In marketing, lead generation is the beginning of consumer interest or enquiry into products or services of a business. Leads can be made for purposes such as list building, e-newsletter list acquisition or for sales leads.
Marketing has become a part of our lives either it is a railway station or any educational institutions, marketing has placed its legs everywhere. Lead generation is commonly paired with lead management to move leads through the purchase funnel. This group of activities is referred to as pipeline marketing.
A lead is commonly allotted to an individual to follow up on. Once the individual (e.g. salesperson) reviews and checks it to have potential business, the lead gets converted to an opportunity for a business. The opportunity then has to undergo various sales stages before the deal is won. Lead generation marketing is making consumer interest to buy that particular product of yours.
B2B lead
B2B (Business-to-Business) is the application of a transaction between a business entity to another business entity. It is a method of acquiring new leads for your business. B2B lead is gathering information regarding customers about qualified prospects including their contact details like name, age, gender, company name, URL, job title and location etc; which can be done through the marketing of emails, cold calls, google ads or events to generate quality leads.
Leads
A lead commonly is the contact information and in some cases, demographic information of a customer who is interested in a specific product or service. There are two kinds of leads in the lead generation market: sales leads and marketing leads.
- Sales leads are originated on the basis of demographic criteria such as FICO score(US), income, age, household income, psychographic etc. These leads are resold to various advertisers. Sales leads are hardly followed up through phone calls by the sales force. Sales leads are generally found in the mortgage, insurance and finance industries.
- Marketing leads are leads of a specific brand originated for a unique advertiser offer. In direct view to sales leads, marketing leads are sold only once. Because transparency is an essential requisite for generating marketing leads, marketing lead campaigns can be optimized by mapping leads to their sources.
An investor lead can be considered as a sales lead. An investor lead can be the identity of a person or entity potentially interested in participating in an investment and represents the first stage of an investment sales procedure. Investor leads are related to having some disposable income that they can use to participate in appropriate investment opportunities in exchange for return on investment in the form of interest, dividend, profit sharing or asset appreciation.
How to capture a lead?
Those days are gone when your customers would see your ad in the local newspaper and call you with inquiries about a particular product. The expansion of technology and advertising platforms has permitted customers to shift from traditional media outlets like newspapers and television to social media and digital websites.
This all makes the lead generation marketing successful.
