Lead Generation: Defining A Lead, Generation Strategy and Mechanism

In a business world, specifically for activities related to marketing, we often hear about lead generation, or some said it lead harvesting.

So, what exactly is a lead?

In common marketing term, a lead is someone who has showed interest to your product, service or your company in general.

In offline marketing, this can be indicated when someone walk in your store or make a phone call, but he hasn’t made any purchase yet. You can count him as a lead when you already has his information, name, phone number, email, etc.

In online, a lead can be generated with many channels. Your business website, landing page and social media are the most common channels. To generate lead, we usually build a form which a person can supply contact information.

Online Lead Generation

This is usually being done online. Instead of the traditional way of cold calling people, generating through a website saves a lot of time and energy. This can be done through search engine optimization (SEO) or paid ads, social media promotion or through blogging.

But you need to apply a bit of strategy to pull people to your web page. Be it a small contest, interesting event online or a small survey regarding your product and market.

To make it more attractive, offer something in returns, a voucher, ticket to watch football games or ticket to an exotic travel destination.

How Much Information You Need to Generate?

This is a tricky questions. As a marketer, we definitely want to gather as much information as we can, but, it is not always an easy job. The more information you ask to submit, the lower the number of lead we could get. People has became more aware on submitting his personal information online, especially sensitive information, like date of birth, home address and phone number.

The downside is, when information gathered is not enough, bigger effort is required for your sales process. It can be a burden and harder for your marketing and sales team to act.

The best way to do this is talk to your sales people. Ask them what important information they need to become productive and efficient in sales process. Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do. If your sales team required a little more information than the ideal number of data request, then just do it.

However, don’t forget to evaluate your landing page frequently to analyze what works best.

The Process of Online Lead Generation

1. Create a Call-to-Action (CTA)

Nobody knows your landing page and they won’t know if somewhere, someone offer them free gifts. You need to build a call-to-action button or link to direct them to your landing page. CTA on your main website, social media such as Facebook Page or Instagram and paid-ads works best in this case.

2. Landing Page

Landing page is a common website page that is developed for a distinct purpose, in this case, to generate lead. This ideal design of the landing page is to make it one page only, so the visitors don’t go navigating anywhere else and forget to go back to the initial page.

The landing page should contain information in text, graphic or video, that you need to let the visitors know and a form to capture their contact information.

3. Offer

Nobody will fill in your form in landing page with personal information if there’s nothing he can get in return. Sometimes, you don’t need to prepare high-budget for a free give-away. Free ebook, free webinar, free consultation or your own product are some options you can try. If your offer is interesting, they will fill in the form.

An ideal scenario works like this.

A person visits your social media or your website and see the obvious call-to-action button. They read the information you provide to attract them to click the CTA button. Then, they click on the CTA button and being directed to your landing page. They see the interesting free gift and fill in your form to submit their information.

Once they are done submitting, they receive a message that their free gift is on the way, Your sales people could use the opportunity to ask for further information through phone or email, before sending out the gift. When everything is confirmed, a new “real” lead is collected.

It is not easy to generate lead these days. Spams and bad activities are circulated over the internet. But a good marketer always know how to work on a good strategy. Lead generation is crucial for business. It is one of the most effective sales tool.