What is Lead Generation in Digital Marketing?

Published by Patrick Anidi on March 9, 2023

Updated on 9th March, 2023

Introduction

During the early 90, the first ‘e’ businesses took off and never looked back. It’s been thirty years since then, and the internet has developed exponentially. The key benefit of digital commerce is that you can reach a wide array of prospects across the world at relatively shorter spans of time while spending much less. Gone are the days when business promotions were ONLY done with newspaper advertisements, TV placements, or sharing flyers. A small online business from Spain can now launch a marketing campaign in the USA in less than a few clicks with a small budget.

This new approach to digital sales and marketing is heavily reliant on data. Marketers now leverage data to reach their target audience and serve highly relevant content. This has paved the way for the generation of highly qualified leads.

But, at the same time, it has also created a tight competitive environment. You can reach your audience very easily and so can other businesses. Your target customers are constantly bombarded with adverts, marketing campaigns, and what not. This makes having a proper lead generation, engagement, and selling framework critical. In this article, we will discuss how lead generation in digital marketing works and how you can implement a proper framework for your business.

What is Lead Generation in Digital Marketing?

In digital marketing, lead generation is the process of identifying, attracting, and transforming online users into prospects for a business. The method utilizes online channels, tactics, and strategies such as advertising, email campaigns, social media, or even offering downloadable content through a landing page. The most common strategy is to direct traffic to a business’s website and acquire the contact information of prospects through forms.

Image Source: Hubspot.com

How to Generate Marketing Leads?

Since loyal customers are the lifeblood of any successful business, lead generation is a top priority for marketers and companies that want to grow. The strategies of lead generations typically involve using content in various forms to increase brand awareness and interest in products or services. Using the sales funnel to nurture the leads interested in your business and nudge them towards taking purchase actions. Seasoned B2B marketers focus on the quality of the lead they attract. They do this by working to understand their buyer persona and ensure that their content resonates deeply with their ideal customer.

Speaking of strategies, keep in mind that content is the medium you’ll use to reach your ideal customers. You need to invest significant resources in creating valuable content that helps your target audience achieve some of their goals related to the product or service you sell. While you’re at it, I’ll share with you three effective lead generation strategies used by highly successful marketers to attract and convert qualified prospects.

If you want your ideal customer to pay special attention to your content when they come across it on any marketing channel, here are the lead generation strategies and tools to keep in mind while planning your digital marketing campaigns.

1. Use advertising platforms

If you have a budget and want to get started as fast as possible, the most simple way to test out your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is to run advertising campaigns on Google or social media platforms like Facebook. How? It’s simple. Based on your product or service type, you can

2. Create gated content pieces and promote them

One way to ensure that you attract quality leads is to create gated content. Gated content is valuable pieces of content that are related to the business goals of your prospect. This content can be anything- white papers, ebooks, case studies; give it a clear and captivating title that tells a prospect precisely what they will gain when they download your content. Since the content is gated, prospects who want access will have to fill the lead capture form. The use of gated content is effective because it makes a good impression on prospects who download and brings your brand legitimacy in front of them. It also provides you with high-quality leads with a genuine interest in your product or service.

Source: Hubspot.com

3. Host events

An event is a great way to engage with your target audience in real-time and build meaningful relationships with them. Hosting a webinar, workshop, or conference to interact with your ideal customers gives you the chance to capture their contact information when they register for the event. Pay close attention to questions, objections during your discussion in the event. You’ll learn more about your audience and artfully guide them through your sales funnel.

4. Promote your gated content and events on social media

Social media is the modern playground of the 21st century, with millions of people actively playing daily. Your ideal prospects are on social media, and your job is to find and display your lead magnets (gated content and event registrations) to them and watch the right prospects convert. With social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you can access powerful ad targeting tools that let you segment and reach particular audiences. Successful B2B markets use paid Facebook and Instagram ads to drive traffic to their gated content.

Tools for Lead Generation

All good workmen need their tools. Powerful tools accompany many successful lead generation campaigns, ranging from drag and drop landing pages to pop-up form builders. There are also great companies that provide excellent email marketing software and customer relationship management software.

When lead generation campaigns have a well-defined strategy and the use of great tools to enhance the flow, the result is high-quality leads flowing into your company’s sales funnel and onwards to the sales pipeline.

5 Lead Generation Tools for 2023

Salespanel

The first job for lead generation is to bring prospects to your website. But, what happens next? Lead generation is a complex process, and engaging and selling to them is even more complicated. Here’s how Salespanel can help:

• It identifies companies visiting your website. This accounts for 10-20% of your visitors if your target audience is medium to large businesses. The leads generated serve as a bonus to your existing sales pipeline.
• It tracks and qualifies every single visitor on your website. This enables you to fast-track qualified visitors for quicker lead acquisition.
• It tracks buyer intent and helps you serve personalized and targeted content on your website.
  It helps you filter and qualify your leads with segmentation and lead scoring to prioritize leads and send the best ones to your sales team.
• It tracks the entire journeys of your customers and helps you attribute campaign data to revenue. This lets you increase your budget on campaigns and strategies that perform and reduce expenditure on poor performers.
• Monitoring your customers’ complete journey will enable you to connect campaign data with revenue. This way, you can reduce spending on underperforming campaigns and allocate more resources toward successful ones.

Salespanel can be the perfect companion for your digital lead generation strategies. Visit us to learn more!

Intercom

It is one of the top products for on-site lead conversion. In fact, it has several useful components for conversational marketing.

• The platform offers an on-site messaging feature. Users can interact with site visitors and collect their information to generate leads.
• Users can also set up rules of engagement according to their requirements. For example, you can set the pop-up to only appear when the visitor is on the pricing page.
• Users can also segment messages according to consumer behavior. This helps you offer personalized onboarding, support, and retention for each lead.
• Intercom has an email follow-up option as well.
• Offers customized bots.

HubSpot

Want to focus on inbound marketing? HubSpot is one of the best options for you. It offers several effective lead-generation elements that help you capture, store, and nurture leads.

• The platform offers forms, pop-up forms, live chats, chatbots, etc, and provides integrations with most CRM software.
• Users can also create appealing content and capture leads. HubSpot lets you use emails to nurture captured leads.
• HubSpot enables your sales team to access the previous touchpoints to close sales quicker and better.
• It also offers free ticketing.

Paperform

Paperform is a multi-purpose lead-generation tool where you get forms, surveys, and quizzes. It is an aesthetic tool that combines design with strong conditional logic.

• You can design quizzes to boost engagement. Users can also increase newsletter sign-ups with pop-up forms.
• Paperform offers a no-code solution and a word document-like structure.

Mailshake

If email outreach is your preferred way of lead generation, Mailshake is a smart choice for you. On this platform, you can automate, optimize and personalize your cold emails.

• You can write effective copies using Mailshake’s AI email writer, which tracks data from thousands of winning campaigns.
• Offers loads of pre-made templates.

AI Becomes a Part of Lead Generation in 2023

Whether you are a B2B or B2C company, lead generation is a complex process. It involves several repetitive tasks and creative elements, such as designing campaigns and engaging leads on different channels.

AI-powered software enables companies to conduct these operations more efficiently, saving time and optimizing resources. From automation to tracking, here are some perks of integrating AI into your lead generation plan.

• You can automate repetitive tasks like collecting information and sorting out quality leads.
• These tools can identify purchase patterns of different leads, helping your sales team personalize their pitch accordingly. This results in better lead nurturing and quicker conversions.
• AI tools measure your performance in lead generation and offer actionable insights.
• Incorporating AI into your lead generation system can help your sales team prioritize leads.
• AI-powered data analysis helps in campaign optimization by accurately locating the ideal buyer persona for your brand.
• These tools segment your target audience based on similarities and differences.
• They offer customized bots to deliver real-time responses to queries.
• AI-powered data analysis helps in campaign optimization by accurately locating the ideal buyer persona.

We hope this article provided you all the information you need to supercharge your lead generation efforts for 2023. Please reach out to us if you have any questions or want to understand how Salespanel can help!