What is Lead Generation?
Lead Generation is an Inbound Marketing strategy that combines two different techniques designed to get to know your leads better. On the one hand it allows you to classify these contacts and give them a score (lead scoring), and, on the other hand, to nurture these potential customers until they become real clients (leads nurturing). In other words: Lead Generation strategies give you a better knowledge of your leads. And it helps you not only to generate more sales but also raise the conversion rate. Thanks to these techniques you will always know what your potential clients need or what fears prevent them from finalizing the purchase.
Let us see now of what consists each of these strategies of lead marketing.
Lead scoring
The main objective of Lead Scoring is to get the necessary information to classify your leads according to their degree of business opportunity that they represent for you. What scoring really does is study the characteristics of each lead and even more important, if possible – the interest they showed in your company. The details that the leads leave when filling in the questionnaire on your landing page will provide you with a profile that you can later compare with the profile of you “ideal customer” like age, gender, area of residence, etc.…This is what is called explicit information.
However, you can also obtain some implicit information from your leads. For example, you can know if they open your emails, if they download the files or what web pages they visit. This data refers to their behavior.
Definitely, through scoring you can prioritize the leads that represent major business possibilities for you. If your Inbound Marketing strategy generates a great amount of leads for you, the scoring will become a crucial tool to separate the wheat from the chaff.
And if your leads are not thinking of buying yet, you can guide them to this decision through lead nurturing.
Lead nurturing
The aim of lead nurturing is to establish personalized relationship with the leads, so that they also could obtain some kind of benefit from each stage of the buyer´s journey.
– Discovery stage: In order for the lead to recognise you as a reference they need to get some useful information.
– Consideration stage: The lead already knows your brand and, to feel identified with it, they need the opinions of other clients.
– Decision stage: The lead wants to know more about your offer and needs advise of an expert.
To sum up, the lead generation strategies are not enough on their own to convert the leads into sales. You will need to go one step further and obtain the data that will allow you to design the content strategies that will create value for your customers.
