One of the most important things any business can do is bring new customers onboard. After all, new customers are the lifeblood of your business. They will boost your sales, and without them, your business will stop growing. That’s a fate no business wants to meet. Yet despite this, 61% of marketers say traffic and lead generation is their biggest challenge.
While there are many ways to get new customers, it’s truly understanding how to generate leads in a way that works for you and your business that will prove most effective.
Lead generation is one of the most important things you will ever do for your business. But it may also seem overwhelming. Where do you start? How long will it take? And just what are leads, anyway?
Read on to find out the answers to these questions and more.
What are leads?
Simply put, a lead is a contact that is a potential customer. Ideally, this is a person or business that you know has a need for what you are selling. But you must not only learn how to generate leads for your business—that is, find them— you also need to nurture your relationship with them with business marketing, and turn them into prospects, then customers.
Let’s dig a little deeper. A lead is someone you have reached out to, but they have not spoken with you. You have sent them communications and invited them into your sales funnel, which is the pathway you take them on from lead to customer.
Once your lead has engaged with your business, they become a prospect. Their engagement has shown that they are interested in what you have to offer and that means you have the opportunity to make a sale.
Where do you start when learning how to generate leads?
While there are many ways to generate leads (we’ll get to those later), there are some basic steps you need to take no matter how you choose to do it. These include:
- Defining your target audience: You need to know who you are selling to in order to know how to best reach them. This requires research to determine who they are, what they like, what their needs are, and where to find them.
- Determine how you will promote your products and services: You need to plan out the best ways to get your products and services in front of your target audience, based on what you have learned about them. Will this be through your website, industry events, traditional advertising, online advertising, or a combination of these and other methods?
- Develop your sales funnel: This is the path you will take your leads down once you make contact with them. It will allow you to gather contact information from them and allow you to provide them with something in return. Once they enter the funnel, you can take them along each stage of it, ultimately leading to the sale.
Once you have all of this in place, you will be ready to generate leads. You will know who you are targeting, how to approach them, and how to engage with them. But the question remains, how to generate leads in sales?
What are the ways to generate leads?
In broad terms, there are three ways to generate leads—organically, through advertising, or buying them. Organic leads are leads you can get without payment, simply by having an online presence. There are a variety of ways you can generate organic leads, such as:
- Blogging
- Vlogging
- Social media
The key here is to make a connection with people and build followers who will then become leads on their own.
Advertising is a paid way to generate leads. Whether you are using pay-per-click advertising, Facebook advertising, or another form of paid content, you can get your business in front of a targeted audience. With this form of lead generation, you will likely offer your prospective leads something in return for their contact information. Examples of what you can offer include a free trial, an informative report, or a small product.
Finally, you can buy a list of leads. This involves paying money for a list of leads that are ready to be contacted. You will have all the relevant information for these leads including their name, address, and phone number, so you can launch your marketing campaign at once.
You might think that getting your leads organically is the best way to go, or maybe putting in a small investment to draw them in through advertising. But as it turns out, buying your leads may be the best decision you make.
What are the benefits of paying for lead generation?
The short answer? The quality of the leads and the speed at which you get them.
You see, the thing about generating leads organically is this—it takes a lot of effort and a lot of time. You will be spending time every day generating your free content—but it may take you weeks or months before you build up enough leads for you to see any real impact on your sales
Paid advertising works faster, but it still takes time to create your advertising content, figure out how to upload and run ads, and decide your formula for success.
What about buying leads? Created to be a one-time payment, you get a list of targeted leads instantly, with all the hard work done for you. You can launch your campaign within a few minutes and start bringing real potential customers into your sales funnel.
The key to buying leads is to make sure you buy quality leads. And for that, you need a provider you can count on like the partners at Salesgenie®.
How to choose a provider for lead generation
Choosing your lead generation provider is not something to take lightly. You need to take three important characteristics into consideration, including:
Quality
The leads you buy must be accurate, otherwise, you won’t reach your intended audience. A reliable and credible provider of leads will invest a significant amount of time and money to ensure their records are always up-to-date.
Trustworthy
Your leads provider should respect all privacy laws that exist and be completely transparent when it comes to how they gather their data.
Guarantee
No matter who the provider is and how good they are, they simply cannot guarantee their data is 100% accurate all the time because life happens. People move, businesses close and merge. A provider that is reputable will offer a satisfaction guarantee, refunding their customers for any data they can’t use because it is out-of-date.
Enjoy access to over 145 million business records
Salesgenie® has more than 15 million verified business records. This means you will be able to access a targeted list of leads that you can customize based on a variety of demographics (ZIP Code, annual household income, gender, marital status, and more) and firmographics (annual sales, number of employees, square footage, and more).
How important is accuracy when generating leads?
The accuracy of your leads forms the foundation of your entire marketing campaign. At Salesgenie, we invest more than $20 million every year to ensure the accuracy of our data. This makes it possible for us to help our customers—businesses just like yours—send out 25 million emails each year.
The answer to how to generate leads is simple
Connect with Salesgenie today and speak with an expert about how you can generate a targeted list of leads to expand your reach and grow your business. We’ll help you create a qualified lead list so you can connect with customers most likely to buy and help you reach your sales and marketing goals quickly.
