For any business, the ultimate goal is to sell. Leads attract customers to look at the products and services a business has to offer, but generating leads is useless without turning potential customers into actual buyers. Hence, lead conversion is essential.
Lead Generation
Leads are people; specifically, they are individuals who show interest in the products and services offered by businesses. For a person to become a lead, the individual might provide their contact information, subscribe to the business’s website or blog, or interact with the business through its online channels.
Because of these conditions, not all users who view a website are considered leads. This is where lead generation comes in. Lead generation is a sales process that involves attracting and convincing customers to purchase from the company. To generate leads, you’ll need to apply different marketing strategies.
For instance, one excellent way to keep current and potential customers engaged is by creating blog posts, content, and videos that they might find useful or solve their problems. You can create content yourself, of course, because you know what your company is about. But often, it might be prudent to hire content writing services so you have your bases covered. Some services can help you with search engine optimization (SEO) so your website ranks high on search engine results pages (SERPs). (More on this later.)
Lead Generation Strategies
Forbes mentions various lead generation strategies that any business can do. These strategies include referrals, lead generation software, social media, events, and SEO:
- Referrals: Referrals are the best method for generating leads. Through a referral, companies can quickly build trust among potential customers.
- Lead Generation Software: Using these tools give your business contact to potential leads. However, this method might require cold-calling from companies. Make sure you find the right talent for your sales team for that.
- Social Media: Social media is the easiest and most accessible way any business can generate leads. It is easy to disseminate information on social media websites, and these platforms allow sharing among different users. Therefore, a business can have a broader reach to audiences.
- Search Engine Optimization: Nowadays, many business owners often hear about SEO. SEO is all about using the right language in a website’s content to work with the algorithm and generate more views and following. Additionally, it helps target the right people that a business wants to reach. The more targeted a business is to an audience, the more chances it will lead to conversion.
- Events: Lastly, the internet might be a convenient tool to generate leads, but nothing beats personal, face-to-face communication. Businesses can reach out to customers on a more personal level by holding events and trade shows. Through these events, business representatives can talk with potential customers and thoroughly discuss the solutions provided by their company’s products and services. Most often, people trust the tangible: what they can see and hear. This is why events and trade shows are important to generate leads.
Lead Conversion
Now that you have the leads, it’s time to convert them. Lead conversion is the endpoint of lead generation. Through this process, leads are converted into paying customers. For lead conversion to happen, the sales and marketing team must convince customers and encourage them to make the purchase finally.
Lead conversion is measured in different ways. The lead conversion rate, for instance, measures the number of users who visit a company’s landing page. It counts the number of new customers a website has gained and their actions after visiting the page.
Lead generation metric, on the other hand, measures the source of consumer traffic. It means it analyzes where customers are coming from and how they heard about the company. This is important for businesses to determine where to allocate their marketing resources correctly.
Through these metrics, businesses can learn more about consumer behavior. The more they know about customers, the more they can adjust their strategies and turn these methods into profit.
Lead Conversion Strategies
To help in boosting lead conversion, here are a few strategies you can adopt:
- Discounts and Freebies: They say that nothing is free in life; imagine people’s surprise when they get freebies from your company. Getting free stuff from a business instantly leaves an excellent feeling to your customer’s emotions and memory; this is one way to build trust between companies and consumers. At the same time, a giveaway or a free sample is a way to get customers to try your product to be interested in purchasing it in the end. It does not have to be expensive; its concept is giving people a taste of the product. Because it’s small, if they like the product, they will crave it; this will eventually buy it.
- Create the Right Offer: Buyers will not purchase a product or service unless it is beneficial. Therefore, to convert leads, businesses must be aware of their audience and their needs. Research is needed to do this.
- Follow-up: A simple follow-up might be the difference between wasting a lead and turning it into profit. By following up, a client will feel important and will eventually lead to a sale. The key, though, is following up a follow-up. One contact isn’t enough, especially if they don’t pick up the phone. Studies reveal that when an unknown caller calls back after 15 minutes, an individual will pick up the phone, thinking it’s essential. Once the customer picks up the phone, it’s time to use one’s skill to make a sale.
To summarize, lead generation is vital to encourage customers to look at a business’s products or services. Lead conversion, on the other hand, is critical to turn generated leads into profit. Both are equally important ingredients for a business’s success.
