Cold calling can be frustrating, especially when you’re interrupted during dinner. That’s why HubSpot offers inbound lead generation as a solution. With inbound lead generation, your business won’t be the annoying caller that disrupts people’s evenings.
A lead can be defined as a person who has taken some sort of action that indicates they may be interested in what you have to offer. Online lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers into leads through online channels such as your website, blog, or social media. You need lead generation because without it, you would have no way of growing your business. You qualify a lead by determining whether or not they fit your target buyer persona. You label lead types so that you can more easily keep track of where they are in your sales funnel. You generate leads through activities such as content marketing, lead magnets, and lead capture forms. Inbound lead generation is more effective than simply buying leads because it allows you to build relationships with your leads and nurture them through the buyer’s journey.
What Is a Lead?
A lead is a person who has shown an interest in a company’s product or service. This interest can be shown in many ways, such as through contact information requests, product demonstrations, or even sales.
Leads are more likely to engage with a business or organization if they initiate contact themselves, rather than receiving a random cold call.
Being a lead means that you have been identified as a potential customer for a product or service. A company may have found your contact information and decided to reach out to you about their product or service. This is usually done through email, although it could also be done through direct mail or over the phone.
In addition to giving the company feedback about your experience, survey responses also help the company learn more about you as a customer. This information can be used to adjust the company’s marketing strategy, so that they can personalize their communication with you in the future. By customizing their outreach, the company can make sure that they are not wasting time calling leads that are not interested in their services.
There are different types of leads based on how they are qualified and what stage of the customer journey they are in. Not all leads are created equal and some will be more qualified than others.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
A Marketing Qualified Lead is a contact that has shown interest in your marketing team’s efforts, but is not ready to receive a sales call. For example, a contact who fills out a form on a landing page for an offer.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
A sales qualified lead is a contact that has taken an action that shows they are interested in becoming a paying customer. An example of a sales qualified lead is a contact who fills out a form to ask a question about your product or service.
Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
Product qualified leads (PQLs) are potential customers who have tried your product and shown interest in becoming a paying customer. PQLs usually exist for companies that offer a product trial or a free or limited version of their product. An example of a PQL would be a customer who uses your free version but expresses interest in features that are only available for payment.
Service Qualified Lead
Service qualified leads are contacts or customers who are interested in becoming a paying customer, according to indications from your service team. For example, a customer who tells their customer service representative that they would like to upgrade their product subscription would be up-leveled to the appropriate sales team or representative by the customer service representative.
There are many strategies you can use to generate leads and bring potential customers to your offers. (We will discuss more strategies later.)
I can’t simply say that I create content for lead generation when someone outside the marketing world asks me what I do because they wouldn’t understand and I would get some confused looks.
I want to find ways to attract people to my business that are unique and will get them interested in my company. I want to provide them with enough information and resources so they will naturally want to hear from us and be familiar with our brand.
When you explain your lead generation strategy in this way, it sounds more appealing to potential customers. You’re essentially getting them excited about your business and paving the way for them to make a purchase in the future.
What Is Lead Generation?
The goal of lead generation is to attract potential customers to your business and then increase their interest in what you have to offer. This is done through a variety of methods, such as job postings, blog articles, coupons, live events, and online content. Ultimately, the goal is to convert these leads into paying customers.
Why Do You Need Lead Generation?
When someone who is not familiar to you takes an interest in your company, it is much easier to turn them into a customer.
Generating leads is a fundamental point in an individual’s journey to becoming a delighted customer. In inbound marketing, lead generation is the second stage. This is when you take the visitors you’ve attracted and turn them into leads for your sales team. This is done by sales-qualified leads. The diagram below shows that lead generation is essential to becoming a satisfied customer.
As you can see from the diagram below, generating leads is a fundamental step in a person’s journey to becoming a satisfied customer.
Keep Your Messaging Consistent and Deliver on Your Promise
The most successful lead generation campaigns are the ones that deliver on their promises and provide a seamless transition from the ad copy and design to the final product. Make sure that your campaign is sending a consistent message and providing value to everyone who interacts with it.
The way you generate leads should match the style of your website, blog, and product. Otherwise, it will be hard to turn leads into paying customers. Your campaign should be about more than just collecting someone’s email address. It should be about creating a new customer.
Link Your CTA to a Dedicated Landing Page
This may seem obvious to you, but many marketers don’t create dedicated landing pages for their offers. A CTA (call-to-action) is supposed to send visitors to a landing page where they can learn more about a specific offer.
You should not use CTAs to drive people to your homepage because it often offers no value. Even if your CTA is about your brand or product, you should still send them to a targeted landing page that includes an opt-in form. If you have the opportunity to use a CTA, send them to a page that will convert them into a lead.
Our ebook provides expert tips on how to build and promote landing pages that result in more conversions.
Turn Your Blog Into A Lead Generating Machine
This blog exists in the hope that someone, somehow, will come in from a Google search, enjoy the content, and buy what is being sold.
Does that sound familiar?
As a marketer, social media manager, or business owner, you’ve probably been in a situation where you need to generate leads. Here’s how you can turn your blog into a tool that generates clients or customers for your product or service, and eventually revenue.
I’m going to assume that you are using the WordPress content management system for this post. WordPress is the most popular platform for blogging and websites across the web, so the same strategies will work for you, but you may have to tinker with the technicalities.
Building a Sidebar Fit For A King
The sidebar on your blog can be used as a powerful lead generation tool. By connecting with your readers and providing content that they are interested in, you can use the sidebar in several different ways to generate leads.
Optimizing Your Sidebar for List Building
Verify that your sidebar is advantageous and building your list. It is commonly said that “the money is in the list”, which you are probably aware of if you have read articles on this topic on blogs such as the Clickfunnels Blog.
Building up the sidebar is a great way to start.
There are many plugins you can use to add an opt-in box to your sidebar, which will help with list building. But what I have found to outperform all my other opt-in boxes is a 2-step ‘Clickpop.’
In order to add this to your sidebar in WordPress and make it look attractive, you will need to get a banner designed to fit within your sidebar. This banner should be the same width as the sidebar on your blog (which will vary depending on your website’s theme) and the height can be whatever you like. I usually stick with a rectangle shape.
You can have a professionally designed banner for your web site by hiring a designer from UpWork or Freelancer for $30-60. The designer will upload the banner to your web site within 1-3 days.
Once you have your banner created, you can add it to your WordPress site by going to the Widgets area and adding the banner code to the Custom HTML widget.
We want to make sure that the conversion numbers on this sidebar are as high as possible. Therefore, we should offer a gift or ‘lead magnet’ that our target audience will find irresistible when they sign up.
This could be anything from a checklist to a cheat sheet to an e-book to a video series. You can also create a quiz to give them a result. If you’re stuck for ideas, take a look at this.
Make The Sidebar Fixed/Sticky
People usually spend about 10 seconds reading the beginning of a blog post before they start scrolling down to read the rest of the post.
Most people do not realize that when they scroll down, the area where the sidebar was sitting is now empty.
It’s such a shame to see an empty parking spot in the middle of the city when there’s so much valuable real estate go unused.
If you want to keep your sidebar offers visible as readers scroll down your blog posts, install the fixed sidebar WordPress plugin. This easy fix will improve your conversion rate immediately for any blog that already has a sidebar set up.
Test, Test, Test
I find it amazing how often I visit a website six months later and see that the offers are still the same.
The coupons on Quality Golfer’s website become outdated eventually, and it is important to test different lead magnet images, colors, and types to see what works best. The headline and ClickPop boxes are also important factors to consider.
Making an effort to change up your sidebar once or twice a month will help you convert more visitors into subscribers by the end of the year.
Dominating With Content Upgrades
If you’re not familiar with a content upgrade, it’s basically an enhanced version of your blog post that you offer in exchange for some type of action on your website.
The main action is providing an email address, however, it can also be an action like sharing or tweeting a message.
A content upgrade is a form of lead magnet that can provide value to your readers. The first step in designing and putting together a content upgrade is creating the content.
A content upgrade is a quick way to improve your blog. A checklist is an easy way to do this. For example, if you have a post about generating leads, you could create a checklist called “The Blog Lead Generating Machine Checklist.”
The more value you provide in your content upgrades, the more likely people are to opt into them. You can turn each content upgrade into a mini product by investing more time and money into it.
We want to create an offer that is so good that there is no reason not to take it.
I usually like to have a front page designed for my content upgrades, so I go to a place like UpWork or Freelancer to hire an affordable designer. If you’re on a budget, you can even use Fiverr, which has a lot of eBook cover designers.