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Keeping a finger on the pulse of your business’ performance is critical to its success. In New Zealand’s SME space, there are 7,100 $5m-to-$50m businesses – nearly five times the corporate market – competing.
To maintain a competitive edge in an ever-changing digital and consumer landscape, and workplace environment, business leaders must embrace strategic marketing measures – and lead generation is the first step in a business’ sales funnel.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the process of attracting prospective customers to your business, increasing their interest in you and your offerings/services, and then nurturing them to become loyal customers.
What is quality Lead Generation?
To be truly successful, lead generation should focus on building qualified leads. Buying any old leads from an outsourced company, or cold calling people, doesn’t work because customers are perceptive – they didn’t sign up to hear from your company so why should they? If they’re not actively opting in, then there’s a good chance your emails will be flagged as spam, and your phone call will be rejected.
How can you generate leads for your business?
So, how do you generate qualified leads? By engaging potential customers via inbound; outbound sales; marketing strategies.
An inbound approach
- Has thought leadership at its core, essentially pushing business content out into the marketplace to build brand affinity and customer loyalty.
- This can be done organically – with blog posts, live events, or via paid means – Facebook, Google AdWords, LinkedIn campaigns, all channelling a call-to-action i.e., a prospective customer follows a link that takes them to a homepage, signs up to a live event, engages with social posts or an ad – thus a lead is secured.
Outbound sales approach
- Is when a business’s sales team reaches out to the customer first, targeting individual people or specific groups who they already know will benefit from their services/products.
- Typically starting off by warming up the customer with a DM or email first, they are then followed up by phone, pitching just the right sales angle to transition potential customers into fully qualified leads.
Successful lead generation doesn’t preference inbound or outbound strategies – a combination of both in a sales funnel can take your business to greater heights. To learn more, click through to our ‘Inbound and Outbound’ article here.
How can you generate leads for your business?
Lead generation doesn’t end at implementation of inbound and outbound sales strategies – they have to be constantly measured and tested to ensure they are generating the right leaders.
This can be done by engaging tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Insights and AdWords Keyword Planner, to reveal and analyse what customers are looking for online, and also help with decision making around content placement, so marketing is directed to the right channels.
A/B testing across your ad campaigns also determines which offers or call-to- actions are performing the best – and then identifying which one is gifting a higher return in qualified leads.
And irrespective if you have inhouse marketing, or external agency support – you should make sure they’re doing all of this to deliver better quality leads to your business.
Time to get started?
Lead generation shouldn’t be a shot in the dark, by engaging both inbound and outbound sales strategies, and testing and analysing the information data through these channels, you can continually upskill your marketing approach and keep those qualified leads rolling in.
If you want to learn more about best practice Lead Generation for your business, then there are plenty of really good articles and guides online you can review. One that you might fine really helpful is the ‘HubSpot Academy - Understanding the Fundamentals of Inbound Marketing’, which you can view here.
Otherwise feel free to reach out to us, and we’ll help answer any questions you might have about Lead Generation, and what you should be doing in your business.
If you’re wanting to turn up the heat on your sales leads, reach out to our team
of sales experts:
