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Getting more customers — that’s your ultimate goal and what you work for every day in your business. You know Marketing and advertising are important to help you grow but, as a small business owner, it’s difficult to get all the necessary information easily and apply it daily.
Well, we’ve got some good news for you: from now on, our blog will focus on helping you out with this on a regular basis!
For our first blog post published after our rebranding, we will start telling you more about the concept our company was renamed after: Leads! What are they? Why are they important for your business? Let’s find out!
What is a Lead?
Lead is the Marketing term used to describe a person who’s shown interest in your product but hasn’t yet bought it. Taking the digital advertising example, a lead may be a person that clicked on a form or subscribed to receive a free ebook you have on your website or even a person who called the number on your ad and contacted you via phone.
Ok, but why should you care about them?
Because they are your future customers. Simply put, you make an investment for your ad to be seen, and as soon as they become leads you only need to invest in turning them into customers, which is a way smaller investment than the cost of losing a lead. This is why it’s so important to nurture them correctly!
A journey through your (future) customer’s thoughts
In Marketing, there’s a three-stage process called Buyer’s Journey that can help you understand how a prospective buyer thinks.
- Awareness: they understand they have a problem. This is the problem your business can try to solve.
- Consideration: they search for the best answers to their problem. Ideally, they discover your business and consider you as an option.
- Decision: they discover the best option to solve their problem. Ideally, they decide your product/service is the right fit for this problem. That’s when they’re ready to buy from you!
So where is the Lead? The customer that becomes a Lead corresponds to the second stage of the Journey, the consideration stage. But before understanding you’re the best solution to their problem — and ultimately buying from you — they need to get to know you first! Only after knowing your business, will they consider you as an option.
So how can you get this user to know your business and become a Lead?
There are several actions you can take to get the awareness you need for your brand:
- Ads: you can create them easily and intuitively in the Leadzai app;
- Content: blog posts, social media (videos, images & respective copywriting), email marketing & online events;
- Optimisation of your website & online presence in general: SEO;
These actions should be thought of as a whole — as an integrated strategy. For example, when writing blog posts on your website, ensure you use keywords that your audience will most likely type on Google when searching for solutions to their problem. This way you are creating not only useful content for your target audience but also relevant content for search engines like Google. When Google considers your content relevant, they will rank you higher, which means your website will be presented to more people.
On the other hand, you also don’t need to take all of these actions at once. Start by researching one by one; understanding what could work better for your specific business, watching what your competitors are doing, and analysing your results.
These are the basic steps you should follow to respond to your customers’ problems when they are in the Awareness stage. But these are only a part of a very effective process that helps you transform an online user into a Lead. In Inbound Marketing, we call that Lead Generation.
Lead Generation: what is that about?
Lead Generation is the process of getting your ideal customer’s interest to then sell them your product or service. Most marketers use online advertising to speed up this process.
That’s how it normally happens…
The user finds your business through an ad or a social channel, clicks on the link and is redirected to a lead-driven Landing Page. This is usually a single page with the clear goal of generating leads by attracting people to fill in a form and give their contacts. Many times, at the end of this landing page, that user sees the chance of receiving something they’re interested in for free (an ebook, participation in a webinar, etc).
You may be thinking: “but if I give them a goodie, what am I going to earn from it?”
The most valuable thing you can get: this person’s contact information. With that data, you will be able to establish regular contact with this lead; to nurture him. Even if they haven’t bought from you after getting the offer, you can still try some strategies to make them move to the Decision stage in the Buyer’s Journey. For example, setting up an email marketing strategy to send them exclusive information, offers for your products and even give them more free goodies (templates, ebooks…).
On the other hand, you can also create a sales Landing Page, with the goal to sell one particular product. These landing pages are created to reach a specific goal with no distractions, so they typically don’t have a menu or too many links to take users away from the actual goal.
To sum up: here’s the desired user journey when you want to generate leads in digital marketing
- Users see an ad (on social media, Google, Bing, etc..);
- The ad links to a Landing Page (not the website);
- They fill in the form that is on the landing page (that is all they can do on the Landing Page);
- The company gets their contact and can start nurturing this lead with the goal of making them a future customer.
The main website doesn’t need to be included in this process, but this, of course, depends on your goal. If your goal is to increase website visits, then of course the ads link to your website.
Wait: don’t forget the other channels!
If you want to take a step forward when it comes to your Lead Generation strategy, you can still work on having an integrated strategy. Like we said before, all your business’ channels should support this Lead Gen strategy, and content, in general, plays a major role in this!
Let’s go for an example:
Imagine you’re a shoe seller and winter is coming. For the problem of How to choose comfortable boots for winter, create a text with all of your tips (don’t forget the keywords!) and adapt it to the different channels you are in. In the end, add a call to action that directs the user to your Landing Page and if you wish to have guaranteed results, invest in online advertising on this content — you can use Leadzai for that.
We hope now you understand better the importance of knowing what Leads are and why you should always have them in mind when implementing your marketing strategy.
What would you like us to cover in the next blog article?
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