpark!
The SparkFunnels tool is super simple and helps you build your company’s sales funnel in just 5 minutes! It’s the most complete option on the market and, even better, it doesn’t make you dependent on programmers, designers, and agencies! Want to generate quality leads and prospects? So, click here and start using our tool for free!