A quick refresher: The basics of the lead gen process
The lead generation process can be scalable, repeatable and predictable for your business. So let’s walk through the basic steps in a very straightforward way.
- First, a visitor discovers your business through one of your marketing channels – think your website, blog, or social media page to name a few.
- That visitor then clicks on your call-to-action (CTA) — a button, an image, or message that encourages website visitors to take some sort of action. This step is crucial and cannot be overlooked. In fact, depending on what your offer is and the channel you’ve chosen, we’ve seen merchants be successful with one CTA displayed in multiple places (we recommend no more than 2 or 3) on the content too but that is not really here nor there. We’ll touch on this strategy briefly just below, don’t you worry!
- That CTA takes your visitor to a landing page, which is a web page that is designed to capture lead information in exchange for an offer.
Note: Just so we are all on the same page, an offer is the content or something of value that’s being “offered” on the landing page, like a guide, checklist, an ebook, a course, a template or a number of other options (also commonly referred to as a lead magnet) but the kicker is that the offer must have enough perceived value to a visitor for them to provide their personal information in exchange for access to it.
- Once the user is on the landing page, your visitor fills out a form in exchange for the offer. We have seen merchants have a lot of success here with primary and secondary segmentation techniques that are designed to tease out critical information about your site visitors without being perceived as too invasive or pushy. If done correctly, your forms can capture a lead, deliver your offer and segment that user in a way that sets you up to send them even more relevant, targeted content in the future, should they opt in to receive future content from you of course. But boom, there you have it — a new lead. That is, as long as you’re following lead-capture form best practices.
Decently neat how everything fits together don’t ya think?
Once the process is firmly in place, which channels will be your best promoters?
So you’ve put all of these elements together and you feel like you’re firing on all cylinders. You know you’ve got an abundance of promotional channels to drive traffic to your landing page and jumpstart generating quality leads but which distribution engine(s) do you choose? How do you decide which channel or channels give you the most bang for your buck? This is where the front-end of lead generation, referred to as lead gen marketing, proves its value.
If you’re a visual learner, the chart below shows the flow from promotional marketing channels to a generated lead.
The image above does a good job covering common channels and stages but it is certainly not exhaustive. There are even more channels you can use to get visitors to become leads. Below we’ll go into depth on these and talk about a few others:
Content
You’ve probably heard it a million times before but why not keep hammering the point home — content is king! Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to provide visitors with useful, free information with hopefully tons of perceived value. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content — remember just above how we mentioned that we’ve seen merchants be successful with the same CTA in multiple places within their content? Try embedding them inline, at the bottom of a post, in the hero, or even on the side panel. Remember to test, test, test to see which CTA formula works best for your business. The more delighted a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your call-to-action and move onto your landing page.
An effective email marketing strategy is a great place to reach the people who already know your brand and product or service. Email is the marketing tool that provides you with the ability to create a fluid, interconnected and undisrupted one to one buyer’s journey. More importantly, email marketing allows you to build relationships with leads, customers and past customers because it’s your opportunity to speak directly to them in their inbox, at a time that is convenient for them. As a result, it becomes much easier for your business to ask contacts to take an action since they’ve previously subscribed to your list. From our research over the years, we’ve seen that emails can become a bit cluttered, so we recommend using CTAs that have compelling copy and an eye-catching design (within your sphere of branding or true to your theme) to grab your subscriber’s attention.
Ads & Retargeting
The sole purpose of an ad is to get people to take an action. Otherwise, why spend the money? If you don’t know what your objective is, who your audience is, and how to reach them, you’re going to be wasting a whole lot of money putting your ads in front of the wrong people. A paid ad strategy will help you get the best possible ROI out of your ads. If you want people to convert, be sure that your landing page and offer match exactly what is promised in the ad. The action you want users to take needs to be crystal clear. A common issue we see with many merchants, especially those of you that may be just beginning your ecommerce journey, is multiple CTAs, mixed or confused messaging or in some cases, totally irrelevant offers. It doesn’t take much for fickle internet browsers to get spooked or lose their attention. Make sure your messaging and CTAs are clear, concise and deliver what they promise. Don’t sleep on the impact clever copy and creative can have on your conversion rates as well.
Blog
Think of your blog as your not so secret weapon. There’s no limit to what you can write about, how you structure the content or who can read it but using your blog posts to promote an offer is such an effective way to tailor the entire piece to your end goal. For instance, if your offer is a downloadable PDF guide highlighting some of the most important use cases for trust badges, then you can write a blog post about how to implement the digital marketing strategies in more depth … which would make your CTA highly relevant and easy to click, wouldn’t it?
For a quick video overview on the HubSpot Blog’s expert lead generation tips, check out our video guide. (Maybe put a video guide here?)
Social Media
From the swipe up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links to bitly URLs on Twitter to short Snap or YouTube tutorials or almost literally anything on TikTok, social media platforms make it easy to guide your followers to take action. Think of them as gigantic social distribution engines for your content marketing strategy. Users hungry for your products/services live in these walled gardens and they share everything with the other people in their universes, all day long. Aside from the costs to attract eyeballs going up and up seemingly all the time, which certainly does stink…we feel ya, for some businesses there are no better channels to reach their target customers.
We have other articles dedicated to channel specific strategies helping you navigate impactful nuances but know that we have your best interests at heart. We want you to build your trust strategy as strong as you can and help get your content in front of your tribe of customers as efficiently as possible!
Product Trials
Depending on which product or service you’re selling, offering product trials can be a game changer. You can break down a lot of barriers to a sale this way. Once a prospect is using your product or service, you can feel confident the user is further along the sales cycle, receptive to middle and bottom of the funnel tactics where you can entice them with additional offers or resources to further encourage them to buy. We have found that paying particular attention to this cohort of users while specifically segmenting them to receive the right targeted messaging can significantly increase revenue by capitalizing on the extremely high purchase intent sitting right there in your funnel.
Referral Marketing
Referral, or word-of-mouth, marketing is useful for lead generation in ways that in a way is as old as time. That is, it gets your brand in front of more people. Referral marketing works because consumers trust the opinions of “real people” more than they trust traditional advertising, which in turn, increases your business’s chances of generating more leads.
In fact, according to Nielsen reports, shoppers in 2021 are four times more likely to buy a product or service when it’s referred by a friend. While referrals usually come from friends and acquaintances, they don’t have to.
influencer marketing is considered another form of referral marketing. Influencers often share their favorite products/services with their followers and audiences via organic sharing and sponsored posts. Very simplified, referral marketing can come from influencers, bloggers, friends and family, media publications, online reviews and testimonials but again, people trust “real reviews” more than traditional forms of advertising. At the end of the day, people buy from people they trust.
Whatever channel you use to generate leads, you’ll want to guide users to your landing page. As long as you’ve built a strong landing page that converts, you’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting to ensure users are more likely to add items to their carts and complete purchases.
How you can apply structure to qualify a lead
As we covered in other articles, a lead is a user that has indicated interest in your company’s product or service. While the definition may be simple, it’s also extremely broad. So we need a system of gauging just how interested this “lead” really is. This next section will address different ways a user can actually demonstrate measurable interest and how to identify it.
Broken down to its basic components, a sales lead is generated through information collection — think forms or email captures. Some everyday examples to chew on here could be a shopper sharing contact information in exchange for a coupon/discount, a person filling out a form to download an educational piece of content or opting in to receive email newsletter content to name a few. But the real nuggets to glean at this stage come from identifying any leading indicators or perhaps lagging indicators, and building quantifiable, measurable systems around them in order to optimize for what’s working. Qualifying leads and content assets during different stages is one of the more widely accepted methods to help you do this. See the lead scoring model below:
To reiterate, this image covers TOFU (top of funnel) and MOFU (middle of funnel) customer journey tactics. BOFU tactics will certainly overlap with some of these options but plenty of bottom of the funnel criteria are also not listed here. Anyways – once the different qualifying stages are defined by company-wide and team specific agreed upon criteria, you’ll need to weave it together through integrated software and build out scalable, non-silo’d workflows across multiple teams…more on that some other time though 😀. We’ve discussed different qualifying stages but how about we examine different content and how certain types correlate to varying levels of interest so you can more accurately gauge it all?
Gauging a lead’s level of interest
Below are just a few of the many ways in which you could qualify someone as a lead. Each of these examples shows that the amount of collected information used to qualify a lead, as well as their level of interest, can vary. Like we’ve also previously touched on, the level of questions you can use on these different types of information collection assets can really help you get better at segmentation, which will translate to increased revenue further down the sales cycle. Something to keep in mind as you think about the scenarios below.
Let’s assess each:
- Job Application: An individual that fills out an application form is willing to share a lot of personal information because he/she wants to be considered for a position. Filling out that application shows their true interest in the job, therefore qualifying the person as a lead for the company’s recruiting team — not marketing or sales teams. The information collected is highly specialized for a purpose that is very different than generating immediate revenue. The questions reflect the needs of recruiting and are designed to build scalable, repeatable and more predictable people systems.
- Coupon/Discount: Unlike the job application, you probably know very little about someone who has stumbled upon one of your online coupons. They could be anyone out there just browsing the internet. But if they find the coupon valuable enough, they may be willing to provide their name and email address in exchange for it. Although it’s not a lot of information, it’s enough for a business to know that someone has interest in their company and build a list with it. Building a central email list and then segmenting out different personas or ideal customer profiles (ICPs) can directly affect your bottom line in extremely valuable ways.
- Content: While the download of a coupon shows an individual has a direct interest in your product or service, content (like an educational ebook, whitepaper or webinar) does not tell you all of the information you might hope to ascertain. Therefore, to truly understand the nature of the person’s interest in your business, you’ll probably need to collect more information to determine whether the person is interested in your product or service and whether they’re a good fit. Again this is where secondary segmentation questions can really help you dig deep into who your users are and what their interests might be to give you really helpful insights that can inform many of your go-to-market strategies going forward.
It’s often tricky to meaningfully measure how effective different styles of content are as different audiences for different products will want different things, but if you and your team are diligent about testing and measuring results through analytics, the data can illuminate a scalable, repeatable and predictable path forward. Pay attention to what your audience is telling you about what they like, how they want to consume information and where they want to be reached, then invest your resources appropriately. If your business can successfully glean meaningful insights from your customer facing operations while keeping costs manageable, you have a better chance at truly building a valuable business with attractive upside.
These three general examples highlight how lead generation differs from company to company, from industry to industry and person to person. You’ll need to collect enough information to gauge whether someone has a true, valid interest in your product or service — how much information is enough information will vary depending on your business. It’s been said in everything you read all the time but test what works, eliminate what doesn’t and keep your questions relevant to the changing needs/wants/interests of your audience(s).
Which leads us into lead scoring 101 and how you can make lead gen marketing even more actionable 🙌
Lead scoring is a more advanced system to qualify leads quantitatively. The sections above this taught you how to understand and define what a lead is, what the lead gen process consists of, the types of content that resonate with users, the channels to reach users on and briefly covered strategies to qualify how good of a lead you’ve captured. But there’s more.
Using this technique, an actual lead scoring model, can help your marketing team further define your lead stages, giving you even more qualified leads on a more granular level. In this system, leads are assigned a numerical value (or score) to determine where they fall on the scale from “interested” to “ready for a sale” where they exit out of marketing’s purview and into sales’ ecosystem. The criteria for these actions is completely up to you, your go-to-market teams, and management but they should connect to your OKRs as well as your KPIs. Something to keep in mind when building this system is that the criteria must be uniform across your marketing and sales department so that everyone is working on the different sides of similar problems, ensuring that the larger goals of the company are all moving in the same direction. SLAs (Service Level Agreement) can work wonders in terms of providing actionable, measurable solutions in situations such as this but we can cover that too at a later time.
The image above is a very generic model to give you a sense of how you could build your own framework off of it but if you want to keep it simple, you’ll get no argument from us.
A lead’s score can be based on actions a user has taken, information they’ve provided, their level of engagement with your brand, or other criteria that your sales team determines. For instance, you may score someone higher if they regularly engage with you on social media or if their demographic information matches your target audience. You might give a lead a higher score if they used one of your coupons — an action that would signify this person is engaged and potentially displaying an above average level of interest in your product.
The good thing about this strategy is there is no one size fits all. Your business can apply a general framework to this problem, test what works and what doesn’t over time, tweak what is needed when it’s needed and build quite a robust marketing machine as the company grows. Essentially what is really important to make sure you keep your focus on is that the higher a lead’s score, the closer they are to becoming a sales-qualified lead (SQL), which is only a step away from becoming a customer. The score and criteria is something you may need to tweak along the way until you find the formula that works, but once you do, you’ll transform your lead generation into customer generation. Cha-Ching 🚀
Final thoughts
So if the purpose of lead generation is to generate consumer interest for a product or service with the goal of turning that interest into a sale, then it is absolutely one of the most core parts of the sales funnel!
There are many ways in which you can optimize your website in order to drive more leads. Since content, email, search ads and social channels are often key channels for driving leads, experiment with different pieces of content, workflows, nurture campaigns, call-to-action placement and lead magnets to determine what type of content performs best. The best way to accomplish this typically involves identifying your key buyer personas, and creating content that would be compelling and useful to those particular segments because they are considered quality leads.
And something your business can take action on immediately we recommend taking a good hard look at your current lead forms. Sometimes with so many balls to juggle so to speak, we tend to overlook how important the lead form actually is as a part of the conversion funnel. It may actually be one of the highest converting changes you could make while also being one of the least capital and staff intensive moves you could make. Try optimizing your lead forms in order to increase the quality of your leads and the results may just surprise you! Experiment with different form lengths to see what is optimal in terms of lead capture and lead information. Oh, and adding a trust badge to signal your company is legitimate and safe to make a purchase with wouldn’t hurt either! 
