What is a lead and How to Prepare It for Sale

by | Jun 17, 2022 | Marketing | 0 comments

If you are interested in both Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing, surely you have heard about lead generation on more than one occasion, but do you know what it is? Read on if you want to know what lead capture is, what the best lead capture techniques are, and how they can help your business.

In a B2B digital strategy, lead generation is essential to increase sales.

What is a lead in digital marketing:

Before talking about capturing leads, it is necessary to explain a lead. A lead, we could translate it as a contact, is a web page user who has provided their contact information to the website at some point during their visit. By providing these contact details, the user ceases to be anonymous and becomes a contact. Those contacts are added to the website’s database, and their actions and interactions with the company are tracked as they may eventually become customers.

What is lead generation?

Now that we know what a lead is, it becomes much easier to understand the concept of lead generation. Therefore, the generation of leads would be all the processes, actions, and strategies that are carried out to obtain contacts with which to swell the database. Lead generation is part of the sales funnel’s conversion phase and focuses on finding contacts with real possibilities of becoming customers. That is contacts who may be interested in acquiring the products or services offered by the company.

Although it seems easy to understand, some are confused v of leads and the attraction of web traffic.  Lead generation is a step after attracting web traffic. SEO, SEM, social networks, etc., can be used to attract traffic to a website. digital marketing Lead capture can be understood as a process of filtering web traffic to determine which visitors may be potential customers. Capturing leads is a fundamental stage in any Digital Marketing lead or Inbound Marketing campaign because it allows the company to have leads on which it can carry out lead scoring and lead nurturing actions.

Lead generation allows companies to have a large database of those consumers who may be interested in buying the products or services they offer, that is, potential customers. The greater the number of leads, the greater the chances of sales and income for the company. Lead generation is necessary for a company to classify the different types of contacts it has in its database.

Lead generation strategies for B2B companies

There are different strategies of proven effectiveness when it comes to capturing leads. However, each company is different, just as each user is different. It often happens that the strategies that have worked well for one company are not the most suitable for other companies. In this sense, it is important to keep the profile of the company itself and the type of users it has.

As we have said before, for a user to be considered a lead, they must provide their data to the company. How can a company encourage a user to give their data? This is the crux of the matter and where lead generation strategies come into play.

  • Landing pages

A landing page is a page that is designed to convert visitors into leads. The landing pages stand out for their careful and attractive design and quality content. In addition, landing pages are ideal for hosting forms, calls to action (CTA), or calls to action and pop-ups or pop-up elements. However, the idea is that a landing page is not too overloaded and goes directly to the point.

  • downloadable content

Downloadable content is an example of a lead generation strategy that works like a charm. Users interested in a product or service are likelier to download content that provides more information about those products or services. Downloadable content also allows a wide variety of formats, from eBooks to templates, through guides and comparisons. We have already said that imagination and creativity are essential.

For the user to be able to download those contents that interest him, he must provide his data. Both the user and the company benefit. On the one hand, the user acquires content that interests her. The company, for its part, obtains a lead for its database through these contents.

  • Thank you pages

Thank you! Pages are pages designed to thank the user for completing a form or downloading content, for example.

  • Follow-up emails

The follow-up emails allow you to maintain more direct and personal contact with the lead. In the same way, the user is taken to a thank you page after completing an action such as downloading content; a follow-up email can be sent to them that includes the content they have downloaded and given the Thank you.

  • newsletters

A newsletter is a digital publication in the form of a bulletin distributed by email with a frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.). Usually, the newsletters contain articles of interest about the company, offers, promotional codes, and news.

For a user to receive a newsletter, it is necessary to subscribe to it. To subscribe to a newsletter, the user must provide their email address. The subscription to the newsletter converts the user directly into a lead since they have provided their email to the company.

On many occasions, newsletters include links to landing pages that offer downloadable content that may interest the user. If you want to download these contents, you must complete a form, thus leaving your data to the company and becoming a lead.

These are just a few examples of lead generation strategies, but there are many more. Any user interaction with the company for which they provide their data will be a way to capture leads. In addition, there are not only digital strategies. Leads can also be captured through offline actions.

Lead generation is a continuous process that does not end. Thanks to the generation of leads, the database is constantly fed with contacts that must later be qualified and prepared for the purchase through lead scoring and lead nurturing actions.

Lead nurturing or nutrition of leads, how to prepare a potential client for the sale

Lead nurturing is a marketing automation process that is very important in an effective inbound marketing strategy. In this post, we will see what it is, how to carry it out, and some of its main advantages when using it.