Who enters the universe of digital marketing industry, you start hearing the words lead, lead generation and qualified lead over and over again. But do you know what a lead or what are qualified leads? Or how to qualify leads?
Let’s start from the beginning: a lead, which comes from the verb “to lead” in English, is a potential consumer who needs to be generated, nurtured and maintained in different ways. They represent a business opportunity for your company, in other words, they are a potential customer.
This means that you can have a very high number of hits on your website, but with low conversion, that is, the person who enters your website is not even identified as a lead that is on a purchasing journey or even gets close to your sales funnel.
But since visualization alone does not generate business, and they are necessary for the financial success of your company, how to generate qualified leads? How to qualify leads?
A lead is generated every time someone shows interest in your company or your company's topic, both in terms of knowledge and in your product or service offering.
And so the lead can be generated from a free offer of value that your company will offer, such as an e-book, a promotion, a blog, budget requests, or even a newsletter, where the lead will click and voluntarily leave their personal data such as full name, CPF, ID, telephone number or email.
And why all this? Because when they enter your website, they are just a potential customer, but through digital marketing work, they can become an actual customer. And this only happens through lead qualification.
Generating qualified leads: how to do it?
The idea of lead qualification, concept, is to identify the good leads that have a clear intention to buy, the good leads that are not yet at the point of buying and the bad leads, that have no interest in your product, only in the information.
E generate qualified leads You will depend on content nutrition to keep good customers interested and attentive to your work. This way, they will be able to advance in their purchasing journey.
According to Chet Holmes, a reference in the sales area, statistics show that only 3% of the public that visits your website actually wants to buy something, but around 6% to 7% show that they are open to proposals, if they consider them advantageous, even if they initially started browsing without any intention of buying.
But to do this, don't just offer something, talking about the advantages of your product, because you already believe that the visitor will want to buy it right away, be gentle. That's why your website, blog or even social networks must present useful and informative content to the lead. And that's what generation of qualified leads does.
This work of qualify leads It is somewhat different from what is done in traditional marketing, which makes the offer of the product or service more direct and aggressive.
What is lead qualification: landing pages
This lead nurturing can be done by offering value to your future customer so that they are willing to learn more about your company's overall outlook on your website. A landing page is excellent for this, and is one of the most efficient ways to generate leads. qualified lead, has the specific function of transforming visitors into leads.
You offer relevant content, an offer or even a quote response, while at the same time suggesting that the lead leave their personal data on the landing page. As they progress through the purchasing journey, this data will serve as a way for the salesperson to contact them in the future.
Typically, offers for the initial purchase stage are only meaningful, relevant, and useful content for the lead; they do not directly address solutions or products. They are presented in e-books, webinars, hangouts, quizzes, tools, newsletters, etc.
When the lead advances a little, the content offered already brings results for those who show more interest in purchasing and know what solution they want for their problem. In this case, forms, discounts, promotions, and product and service trials are the ideal tools.
Read also Sales Funnel
Social networks to capture qualified leads
The feeling of greater proximity between the consumer and your company that social networks offer are excellent mechanisms for generating and qualifying leads.
On social media, you can work with personas to create a closer dialogue with your lead. A persona is a fictional representation of your audience, creating an ideal customer. For example, think about age, social status, gender, goals, and areas of interest to define your persona. It will represent what your customer wants to hear and create content based on that.
With these personas defined, see which social network you want to focus on: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
Facebook, for example, is one of the most promising. Almost everyone is there, and it has over 1 billion active users. You will certainly have many leads similar to your persona among the 1,5 billion daily searches. On Facebook, you can invest in blog posts, landing pages, product and service offers, and even contests.
LinkedIn, focused on conversations more related to professional profiles, for networking between professionals and businesses, is also very promising.
In other words, carefully evaluate the strengths of each social network and don't be shy about taking advantage of its possibilities to generate your qualified leads.
Paid media to generate qualified leads
Another way to qualify leads is with paid media, which provides results as good as generating leads organically or better, with a conversion rate up to 25% higher than organic posts.
In paid media, a specific offer through a landing page is essential to guarantee ROI (Return on Investment).
To do this, Facebook Ads is a powerful channel for finding your target audience, with segmentation by gender, age, interests, relationship, etc. Therefore, your offer here needs to be very specific, not generic in the various ads that can be created.
Other paid media that you pay to invest in to generate conversions are Google Adwords, LinkedIn Ads and Instagram Ads.
E-mail marketing
With the data captured through landing pages, it also enables successful email marketing campaigns through newsletters.
These emails sent to the entire contact base captured on the landing pages can be on special dates (Mother's Day, Father's Day, Christmas, etc.), occasions when people already show a greater interest in buying.
But remember that these campaigns should be periodic. It is not at all productive to fill people's inboxes without any criteria. In fact, this behavior can even have the opposite effect.
These campaigns can be facilitated by marketing automation, however, remember that emails sent through this tool must be highly segmented and cover all stages of your future customer's purchasing journey, but they usually have good engagement.