When it comes to selling a product or service, one thing you must know about is lead generation. The better you understand this, the more effective your sales efforts will be. In fact, you can easily find out how to use this various advertising techniques to drive traffic to your website – and generate leads – in just a matter of minutes.
Leads are important for any business. In the traditional marketing process, “lead” is the term used to describe those who have decided to become buyers of the products or services being marketed. These leads are then given to the sales people who will decide how to promote the products or services to their target market.
For marketers, a lead is vital as it allows them to get hold of the customers they need. This will help to improve your marketing effectiveness and will provide you with a more steady stream of sales.
In this article, I will tell you more about lead generation. In addition, I will discuss the benefits of lead generation as well as the tools and resources you need to effectively generate leads.
So what is lead generation? It’s really simple actually.
Simply put, lead generation is the process of showing ads and sharing information with your prospects in order to drive more sales. By generating leads, you are collecting contact info from prospects that can be used in your sales funnel. Your prospects (the “leads”) are then pushed through your funnel with a sale of some sort being the desired endpoint.
There are many tools and resources available that will help you generate leads. Facebook, Google, Radio, TV, Print, Billboards, Cold Calling, Direct mail are all advertising channels designed to generate leads. The typical call to action in these types of ads are typically “Call Now” or “Fill out this Form”. As people respond by calling or by filling out the form – you are collecting their information so that you can continue to market to them until they either tell you to stop or when a sales is completed.
A perfect example of this would be a real estate agent – because their whole business is to sell and rent houses. How do they do it?
Well they start by advertising. The advertising results in calls or forms being filled out on their website. The realtor happily takes the propsects information and finds out about what the potential customers needs are.
The realtor then starts sending the prospect listings of homes that match the prospects wants. Prospect sees homes with realtor, realtor sells a home.
While your business may not be real estate the idea is the same. Advertise -> Collect Leads -> Sell Something. Lead Generation is critical to 99% of businesses out there and doing it effectively is the key difference to success and failure of business themselves.
