Whats Coming Up? - Table Of Contents
What Is Lead Generation?
At a time when competition between businesses is greater than ever and more and more new companies are vying for prospective clients, marketers can no longer rely on simple email marketing or social media posts as a way to generate leads and introduce new audiences to their product or service.
As competition continues to increase rapidly with more people looking to start a business, information overload makes it almost impossible to keep track of, reach and engage with potential customers.
Lead generation stimulates and captures interest in a service or a product, develops a sales pipeline, and allows businesses to nurture relationships with their target audience until they are ready to buy.
Used for all types of business, both B2C and B2B, lead generation is an incredibly useful strategy for companies of every size and level.
However, many marketers find lead generation a difficult thing to implement.
Finding good leads is more complicated than simply targeting people who are already aware of your company, and cold-calling unfounded leads wastes a lot of time and money.
Lead generation helps narrow down the pool of potential customers, allowing companies to target their marketing with laser accuracy to those who are most likely to pay attention to it and purchase the product or service on offer.
How Lead Generation Works: It’s Simple
When lead generation is implemented, brand awareness is increased, relationships are built and nurtured, qualified leads are generated, and sales are made.
Not every lead is a potential customer, so the leads you follow must be accurate and high-quality.
The higher the lead quality, the more likely you are to find clients or customers and close deals.
This, in turn, helps your business to grow both in size and credibility.
Lead generation isn’t a new concept, but methods have changed over the years from just finding a customer early on in their buying journey and sending the sales team in their direction.
These days, customers are inundated with information and businesses jostling for attention, so the need for creative and innovative ways to stand out among the noise is vital.
Instead of old-fashioned email marketing and an onslaught of mass advertising, the key to successful marketing and sales in the 21st century is building relationships with those you wish to reach.
What Is A Lead Generation Business?
Lead generation businesses help their clients by finding quality leads to sell their products or services.
The clients pay the lead generation business a fee, and, in return, the business directs the right customer demand towards the client.
In B2B lead generation, clients will pay the business per lead generated, providing each one meets specific criteria, regardless of whether or not the leads make a purchase.
However, in other models, such as affiliate sales, the lead will need to purchase a product or service for the lead generation business to get paid.
How To Start A Lead Generation Business?
So, now we’ve looked briefly at what lead generation is and how lead generation services work, it’s time to explore the ins and outs of how to start a lead generation business of your own.
There’s a lot to consider when you start a lead generation business, especially if you have no prior knowledge of running lead gen companies.
From niches, location, and client relationships to building a successful business model, finding new and innovative ways of generating leads, creating a strong fee and payment structure, and search optimization, it may seem like an overwhelming amount of work.
But by following logical steps, building your own business doesn’t have to be intimidating.
Getting Started
Lead generation is a relatively easy business to get started in.
With such high demand from the increasing market, you won’t find yourself short of clients needing your help and expertise.
Find Your Niche
The first thing you need to consider is what type of leads you’re going to be selling.
Can you identify any particular niches in which companies particularly struggle?
Or perhaps you have expertise in a specific niche and know that you can provide an excellent service here.
Be aware of how competitive or saturated markets are and where companies will be more likely to want to hire you to help them find leads.
Remember, the narrower the niche you choose, the bigger your opportunities will be.
So if you’re a finance expert, hone in on this and find a smaller, more specialized sub-category, like insurance, and then narrow down further to home insurance, travel insurance, or pet insurance, for example.
These smaller categories will most likely have less competition from rival lead generation companies.
The niche you settle on will also influence the strategies you adopt to generate leads.
For example, a strategy that is successful in the finance niche probably won’t work as well in the home design sector, so it’s worth being sure of this before you take the next step.
Build Good Client Relationships
Good relationships with your clients are the key to running a business successfully.
So, once you’ve established your niche, the next step has to be building these relationships.
Start by making a list of companies that work within the niche you have identified.
Networks like LinkedIn and even social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be invaluable in this search.
If you’ve never generated leads before and are just starting out, simply sending emails to potential clients can be an effective way of building your client list.
If you already have an established list of clients you can reach out to, this process can be streamlined with the use of email outreach tools, which also help you keep up to date with your client list and adjust your strategies to make sure they remain effective over time.
Once you’ve introduced yourself to these companies and established which ones are willing to work with you, you need to decide on relationship terms – what kind of leads your clients are looking for and how much they’ll be paying for your service.
Establish A Fee Structure And Rates System
While deciding on your niche, it will probably be worth checking on the LTV (Lifetime Value) of the average lead for your clients.
This data can be used while negotiating your fee per lead.
The higher the LTV, the bigger the fee you can demand.
When finalizing payment terms, be careful to cover the specifics of evaluating the quality of leads, payment schedule, and anything that may become an issue at a later date if left unchecked.
As with any industry, there are standard rates in lead generation services.
Generally speaking, for any product with an LTV of $100k or more, fees per lead range between $100 and $500.
You might find it helpful to stick to this sort of range when you set out and put a clause into your contracts that increase your fee as more leads are converted.
Build Up Your Marketing Assets
Marketing assets are web properties like landing pages, google ads, blogs, and e-books that attract leads looking for specific information.
These leads are usually intent on buying, so your marketing asset could prove invaluable to them and draw them back to the company again in the future.
Therefore, these assets are vital for effective and successful digital marketing strategies.
These assets are incredibly easy to build, and tools such as Wix, Canva, and WordPress are easy to use and can help you create eye-catching and user-friendly websites or graphics.
The tricky part comes in trying to make this marketing content visible to potential leads.
If prospective clients and customers can’t find your website or book, you’ll never be able to attract them.
Posting your assets on relevant websites and forums will go some way towards helping, and making sure your SEO is on the point will help the content rank highly on search engines.
Remember, assets that work in one niche may not be successful in another, so think carefully about the leads you’re trying to reach and tailor accordingly.
Nurture Your Leads Before You Hand Off
Your work as a lead generation business doesn’t stop once you’ve captured the interest of your leads; you have to make sure that leads are converted to sales.
This can be done by lead nurturing – exchanging more information with your leads and raising their interest in your client’s products or services.
Enrolling them in an email sequence helps you schedule and send multi-stage automated emails, track engagement, and keep your leads fully up to date with your client’s business.
By nurturing these leads and tracking their engagement, you are ensuring that you are only passing quality leads on to your clients and offering more room for successful lead conversion.
Track And Optimize Results
Once you’ve begun passing your leads onto your clients, asking them to share conversion metrics with you will help you see which of your marketing assets and channels were the most effective in converting leads.
For example, if you’re running multiple Google ads to generate leads, the analytics will help you see which ads were the most effective.
Now you can get rid of the ads that aren’t performing so well and concentrate on the ones that are.
This information is crucial to making optimizations and ensuring that your business is working to optimal levels.
It can also help you re-negotiate your fees and terms of service later on.
Having proof of consistent lead conversions will give you a foundation on which to raise your prices and scale your business appropriately and further increase your lead generation income.
How To Find Qualified Leads?
Now that we’ve established what a lead generation business is and what it does, and what is needed to start one of your own, let’s look at some strategies for finding high-quality leads for your clients.
Become An Authority In A Niche
We mentioned the importance of exploring niches earlier on, but there’s a lot more that can be done once you’ve settled on your niche.
If you have found a niche in which there is no competition, it’s crucial that your content comes across as authoritative and trustworthy.
Create catchy and evergreen content that is easily shareable and gets people talking.
This way, you’ll be able to build a strong brand around the content and be an established and influential voice on the subject should other companies enter the niche.
This ensures that your content ranks the highest, is instantly recognizable, and is more trustworthy than your competitors.
Your content assets will remain competitive and will continuously generate leads for your clients.
Attract Higher Intent Leads
It’s hard to know precisely what high intent leads might be looking for but keeping track of those who have the highest intention of buying a product is an important step to take.
Testing your content assets for the best channel for conversion can help with this process, but creating an Ideal Customer Profile and working backward to discover their needs and wants is also a useful activity.
This will ensure that you generate the best converting leads without the need to filter out any irrelevant ones actively.
Nurture Your Qualified Leads
Qualified leads are incredibly important, and when you’re first starting up your lead generation service, your main aim should be finding the right leads, not necessarily lots of leads.
Lead qualification ensures that you’re only nurturing leads with high buying intent.
In doing so, you’re establishing trust with your client, scaling your channels and business model to help generate more leads that convert into sales.
Just be careful not to reach out to or nurture unqualified leads, as this wastes time and money.
Gain More Qualified Leads With A Referral System
Referral sales are the best converting sales channels that can double your output without any extra effort on your part.
Generating quality leads and then setting up a referral system that allows your leads to refer more leads like them also offers your customers incentive to buy and recommend the product or service to others.
Referred customers also tend to be more loyal and more profitable, keeping your clients very happy.
How To Generate Leads For Your Clients?
There is no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to generating leads for your clients.
The methods you use depend on the type of client you’re working for, the niche you specialize in, and the demographic of your leads.
The basic foundations of lead generation are made up of good SEO and paid ads, but these need to be carefully tailored.
Use whichever method you know best and branch out as and when new opportunities arrive.
You’ll need to create diverse content that drives people to your site and becomes the core of your system.
Content should adapt to the lead as they progress through their buying journey.
Leads who are just starting out will be interested in learning as much as they can about a product and or service and will benefit from exposure to newsletters or blog posts clearly outlining what it’s about.
Email marketing is a great way to nurture leads that aren’t quite ready to commit.
Those ready to take the plunge on buying a product or service won’t need so much information but may need a little nudge in the form of an email reminding them where they need to go to buy.
Blog posts are an excellent way of using SEO to direct potential customers to products or services, and a CTA (call to action) can drive them to a landing page.
Google ads are also effective in driving traffic to specific website landing pages and content.
If you’re looking to send leads to ebooks, webinars, or similar content, social media marketing is an excellent tool for advertising these assets in relevant forums and social media groups.
TV and YouTube adverts also garner huge audiences.
Ads on YouTube can be very carefully targeted to reach only the relevant leads.
Starting your own YouTube channel or Instagram account full of educational content is also a brilliant way of driving people to your site.
As long as you’re keeping an eye on what is and is not working, the possibilities when it comes to generating leads are almost endless and only limited by your imagination.
How To Engage With And Nurture Leads?
Generating new leads is, of course, incredibly important. But more important is engaging with those leads and nurturing them so that you don’t lose them.
Every lead is valuable, and once you’ve taken the time to find them, you need to remind them that you care about their experience and their points of view.
Lead nurturing develops and reinforces your relationship with your customers at every stage of the sales funnel.
An effective lead nurturing program is focused on communication and marketing, listening to the needs of your leads, and providing the answers and information they need in order to build and maintain trust, increase brand awareness and keep your connections strong until your prospects are ready to purchase.
On average, around half of the leads in any lead generation system are not ready to make a purchase, and almost 80% of new leads end up never making a purchase at all.
Therefore it’s vital that you nurture these relationships strategically and systematically.
Marketing automation sites can help your marketing team develop large-scale adaptive communication with your customers.
In doing so, you’re creating a sustainable way of building and maintaining meaningful customer relationships while your leads move through their buying journey.
Click-through rates will also increase, and the likelihood of leads turning into sales will grow while you continue to build brand advocacy.
Lead nurturing campaigns are not only great for interacting with your customers but are also ideal for creating data that you can collect to help you gauge their interest, monitor their behavior, and optimize future campaigns, in turn increasing return on investment with your lead generation.
The more connected your business becomes with these prospective customers, the more necessary it is to create cross-channel experiences for your buyers.
A certain level of personalized marketing is expected by today’s consumers.
Implementing this will catch their eye, make them feel valued, and allow for a web of engagement that doesn’t bombard them with unsolicited ads or emails.
Consumers don’t want you to sell them a product.
They want you to listen to them and cater to their needs.
When you get to know your customers and understand what they want, you will be better able to serve them and earn their continued loyalty through a genuine understanding and connection.
Whatever and however many forms of marketing you choose to implement, ensure that your communications and interactions are seamless, harmonious, and relevant.
This will give your leads the best experience possible, and you will earn their loyalty.
While lead nurturing is ultimately centered on email marketing, the customers’ experience needs to span through all channels, including newsletters, product updates and reviews, emails, and whatever else you know works for your demographic.
Conclusion
As we mentioned, lead generation businesses take the stress and hassle of generating leads away from other companies and lend their expertise and experience to a vital but notoriously tricky process.
By providing effective lead generation services and building strong working relationships with companies and leads, you can build your brand whilst helping struggling businesses build theirs, drive sales, and earn everyone money.
Although starting a lead gen business may seem daunting on the surface, one of the great joys of starting one of your own is watching it grow organically.
Once you’ve started the process and got the ball rolling, the marketing content you put out should, after a while, start working more or less for itself.
Then you, and the companies you’re generating leads for, can sit back, relax and watch the customers, and the money, come in.
