What is Lead is one of the most talked-about terms for inbound marketing. It all starts with strategies to win over potential buyers. In other words, generate leads.
Understanding this mindset helps you know that leads are the raw material of digital marketing. After all, for the company to increase revenue, achieve goals and grow, it is necessary to keep active the strategies for attracting and relating to potential customers.
Also, even if you understand the concept, you need to be up to date on lead management and nurturing. Maintaining high lead conversion rates is no use if they don’t convert into sales.
Keep reading to study what a lead is, understand everything about this concept, and know-how to capture and relate to these contacts. Check out!
Table of Contents
What Is A Lead?
A lead is a possible customer who has somehow expressed an interest in your service or product. In digital marketing, he demonstrates this interest through conversions; he gives up personal or professional information such as name, email, or phone number in exchange for content from his company or some other value offer.
It could be the case of downloading an e-book or activating a 30-day free trial, for example. The user will hand over his information to purchase the offer in both situations.
Therefore, leads are treated as potential customers because they provided this information in exchange for content e-Books, spreadsheets, infographics, webinars, or offers promotional coupons, trials, etc.
In other words, he pursued his business. And most likely he would like to hear more and extend the relationship with your company.
Once initiating this contact, the lead follows your company’s marketing funnel. Being guided by actions and marketing strategies until the moment of sale.
It is essential to clarify some common doubts beforehand to understand better these processes and stages of lead generation and management.
Why Is Lead Generation So Important?
I believe that it has become quite clear the importance of leads both for marketing and sales results and for the general growth of companies.
But if there is any doubt, remember the main objective of the companies mentioned above: sales.
The generation and relationship of leads become essential to increase and accelerate sales for a company. Even if only 3% of visitors will prepare to buy, wasting the other 97% would not be strategic.
Thus, if the company develops actions to capture leads, offering content and offers of value in exchange for data such as email, this sale becomes more concrete mainly if the marketing team develops relationship strategies with the generated leads.
Of course, it will depend on your company’s segment and type of business. But when dealing with complex sales, this decision process becomes faster. And you can face fewer barriers.
What Is The Difference Between Lead And Visitor?
Let me explain better: visitors are general users who browse any page on the website or any other company’s online channel.
While leads, as we said, are people interested in your solution and who have performed some conversion on your website, blog, landing page, or another digital channel. That is, visitors only accessed these pages.
It’s pretty obvious. For a visitor to befall a lead, they need to provide some data to the company. And within inbound marketing, the goal besides attracting visitors is to make them convert and start relationships. So an important metric is the conversion rate from visitors to leads.
When these visitors enter your company’s base, you need to initiate processes to engage them—for example, making them relate to the brand and decide to hire it in the future. Thus, this lead qualification process aims to turn leads into opportunities and customers.
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Lead Or Customer?
The main difference connecting a lead and a customer is their status within the sales funnel. In both cases, the company has access to email, for example. However, the information did not make any purchase.
That is, the “lead” status comes before the customer. From the moment the acquisition of your solution is carried out, the lead becomes a customer. However, the relationship should not end there.
After all, satisfied customers tend to buy again. Therefore, your business must have a process of nurturing customers after the sale, treating them almost as a lead again.
Difference Between Lead And Qualified Lead
Qualified leads are most predisposed to selling, understanding the problem they face and how your company solves it. In other words, they are leads that have already had a relationship with the brand. Therefore, if lead scoring will set, it is when the potential customer already has a higher qualification of information and has converted to more than one opportunity.
However, not every lead will turn out to be a qualified lead. Not every user who converts will be interested in initiating a buy trade.
It is the case, for example, of a lead who logged in to use the trial version of a tool but did not make the purchase later. It could have any number of reasons, such as lack of funds or didn’t see value in the product.
That way, not all leads will be within your company’s ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). But, unfortunately, that means he may not have the feat to buy your solution.
What Is Lead Capture?
The capture – or generation – of leads is the basis of the business. There are several ways to convert a user into a leader, whether through a form in a blog article, a landing page with conversion points, or even pop-ups spread across the site, for example.
What cannot be missing are places where the user feels attracted to an offer or content, to the point where he leaves his information there to purchase the product.
What Is Lead Qualification?
Understand that: when a user converts into a lead, the chances that he is not mature enough to contact your commercial activities are plentiful.
In the book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes, explains that only 3% of people are willing to buy something in the entire market. However, another 7% are eager to hear about it, 30% are not thinking about it, another 30% believe they are not interested, and another 30% are not interested.
Conclution
We call the customer journey the user maturation process within your funnel until he reaches 3%. Then, yes, a lead may arrive at your base today, ready to buy, but these are rare, especially when we talk about complex sales, which require even greater qualifications.
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