Digital Marketing Basics - What Is Lead Generation?

For your digital marketing efforts to be successful, you need to have an in-depth understanding of the underlying internet marketing business works. More precisely, you need to know a thing or two about what is lead generation.

By leveraging data to its full potential, you can reach relevant customers and target only prospects who are likely to make a purchase in your digital marketing campaigns. 

If you want to say goodbye to ineffective marketing efforts and low sales, continue reading to learn what is lead generation and how you can access high-quality leads.

What are leads and why they matter

Leads are people who have shown interest in your company’s offering. In other words, a lead is a person who has already established any sort of contact with your business and shared their contact information. 

For example, a person completes an online survey about internet download speeds created by an internet provider. The next day, the same person receives an email from the company with a special offer - this person is considered a lead. 

As you can see, the entire process is less invasive than receiving a random phone call from an internet provider asking you if you’re happy with your internet connection.

The information that a potential customer provides helps you come up with a more personalized approach and informs the rest of the interaction. This is invaluable as it ensures you’re not investing too much time into prospective customers who aren’t likely to convert.

But what is lead generation?

Regardless of whether we’re talking about Business-to-Consumer (B2C) or Business-to-Business (B2B) lead generation, it’s the process of acquiring leads by identifying, engaging, and converting online users into quality business prospects.

This includes different online advertising channels or techniques such as pay-per-click advertising, email marketing campaigns, and tactics such as offering content through a landing page.

How to generate leads

What is lead generation if not the way for successful businesses to grow their loyal customer base? To achieve success and increase interest in your offering, your lead generation efforts have to involve high-quality content. 

By having a deep understanding of your target audience, you can nurture your leads into customers by showing them content they are interested in. In most cases, it should help the audience member achieve a goal or solve an issue in relation to the product or service you are offering. 

Here are some of the best content-related lead generation strategies you could try:

1. Creating gated content

Through gated content, you can easily eliminate weak leads. Since gated content is ‘’hidden’’ behind a capture form that requires contact information, it ensures that the content your prospects are trying to reach is so valuable that they’d be willing to give out their info.

Since the content already aligns with the business goals of your prospects, you can easily conclude that these leads are high in quality and more likely to convert since they showed genuine interest in your offering.

Gated content could be anything: from articles and white papers to ebooks and videos. If you make the title catchy yet clear, the prospects who download the gated content will know exactly what they’re receiving.

2. Using paid ads

Knowledge of what is lead generation isn’t going to do much without rigorous testing. The good news is that you can use advertising platforms such as Facebook Ads or Google Ads to quickly receive key info about your target persona.

How?

You can show ads to different audiences and test how each keyword and each message are performing. By testing out different personas, you get a better idea of which audiences are likely to convert into paid customers.

3. Hosting events

Similarly to gated content, hosting an event such as a conference, workshop, or webinar, is a great way to generate qualified leads. But not only that, it’s the best method you can leverage to build a meaningful relationship with your target audience in real time. 

Once they sign up for the event you’re hosting (again, they are interested enough to be willing to give away their info), you can capture their contact information.

The event itself is also an amazing opportunity to learn more about your target audience, but also to slowly guide them towards the conversion process in your sales.

4. Promoting your content on social media

Once you put it all together, you get to this point. You already have an idea of who the best target audience is and you’ve got content that has serious potential. Since there are millions of potential leads lurking on social media, it’s a perfect place to discover high-quality prospects.

Social media platforms offer powerful targeting tools which you can make use of to display ads that link your gated content to the right prospects. Since the brunt of the work is already done, you only have to sit back and watch the fruit of your lead generation labors.

To help you visualize the whole process, here’s an example:

1. A prospect discovers your page through a social media ad

2. The ad seems interesting to them and they click on the call to action (CTA), which takes them to a landing page where they can give their information in exchange for an offer (the offer is a piece of content that has enough perceived value)

3. The visitor fills out a quick capture form to claim the offer

Voila, you’ve got yourself a qualified lead!!

Can lead generation be organic?

Why yes, it can!

Hopefully, the previous example didn’t leave you with the idea that you have to run ads to capture leads. Do you remember when we mentioned content is one of the cornerstones of lead generation? The same applies to search engine optimization (SEO).

By targeting the right keywords, you can attract qualified leads through Google searches. This is especially true if you create content regularly and rank for long-tail keywords that are more specific and can help prospects find exactly what they are looking for - which could ultimately be your product or service.

Growing your business with qualified leads

With all this information, you should have a better idea of the basics of digital marketing and know what is lead generation.

What happens next is up to you, as lead generation is not something you can do once and forget about it. You’ll always have to create new content and come up with valuable offers and engaging CTAs. The same goes for new rounds of testing that will help you laser in on your target audience with greater precision.

With every effort, you will gain more competence and a deeper understanding of what is lead generation. In turn, you’ll access leads that are even more qualified than the ones that you made before