Marketers need to embrace the 95:5 rule. Only 5% of the market is actively in buying mode while 95% are actively researching. Thus marketers need to be able to balance their approach to demand gen, lead gen, and demand capture.
Customers expect personalized, omnichannel experiences delivered in real-time. Thus, to attract them, businesses require a well-thought-through plan. A successful lead generation strategy should be concerned with much more than just clients – it ought to begin within an organization with the teams involved in the process. So, how to generate sales-qualified leads? - we explain it in this article.
What Is a Lead Generation Funnel
A lead generation funnel is the initial part of a sales funnel – the route that a potential client travels from learning about a product or service to purchasing it.
The lead generation funnel starts with the moment an individual becomes aware of your brand attention to the moment they decide whether they want to buy the product or services. It consists of three main stages:
- Top of the funnel (ToFu) – This is the phase in which a company tries to build awareness and acquaint as much target audience as possible with the brand.
- Middle of the funnel (MoFu) – In the middle of the funnel, the most work is done. This is when organizations target potential customers with ads and other marketing materials to convince them to purchase the product or service itself.
- Bottom of the funnel (BoFu) – At this stage, the targeted potential customer decides whether to purchase what you offer or to walk away. In the second case, it is also possible to introduce retargeting strategies to put the potential customers back into the funnel and attempt to convince them to convert once again.
Successful Lead Generation Strategy
As it is visible from the particular parts of the lead generation funnel, a successful lead generation strategy leads directly to an increase in sales. Therefore, it is crucial to prepare these tactics thoroughly, and constantly improve them. How to build a strategy to generate leads effectively? Here are the key steps:
Connect Customer Data
In order to achieve a higher level of personalization and build a truly omnichannel customer experience, businesses need to integrate their data. Sales, marketing, and customer service teams all collect information on the customers, but they often do not share it, thus creating data silos and sending inconsistent messages to the customers themselves. An integrated system solves this problem and enables businesses to deliver better experiences to their potential and current customers.
Personalized Engagement
Nowadays, customers expect personalized treatment. They want to know how a product will solve their problems and make their lives better. Thus, to engage them and make them more likely to convert in the end, a lead generation strategy should involve high personalization.
Businesses need to create detailed marketing personas and break them down into potential client types to address the needs of each customer as accurately as possible. With integrated data – the first step – this is fairly straightforward – all the information gathered on a potential customer is in one place, waiting to be utilized to the fullest.
Automate Time-Consuming Operations
It is impossible to turn every lead into sales, and the more leads a company acquires the more sales it will make. For that reason, it is important for organizations to actively bring new customers into the ToFu. And, this can be accomplished with automation.
Many manual tasks performed by marketing teams are time-consuming, yet they do not bring much value to a business. With automation, it is possible to eliminate this problem and give marketers more time to plan their strategies. Additionally, this also lets organizations approach many more potential customers, even with limited resources, since no human is capable of processing as much data and completing as many actions at the same time, as AI or scripts.
Optimize Buyer Journey
The buyer's journey needs to be adjusted to the needs and expectations of the potential customers. How to generate sales leads with it? It’s crucial to look at every step separately:
- ToFu – At this stage, people seek answers to their problems. Thus, instead of approaching them with heavy marketing materials, organizations need to focus on showing their proficiency in the related field and providing their target audience with knowledge and their brand identity.
- MoFu – This is when businesses need to convince the customer that their product or service is the best. The focus in this step should be put on advertising, with a clear enumeration of the benefits, price, and features of the products. It is also a good practice to use reviews and testimonials in the middle of the lead funnel.
- BoFu – No matter the result, at this point, organizations need to show that they understand the decision. Those who decide to purchase the product or service need to be guided through sales quickly and effortlessly; those who decide to give up should be shown understanding – even if a business is planning to introduce a retargeting campaign, it must not be done too soon since it will only be intrusive.
Use Intent Analysis Models
Often, a particular individual goes through the lead generation funnel but gives up not because they were unsatisfied with what they were exposed to, but rather because they never wished to convert. At other times, a potential customer has a clear-cut commercial intent from the very beginning and needs to be pushed through the funnel faster. Understanding when these situations happen is the key to any effective lead-generation strategy.
To do that, organizations need to introduce intent analysis models and incorporate them into their marketing tools. This way, the target buyers will be provided with the most suitable materials, increasing the chances of successfully closing the lead.
Get Real-Time Engagement Insights
Real-time engagement insights are excellent for understanding how the lead generation funnel works – which aspects perform better than others, but also when the content is more effective. Thus, any organization wishing to put a successful lead generation strategy into life should incorporate real-time engagement analysis solutions into their tech stack.
How Sales and Marketing Benefit from Automated Lead Generation
Automated lead generation is an effective way to collect valuable leads thus increasing sales. How exactly may an organization benefit from such a solution?
- High lead quality – Based on data, automated lead generation models make better decisions – they leverage all the information they have to automatically spot the leads that are truly worth pursuing, thus boosting the overall lead quality.
- More business opportunities – With an automatic system, it is possible to collect more leads than manually. This gives businesses a higher number of opportunities to expand and acquire new clients.
- Accelerated sales flow – Automated means quick. By pushing potential customers through the three stages of the lead generation funnel automatically, businesses can close sales more quickly and with less effort.
- Reduced manual work – High-paid marketing and sales specialists should spend time on work that truly matches their skills, not manual, repetitive, and low-value tasks. With automated lead generation, this is no longer a problem, since such jobs are performed by the system.
Generate More Leads with Put It Forward
Put It Forward Lead Generation solution can help your business thrive and acquire more high-quality leads while saving your resources. How can you benefit from using our platform?
- Accurate lead scoring – Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are the most important element that you are looking for when running your promotional campaigns. With our data-driven intelligent platform, your marketing and sales teams will immediately know which leads are more promising and their number will in general be higher – you should experience an approximately 100% - 200% increase in MQLs.
- Connected customer experience – Due to our data integration solutions, your business will be able to deliver consistent messages across all channels, thus enhancing customer experience and boosting their satisfaction levels.
- Personalized engagement – With integrated data, personalizing your content and engaging customers with matters that they truly care about will be effortless.
- Automated acquisition – Due to the use of intelligent automation, AI, deep learning, and other technologies, our platform is capable of guiding your potential customers from their very first impression to the sales, increasing the pipeline by up to 80% and giving you more resources to distribute to more burning issues.
- Real-time customer insights – Our platform offers real-time customer insights as well, to grant you full control and overview of the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, thus letting you squeeze the maximum ROI and reduce acquisition costs by 30%.
Key Takeaways
How to generate leads efficiently and build a successful lead-generation strategy? By connecting customer data, personalizing engagement, automating time-consuming tasks, optimizing buyer journeys, and analyzing available data. This is exactly what Put It Forward solutions are capable of – get a demo now and see how we can help you generate more high-quality leads.
