Lead generation is a marketing term used to define how you gain new prospective customers or clients. Essentially, you have generated a lead if you have created a newfound interest in your products or service with a potential customer.

Types of Lead Generation

There are four main types of lead generation:

1. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): MQLs are warm leads that have expressed interest in your product or service. These prospects have been pre-verified as quality leads by your marketing team.
2. Sales qualified leads (SQLs): Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are leads that have a stronger intent. A SQL is more likely to call your business or visit in person, and they’re prepared to spend money now on whatever it is you’re selling.
3. Product Qualified Leads(PQLs): A product qualified lead would be a person or business who has already used your product or service, perhaps by a free trial. You can look at a PQL as more valuable than a qualified marketing lead because they already use the product! 
4. Service Qualified Leads: These are the leads you generate through customer service, for example, a person requesting to speak to a sales rep.

Benefits of Lead Generation

Lead generation is vital to your businesses success, and if you focus your energy on optimising/improving lead generation, you’ll reap a lot of benefits:

• It will enhance your customer’s lifetime value
• Improving Customer’s Acquisition Costs
• Collecting Valuable Customer Data
• Improves Branding 
• Building Trust

Lead Generation Process

The lead generation process can be looked at like a sales funnel with three key stages.

1. Awareness 
2. Consideration
3. Conversion

Awareness Stage

The first step in generating leads is getting new eyes on your business. There are plenty of ways that you can build brand awareness. For example, if you want to build leads digitally, you could use: 

• Your Website
• Email Marketing
• Social Media
• Influencer Marketing
• Paid Marketing

Make sure that you choose the right marketing channel for your demographic! If you’d like to learn more about digital marketing channels, you can click here. 

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Consideration Stage

Now that you have generated new interest in your business, you’ll want your visitors to perform a call-to-action. Usually, this call-to-action will bring your new audience to a landing page, forum or contact portal. 

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When creating a Call-to-action you should remember that this audience is new; they probably don’t know your business and have minimal trust in your business. You can always increase your CTR by offering something for free or a deal of some kind.

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Conversions Stage

Once your audience clicks on your Call-to-action, your visitors will be taken to your landing page.   To maximize your lead generation, you’ll want to have a killer landing page. And that’s it you are now generating leads!

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