In digital marketing parlance, leads are prospects interested in your products or services. These people are taking some action toward your product or service, for example visiting your website, sending you contact information, or signing up to your e-newsletter.
Some of the common leads generally found in digital marketing include:
- Website visitors: The visitors who come to your website.
- Contact form submissions: Those people who complete a form on your site.
- Email subscribers: Members that join your email list.
- Social media followers: Users who subscribe to your business on other social media platforms.
- Demo requests: Users who ask for a demo on your product or service.
- Free trail sign-ups: Those who sign up for a free trial of your offering.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is one of the most fundamental things in the digital marketing world. Companies need to find leads, conversion rate at each point of time, and collect a pipeline of sales opportunities. Lead generation occurs through various methods. Some of them are as follows:
Search Engine Optimization: Improving your website in such a way that it ranks better on search engines.
Pay-Per-Click advertising: Running paid adverts on search engines or social media channels.
- Content marketing: Developing valuable content to attract and engage your targeted audience.
- Social media marketing: Advertizing your business through social media.
- Email marketing: Building relationship with the prospective leads through emails.
Types of Leads
1. Based on intent
- – Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): Leads interested in your brand but are not yet ready to buy, for example; downloading a whitepaper or attending a webinar.
- – Leads qualified to be contacted by the sales team, with typical criteria including having a budget, authority, need, and timeline.
- – PQLs are those leads that are highly knowledgeable about your product and thus likely to become a customer.
2. Based on source
- Organic leads are through organic search results such as Google.
- Paid leads: Directly developed from paid adverts on search engines or social media.
- Referral leads: Those referred by current clients or partners.
- Event leads: Obtained through virtual or in-person events.
Sales Funnel
Leads are very much associated with sales funnels. This actually forms an attractive, visual image of the life cycle of a customer and the journey of the customer moving from the time of awareness of his product or service up to purchasing one.
Here’s a breakdown of how leads and sales funnels are connected:
Leads that enter through the top of the sales funnel move through various stages to eventually become customers.
The leads and sales funnel connection:
- 1. Lead Generation: Leads generated at the top of the funnel through marketing activities like ads, content marketing, social media, and emails.
- 2. Lead Nurturing: After leads are generated, they have to be nurtured with valuable content and support in order to move them down further in the funnel.
- 3. Lead Qualification: Now that leads are passing through the sales funnel, they need to be qualified in terms of their needs, budget, and timeline so one can evaluate how they might fit into your product or service.
- 4. Lead Conversion: Leads at the bottom of the sales funnel are qualified and now ready to be paying customers.
A good sales funnel is an important business tool because it helps organizations:
- To view the customer journey.
- To identify bottlenecks and conversions.
- -Measure the leads conversion rate and what is successful conversion
- -Let the marketing activities be in the right steps of the sales funnel
Conclusion
As a summarizing sentence, leads are new potential customers found at the top of the sales funnel, where the funnel stages outline their journey to the buying stage. Understanding leads and sales funnels helps improve lead generation and conversion techniques in any business.