Lead Generation

What do we mean by lead generation?

You can see the definition here.  Lead Generation is the action or process of identifying or cultivating potential customers for a business’s products or services.  That’s a great definition.

So let’s have a look at flow of how lead generation works. This is a very crude diagram but I just want to get the message across.  Essentially, we need to do something to drive traffic somewhere to generate that lead.  In this example here, they are suggesting a landing page with a form.

Landing Pages

If you’re doing this on Facebook for example, Facebook has landing pages. If you go to your Facebook business page, and you want to set up an advert.  You can send the link from that advert to a lead generation form within Facebook.

So there are lots of different places where you can create these landing pages but let’s just for the sake of this example that it’s on your website.  So we’re going to drive people to your website, to this specific page where you’re going to have some kind of offer or giveaway.

It could be a free e-book, a white paper, it could that they get an offer through a coupon with a discount on one of the products that you’re selling.  There are lots of things you can do and we’ll cover that in different videos.

Essentially, they are going to land on a landing page which is dedicated to capturing information off this traffic.  We’ll talk about the type of information you can capture later but let’s just look at the different ways in which you can drive traffic.

You could have sent emails out to a legitimate list under GDPR. So you can email people and send them to a special offer that you’re doing, driving them to a landing page so you can find out who’s interested.

Social, that can be putting information up on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and all these other various platforms.  In social it could also be Facebook advertising, Twitter advertising. Linked In advertising where you’re doing paid traffic.

There are a million and one ways in which you can drive people to these landing pages.  It just depends on what your business is, your target audience etc… which will be different for each type of audience you are trying to attract.

The Quality of Lead Generation Forms

When they land on your landing page they will be invited to fill a form in.  Depending on what information you are asking for will depend on the quality of the leads.  For example, for one client we have, basically people want to put their names down for being outsourced for work.

So the forms they have to fill in cover everything including their name, address, contact details, qualifications. In other words, a very detailed form.  So that lead is a very highly qualified lead and if you did it on a scoring system it would be a high scoring lead.

Another example is when you get traffic by sending someone to a landing page where you give them a free e-book and you ask them for their name and email address.  But what would you call that in terms of a qualified lead as a lot of the time they could put in a false name or email address because all they want is the free e-book or other giveaway.

So the score for that would be 10 and below if you were scoring out of 100 compared to the other one I mentioned where you can score 90 to 100.

You score these landing pages depending on what it is that you’re offering these people and what actions you want them to take.

Are Paid Leads Good Value?

When it comes to lead generation, be wary of companies that offer you paid leads as what they don’t tell you is that the lead is sold elsewhere. For example, if you’re a plumbing company and they offer to sell the lead to you for central heating, what they’re not telling you is that this particular lead is being sold to six other plumbing firms.  So there are six of you competing for the same job and it’s not your own lead.

It’s always best to generate leads for yourself because you’re in control and secondly you can also control the quality by getting the right information.

Lead Generation – Quality & Quantity

So your landing page is set up with all the right criteria. The right offer to get them to convert. At the same time, when you get them to convert you know they are the right people. Who are converting by getting the right information off them.  And if they are not willing to give that information, then they are not a real lead.

Just be aware that when it comes to lead generation, there are good quality ways of doing it in terms of driving someone to a page where you get the desired action and then you get the information to contact that lead and follow up (whether by email or phone).

Depending on what you set up will also determine how many leads you get.  For example. We talked about an offer for a free e-book. You can get lots of leads but they would be very poor quality. Whereas if you say to somebody we want your name, email address or mobile number i.e. a way of contacting you.

What you’ll find is that you’ll have fewer leads but they are much higher quality leads.  It’s setting the right strategy in place to generate leads of the right quality so you know you’re generating real business as opposed to kidding yourself that you have lots of leads coming in when, in fact, they are very poor quality